Horovitz:
I asked Richard Kemp how Israel might
achieve a demilitarized Gaza. He shook his head at the improbability of it. “Some
kind of peacekeeping force would be essential, but who’d do that? Not the US,
not the UK, nobody.”
Col.
Richard Kemp CBE, a former commander of British troops in Afghanistan, is
notorious among Israel-bashers for his robust defense of the morality of
Israel’s army and his empathy for the challenges Israel faces from Hamas and
other Islamic extremist groups seeking its destruction.
Kemp is
in Israel at the moment and gave a lecture on Thursday afternoon in Jerusalem,
arranged by the NGO Monitor organization. I spoke to him beforehand in the
faint hope that this 30-year British army combat veteran, who served 14
operational tours of duty worldwide and who subsequently worked in the British
Cabinet office on defense and intelligence issues, could offer clear-cut
guidance on how Israel might decisively, and with a minimum of loss of life,
prevail over Hamas in the current offensive. As we talked in the cafe of
Jerusalem’s Menachem Begin Heritage Center, Kemp was astute and informed and
wise. Unsurprisingly, unhappily, however, he echoed the words from the Prime
Minister’s Office these past two weeks — you need to use a mixture of military
and diplomatic strategies, but there are no 100 percent solutions. Actually, it
was bleaker than that. Read on, but don’t expect to be uplifted.
I asked
Kemp first, simply and unfairly, how Israel could win out over Hamas in the
military, diplomatic and public opinion arenas, and left it for him to choose
where to start. He began with the military aspects. “It’s possible to use
different military operations to defeat Hamas as a viable military entity,” he
opened, promisingly enough. “It can’t be done from the air. It can be done from
the ground. At the moment you’re attacking the tunnels. You could move further
into Gaza, to the rocket launchers and the infrastructure and the underground
tunnels there.”
And
here’s where things started to go downhill. “But that means a protracted
operation, which is likely to be costly,” he warned. “There’s already been
significant cost to Israel in the ground operation. There’d be more clashes
with those the Israeli troops are assaulting. As with British forces in
Afghanistan, you’re facing suicide attacks, roadside bombs, IEDs, booby traps,
snipers. Except Hamas has had a lot more time to prepare than the Taliban had in
any particular area of Afghanistan. You’re also operating in very heavily
populated areas. This all means major advantages to the defenders. Tanks,
artillery and aircraft are of more limited use. You’re fighting hand-to-hand.”
And
that’s not all, said Kemp. The heavy civilian casualties among Gazans would
raise world opprobrium. And the heavy casualties among Israeli troops would
cause support to falter in Israel. Therefore, you need to bring in diplomatic
resolution “at some stage along that path.”
Okay,
but at which point along that path, I asked him.
“Military
pressure at some point could cause Hamas to want a ceasefire, he said. “That’s
more than possible at some point before its defeat. Or,” he went on,
“diplomatic pressure [earlier on] could achieve the same effect.” But he
cautioned, “it’s preferable to end with a diplomatic solution only if and when
the IDF believes there has been sufficient damage to Hamas and/or you are
confident that Hamas is so restricted as to significantly reduce the threat it
poses.”
But, I
responded, as he sipped his soda water, it’s hard to imagine Hamas seeking a
ceasefire. Indeed, he agreed, and Israel has sustained so many casualties that
it will not want a ceasefire without concrete assurances of long-term calm. At
the same time, he said, “there’s media pressure” — reports of dead babies, dead
boys on the Gaza beach, the UNHRC ordering a probe — “accumulating on the
government to agree to a ceasefire short of what it really wants.”
If that
all sounds unsatisfactory, Kemp readily acknowledged it. These are hard
questions, he said.
I asked
him how Israel might realistically achieve the demilitarized Gaza that it and
the EU are calling for. He shook his head at the improbability of it all. “Some
kind of peacekeeping force would be essential, but who’d do that? Not the US,
not the UK, nobody.”
So
what, I asked him, at the risk of going round in circles, was a realistic exit?
“Pillar of Defense-style assurances from Hamas that they won’t carry out
attacks,” he suggested, “and assurances from Egypt that they’ll do what they
can to prevent Hamas’s rearming.”
But the
Pillar of Defense calm held for only 20 months, and Hamas was unlikely at
present to offer any assurances, I noted. “I don’t have the solution,” said
Kemp. “The fact that there’s a problem doesn’t mean there’s a solution.”
So what
is Israel to do? Kemp was curt. “Recognize that it has a festering sore
blistered onto the side of it.”
He did
recommend something Israel could do to boost its security — encroaching deeper
into Gaza to carve out “a more substantial buffer zone that would provide some
defense against the cross border tunnels.” But he also then immediately
acknowledged that there would be heavy international criticism for the removal
of Gaza’s civilian population that this would entail.
It all
sounds impossible, I suggested bleakly. He sighed and said that Western forces
in Afghanistan and Iraq had found it very difficult to grapple with the tactics
and strategies used by Islamic extremist forces. “Years ago it was possible for
Western forces to use extreme violence,” he said. “The language of extreme
violence has more leverage here [in this region]. But that’s not on the table
in the 21st century… That’s not feasible or desirable.” And, therefore, he
concluded, “You’re in an enduring situation.”
Worse
than that of Western forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, I said, because we can’t
withdraw back to distant Britain and the United States. We’re stuck here in
this neighborhood. Said Kemp: “It’s a matter of containment, rather than
resolution.”
I tried
a different course. Perhaps a political solution? “Yes, of course,” replied
Kemp. But it quickly became clear he was speaking theoretically. “But as the
Gaza lessons show, how could Israel possibly come to any agreement with the
Palestinian Authority which would allow them full sovereignty in the West Bank?
Maybe in 20, 50 years. But in the world today, it’s not possible for Israel,
with its security needs, to withdraw its forces significantly from the West
Bank.”
Except
that’s precisely what the international community, led by the United States,
has been urging Israel to do. Kemp was withering. “The Allen Plan” — a proposal
drawn up by General John Allen for Secretary of State John Kerry to provide
security for Israel after a gradual West Bank withdrawal — “is a complete
nonstarter and was from the very beginning,” he said. “The idea that you could
expect technology to secure the area, to expect Israel to rely on monitoring
perhaps by American forces, and thus to withdraw Israeli forces from the
interior of the West Bank, and gradually from the border, [in a world] with the
Islamic State (terror group), Gaza, the downing of the Ukrainian airliner…”
Kemp tailed off.
“Even
if your prime minister, any Israeli prime minister, wants to enable the PA to
have a state without an internal Israeli military presence, they can’t. And
will the PA accept an agreement on sovereignty with an Israeli military
presence? Of course not.” So unless there’s a tectonic shift in the region, a
political solution is “impossible.”
What he
seemed to be saying, I summed up, is that Israel is, at best, doomed to have to
continue intermittently conducting very costly military operations. The colonel
agreed. “In the world today, and as it appears it will be, Israel is, if not
fighting for its survival, certainly fighting people who will continue to
attack it.”
Doesn’t
the international failure to understand this constitute an existential danger,
given the criticism and potential constraints on Israel’s room for maneuver
when it resorts to these very costly military operations? Kemp said there was a
strategic danger if international criticism became a profound economic problem
for Israel. But he also thought the BDS campaign and some efforts by the EU to
disrupt the economy had been “feeble” to date.
How did
Kemp explain the international failure to understand what Israel is up against,
I wondered. I cited British Labor opposition leader Ed Miliband’s harsh criticisms of Israel in recent days and President Barack Obama’s less than unconditional support as examples, while crediting British Prime Minister David
Cameron for taking a more supportive position. But Kemp wasn’t even completely
happy with Cameron. “Cameron said some good things, to an extent, but he also
said that Israel needs to do more to reduce civilian casualties. Assuming he’s
aware of how things are unfolding, that’s not a reasonable comment of an ally
of Israel. The same goes for Obama (who expressed concern at the deaths of
civilians), and for [UN Secretary General] Ban Ki-moon’s use of the word ‘atrocious.’ All of that validates Hamas’s tactics and encourages Hamas to
continue what it is doing,” he fumed. “It shows other jihadists that these
tactics work — especially the use of human shields. If Miliband says ‘I can’t
defend Israel,’ well, how would he fight terrorism? Our country Britain has
been very lucky not to face the same thing. But these international jihadists
learn from each other.”
The
international response to Operation Protective Edge could have been worse, Kemp
allowed. But Israel deserves full support for what is a “legal, lawful
operation, [a case of] Israel defending itself,” he said. When that full support
is not forthcoming, that encourages the extremists.
Lack of
empathy for Israel in some quarters, certainly in Britain, Kemp posited, stems
partly from a desire to avoid internalizing what is really going on. People are
“self-indoctrinated with their own thinking” — their own inclinations to
“compromise, reason and logic. They just can’t see how the situation really
plays out,” he said.
In the
UK, he added, there is also still a belief in high circles that Israel is at
the root of all of the Middle East’s problems, even if that belief has been
somewhat dented by reality. Also, he said, “people like Miliband see that
supporting Israel, when most parts of the Muslim world oppose it, is going to
be unpopular given the UK’s increasingly influential Muslim community. And
there’s an element of appeasement: [Islamic extremists] have carried out
attacks,” a reference to the July 7, 2005, London bombings — “and we’ve
thwarted more. So [the thinking is], if we’re nice to Israel, [the extremists]
will be nasty to us.” Kemp also cited electoral considerations — with British
constituencies where Muslim voters can prove decisive — and the small matter of
oil.
But
what of Obama, president of Israel’s key ally? Kemp began apologetically: “It’s
not an original thought, but obviously he wants to be a peacemaker, to lower
the Middle East profile, to be a friend of the Arab world. Being seen to be too
close to Israel undermines that.”
Increasingly
depressed by this point, I said one of my concerns was that Israel, when facing
amoral enemies, might have an increasingly hard time surviving without
resorting to more brutal actions. He was adamant that Israel, in his judgment,
is simply not prepared to act immorally. He spoke of Israeli pilots telling him
that they’d aborted bombing runs time after time because of the danger of
civilian casualties. That must be frustrating, he’d ventured. Quite the
reverse, they told him. I’d rather do that time and again, one pilot had said,
than have the opposite on my hands.
Kemp
said he didn’t understand why the Western media doesn’t recognize this morality.
“They go to Afghanistan and see the troops and feel respect, but they seem to
believe Israeli soldiers are different. In my experience, Israeli soldiers,
with their different accents and uniform, are very similar to the British
soldiers in terms of their mentality, ethos and morality,” Kemp said. “In some
cases, the individual morality of the Israeli soldiers is greater than the
British.”
Maybe
all our woes stem from the settlements, I suggested, playing devil’s advocate
as our conversation came to its bitter end. “Some say that’s central. I say
it’s marginal,” Kemp said. “The same people who are attacking Israel now were
attacking Israel before there were any settlements. If the settlements were
withdrawn, it would not markedly affect the problem. The only thing that would
markedly affect the problem is if Israel — I should say the Jewish state — were
to withdraw from the Middle East. Because that’s what Hamas wants. And in my
view, that’s what Fatah wants as well.”
Bleak
indeed. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. But utterly supportive. At least someone
gets it.
