In a New History of the IDF, an Israeli Author Breaks New Ground in Lying about His Country

In An Army Like No Other, Haim Bresheeth-Zabner—a professor of film studies at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and himself a veteran of the Six-Day War—tells the story of Israel’s army from 1948 until the present day. The military historian Edward Luttwak begins his review by examining Bresheeth-Zabner’s insinuation that the IDF slaughtered some 200 Syrian POWs in 1967:

Israeli military actions—past, present and nonexistent—receive, I would wager, more scrutiny than those of any other army, and in the endless list of accusations against it—valid, semi-valid, improbable, or utterly impossible—no such prisoner massacre has ever previously been included. But I will offer no such probabilistic argument because I was there in the Hula Valley in June 1967.

Of course, Luttwak saw no sign of such a massacre, because one never occurred. But, he goes on to argue, the entire book is filled with similar libels and insinuations, unencumbered by excessive concern for the truth, or even for plausibility.

Bresheeth-Zabner is one of those Israelis who are warmly welcomed in London by the academics and publicists who, for reasons on which we need not speculate here, studiously overlook every other conflict in the world (including Syria’s, amazingly enough, with its own Palestinian casualties numbering in the many thousands) to campaign relentlessly against Israel. That warm welcome is available in exchange for the acceptance of a simple axiom: Israel has no right to exist; hence everything about it is illegitimate, if not also atrocious, beginning with the Israeli army of course.

That is a bargain that Bresheeth-Zabner is very willing to fulfil. We thus read: “The Israelis are the greatest warmongers in the Middle East.” . . . The author’s apparent need to blacken Israel affords him no license for the [book’s] countless factual errors—most of them easily avoidable via a little light googling.

As for the IDF’s supposed victims, Luttwak writes that Bresheeth-Zabner “does not like the Palestinians enough to tell them the truth, thereby insisting on Palestinian exceptionalism.”

Read more at Times Literary Supplement

More about: Anti-Semitism, IDF, Military ethics, Six-Day War

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF