In this in-depth special, Gadi spoke with MK Amit Halevi who sits on the Knesset’s National Security Committee. The current strategy employed by the IDF, Halevi says, will not lead to victory. It will only drag Israel into a never ending guerilla war of attrition.
If Israel is to win this war, it must begin to think in terms of control: it must take control of the border between Egypt and Gaza to stop arms smuggling; it must distribute the humanitarian aid itself, to disrupt Hamas’s system of patronage; it must exclude diesel fuel from all aid packages, because fuel is what keeps the underground tunnel system alive; it must divide the Gaza strip into five areas and control movement between them; and finally, it must extract a price in land - the only price that counts in the eyes of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Gadi Taub is an author, historian, and op-ed columnist. He is co-host of Tablet’s Israel Update podcast.
Michael Doran is Director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.