Day: September 14, 2024

Israeli decision-makers are considering a plan to lay siege to northern Gaza in an effort to ramp up pressure on Hamas.

The “Generals’ Plan,” a three-page document published last week by high-ranking Israel Defense Forces reserve officers, calls to evacuate up to 300,000 civilians from the northern 1/3 of Gaza and then block all supplies to the estimated 5,000 Hamas terrorists in the area. The goal is to bring Hamas to the brink of defeat and force the Palestinian terror group to return the remaining hostages in Gaza on terms favorable to Israel.

The authors of the plan are now engaged in a public advocacy campaign aimed at shoring up public support for it.

“Officials of Hamas will have only two choices: Starve or surrender,” Giora Eiland, the face of the plan and a former IDF planning and operations chief who headed Israel’s National Security Council under prime minister Ariel Sharon, told the Washington Free Beacon. “This is something that might create some, let’s say, real pressure, and if we do it in this area, we can later do it in other areas.”

Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported on Thursday that top IDF brass are “considering accepting the plan.” The authors told the Free Beacon they have presented the plan to a number of senior government officials, including members of the security cabinet, and will address the Knesset Affairs and Defense Committee on Wednesday.

“It seems that my plan is being seriously considered by the IDF,” Eiland said. “I have gotten indications that my plan is being discussed and revised by, let’s say, official people, and hopefully it will become something real.”

A spokesman for the IDF declined to comment.

Eiland, a frequent presence in Israeli television studios, was among those who called for a complete siege of Gaza in the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel. He said the Generals’ Plan—which he developed along with an organization of hawkish Gaza war veterans known as the Forum of Reservist Commanders and Fighters—is a “relatively modest” version of his original idea.

The initial impact of the plan reflects a growing consensus in Israel that there is little choice but to take control of Gaza, at least temporarily, if the Jewish state hopes to achieve its war aims of toppling Hamas, returning the remaining hostages, and ensuring the territory does not pose a national security threat in the future.

The authors warn in the plan that nearly a year into the Gaza war, Israel is not winning. They say the IDF must bring economic and political pressure to bear on the group as well as military force.

“As long as there is an unlimited supply of food, water, and fuel in Gaza, and as long as Hamas is the one who controls this supply to residents, and as long as we do not make an effort to physically separate Hamas from the civilians, it is impossible to create effective pressure for the release of the hostages and the hoped-for victory will not be achieved,” they write.

“It is not enough to call for the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to move south. We must make it clear to them that starting from a certain date, aid supplies will be prohibited from entering Gaza City and its neighborhoods. If such pressure is created, what it means for [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar is complete loss of the control and the presence [of Hamas] in the north of the Gaza Strip. It will then be possible to make progress in achieving the goals of the war.”

Hezi Nehama, a member of the Forum of Reservist Commanders and Fighters and former brigade commander in Gaza, told the Free Beacon that it was frustratingly difficult to fight terrorists who could disappear among civilians, move in and out of combat zones, and constantly replenish their ranks with new recruits. He said a key to Hamas’s survival has been the roughly 200 truckloads of humanitarian aid that Israel allows into Gaza each day on average.

“I can’t explain how strange it is, on one hand, to fight against Hamas, and on the other hand, to supply them with food, water, fuel, etc.,” Nehama said. “They get the aid for free and sell it for a lot of money. They use it to pay salaries for terrorists. They use it to recruit new terrorists.”

Almog Boker of Israel’s Channel 12 news station reported on air Tuesday that Hamas has reaped a windfall of at least half a billion dollars by stealing and selling humanitarian aid in Gaza during the war—and has added 3,000 terrorists to its payroll in northern Gaza, according to “assessments” by Israel’s “security establishment.”

“It’s actually become the main oxygen pipeline for the terrorist organization,” Boker said of the aid, which has doubled in quantity compared to before the war.

According to Eiland, a core problem with the IDF’s strategy in Gaza is that it relies on a wrongheaded understanding of the enemy.

“Unfortunately, we were persuaded by the American administration that Hamas is like [the Islamic State terrorist group] in Baghdad or in Iraq. They are terrible people, but the rest of the people of Gaza are innocent. So let’s try to fight against the bad people, and at the same time please make sure to take care of all the poor people of Gaza,” Eiland said.

In reality, according to Eiland, Hamas is more like the Nazi Party that came to power in Germany. Over the 17 years since Hamas won election and then violently eliminated political opposition in Gaza, the genocidal anti-Semitic group has turned the territory into a de facto state.

“They melded all the civilian agencies and organizations—including the health ministry, the schools, the religious institutions, and even the international groups that are there—into one strong, robust, and cohesive entity,” Eiland said. “So, what really happened on Oct. 7 was the State of Gaza launched a vicious attack against the State of Israel. Now, when your state is attacked by another state, the very first question that you have to ask yourself is, ‘What is our relative advantage over the enemy?’”

Beyond starving Hamas’s leaders, Eiland said, the Generals’ Plan would demonstrate to the Palestinian people that the group cannot provide for them or even secure their land.

“There is nothing Arab leaders are more sensitive about than land,” Eiland said. “They are ready to sacrifice many lives, but they are never ready to lose land. This is an almost holy matter for them.”

Talk in Israel of taking direct control of humanitarian aid distribution has grown as the Gaza war has dragged on, a second round of hostage-ceasefire negotiations has stalled, and the extent of Hamas’s corruption of UNRWA, the U.N. agency primarily responsible for the task, has become clear. But Israel’s security establishment, reluctant to get bogged down in Gaza amid an escalating multifront war with Iran, has pushed back

Tzav 9, a grassroots movement that sprang up during the war to block humanitarian aid to Gaza, has since March championed an IDF takeover of distribution instead.

“We thought the war would be over in a couple weeks,” Reut Ben Chaim, a leader of Tzav 9, told the Free Beacon. “But month after month went by, so we evolved and said, ‘OK, We need to control this aid and make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.'”

In an interview with Kan on Monday, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich accused the IDF of having “insisted for months on not taking responsibility for humanitarian aid” in Gaza and thereby enabling Hamas to hold onto power. Netanyahu told the security cabinet in June that he was considering transferring responsibility for humanitarian aid distribution in Gaza to the IDF, “contrary to the position of the security establishment,” Kan reported at the time.

In July, leaders of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, another reservist organization, presented Netanyahu, defense minister Yoav Gallant, and other lawmakers with a plan for Gaza that recommends “distribution of humanitarian aid directly by the IDF” and “taking over the territory for a while.”

“Whoever controls the aid controls the society,” Amir Avivi, a reserve brigadier general and the head of IDSF, told the Free Beacon. “If we get Gazans to understand that Hamas cannot exercise power over them anymore, then the chances increase dramatically of the people working with us—handing over our hostages or Sinwar and the other Hamas leaders.”

Avivi said his impression from meeting with Netanyahu and Gallant was that the prime minister is “very aligned” with those who want Israel to see the IDF take over civilian administration in Gaza, and the defense minister, who has publicly ruled out military rule of Gaza, is reluctantly realizing that “there is no other choice.”

The Prime Minister’s Office declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for Gallant told the Free Beacon in a statement: “The minister does not support maintaining a long term presence in Gaza.” She did not respond to a follow-up question about his views on the shorter term.

Eiland, for his part, said that after Israel lays siege to the north, it should agree to “officially end the war and withdraw all our forces from Gaza” in exchange for the return of all the hostages.

“Hamas will probably say yes,” he predicted.

“We face much greater concerns than Gaza on all our other borders, including of course the direct threat from Iran,” Eiland said. “We are in such a real, almost existential crisis today that if we need to give up in Gaza and agree to end the war in order to be able to solve some of our more urgent problems, then we have to do it.”

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On Monday, three federal judges will consider the constitutionality of the so-called TikTok ban, which will shut off TikTok in the United States beginning in January unless TikTok’s China-based owner sells the platform before then. TikTok is a relatively new technology, but the ban is a reprise of past reactionary efforts to limit Americans from accessing media from abroad. The court should see the ban in that light and strike it down.

Americans tend to associate restrictions on access to foreign media with other governments, not their own. There’s some justification for this. The Soviet Union and China both jammed shortwave transmissions after the Second World War to prevent their citizens from accessing ideas they viewed as subversive. Many rights-abusing regimes engage in similar practices today. After it invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russia blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, and many foreign news outlets. Iran blocks its citizens from accessing a broad array of foreign websites and media sources. So does Saudi Arabia. Autocratic regimes often try to consolidate their own power by restricting their citizens’ access to information and ideas from abroad.

But, as the Knight Institute (which I direct) explained in a brief filed earlier this year, the U.S. government has sometimes imposed these kinds of restrictions, too. When Congress passed the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1917, it gave the president the power to prohibit Americans from purchasing books, films, and periodicals from enemy nations. Over time, the law and its successors were used to bar Americans from receiving books and other expressive materials from, among other places, Vietnam, North Korea, and China. The Treasury Department once ordered postal authorities to seize hundreds of Cuban publications destined for American readers—an order it rescinded only after The Nation and others filed a First Amendment challenge.

A parallel set of restrictions that barred Communists and anarchists from entering the United States similarly became a tool for the broad suppression of disfavored ideas and viewpoints. When Congress enacted these provisions in 1952, President Harry Truman opposed them, describing them as “thought control” and “inconsistent with our democratic ideals.” Congress overrode his veto, but history proved him right. The restrictions were used to exclude a vast array of respected political and cultural figures, including writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Czesław Miłosz, and Doris Lessing, as well as Nino Pasti, a former NATO commander who was banned after he criticized the Reagan administration’s effort to locate nuclear missiles in Europe.

The fundamentally illiberal character of all of these restrictions eventually became impossible for Congress to ignore. The restrictions impoverished public discourse in the United States, undermined the government’s ability to champion free speech abroad, and made the United States seem petty, fearful, and hypocritical at a moment when it was trying to make a case for the superiority of open societies. Congress eventually repealed the immigration provisions that had been used as tools of censorship during the Cold War. In 1988, it passed a law, known as the Berman Amendment, to make clear that the president’s authority to restrict trade with the enemy did not extend to restricting the import or export of expressive materials. It expanded that law in 1994 to protect Americans’ right “to educate themselves about the world by communicating with peoples of other countries.”

The TikTok ban is an unwelcome throwback to an era in which the government exercised far-reaching control over Americans’ access to information and ideas from abroad. Many of the legislators who voted for the ban acknowledged forthrightly that the law was intended to limit Americans from accessing viewpoints with which they, the legislators, disagreed. (Some of these statements are collected at pp. 19-23 of the Knight Institute’s brief.) And while the Justice Department now says the ban is necessary because China might access TikTok’s databases of information about American users, it’s difficult to take the argument seriously when even the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has observed that China can readily access the same kinds of information in other ways, and when Congress could address data-collection concerns more effectively with a privacy law that limited what TikTok and other platforms can collect.

New technology presents new challenges, and perhaps in some contexts these challenges will require Americans to reconsider hard-won freedoms that are, for all of the United States’ profound problems, still the envy of much of the world. But before we permit the government to reinstate long-discredited forms of censorship, we should at least require it to demonstrate that its professed interests—protecting privacy, most significantly—couldn’t be achieved in some other way. The Biden administration hasn’t established that the TikTok ban is actually necessary to achieving any legitimate government interest. Under settled First Amendment standards, that should be the end of the matter.

IMAGE: Participants hold up signs in support of TikTok at a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol Building on March 12, 2024 in Washington, (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The post History Has Already Discredited the TikTok Ban appeared first on Just Security.