Israel-Hamas War

As Israel prepares for a major ground war in Gaza, it’s not quite the time for it to examine how and why its intelligence failed to detect any sign of Hamas’s devastating weekend attack by land, sea, and air. That time will come, as it did after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, another surprise attack that commentators are drawing parallels to this week. But as much as Saturday’s attacks were a failure of intelligence, they also represent a failure of diplomacy—or the world’s abandonment of a Middle East peace process.

For much of the 1980s and ’90s, the United States called on the services of Aaron David Miller as it sought to broker Arab-Israeli negotiations. Miller worked closely with six Republican and Democratic secretaries of state. Since he left the State Department in 2003, diplomacy has taken a further backseat, making the current war seem, in hindsight, something that was brewing for years.

I spoke with Miller on FP Live, the magazine’s platform for live journalism. Subscribers can watch the full video in the box atop this page. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: So, given your depth of history in the Middle East, I’m curious whether you see Saturday’s attack as unprecedented. Some U.S. commentators have been calling it Israel’s 9/11.

Aaron David Miller: Historical analogies can be very flawed, particularly the comparative issue of what happens in the Middle East to our own politics. I would use 1973 as a sort of point of departure in some respects. The attacks that led to that war were a massive intelligence failure, but it was very much a war on the borders with little or no involvement of the civilian population. And then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had a clear strategy to inflict a limited and specific military defeat on Israel by establishing an Egyptian presence on the east bank of the Suez Canal and then trying to figure a way to convert that—with a lot of U.S. help—into disengagement agreements that would hopefully pave the way for an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

However, what’s happened over the past four days is quite different. It is part and parcel of a long confrontation between Israel and Hamas. I’m not sure where this is going, but it’s clear to me that you have the largest attack on civilians in the history of the state of Israel. Hamas’s strategy is certainly not as focused or as coherent as Sadat’s.

RA: Hamas claims to have more than a hundred Israeli hostages, which dramatically complicates a potential response on Israel’s part. How might Israel be thinking about this?

ADM: That’s a fundamental difference with 1973, when there were plenty of prisoners taken by the Syrians and the Egyptians. This is another order of magnitude. The 900 Israelis dead provide a basis for extraordinary anger, hatred, and a call for vengeance.

But the 900 dead have to be weighed against the reality of 150 living hostages. That, I think, is the conundrum that the Israelis face. That balance has created tension and, to a degree, some indecision and paralysis on how to respond.

The Israelis have responded with two tactical actions. They’ve blockaded Gaza, and they’ve conducted a series of punishing airstrikes. What is the purpose of those tactics with regard to either paving the way for a larger ground operation or trying to sort through some way to free hostages? That makes this situation seem unique to me. The options are incredibly fraught.

The issue of prisoner releases resonates deeply in the Palestinian street and would boost Hamas’s prestige enormously. Are the Israelis ready and willing to pay that price now? Again, there are a lot of unknowns both for us as analysts—and clearly, the Israelis.

RA: The attacks represent a real intelligence failure for Israel. How are you thinking about the state of readiness of Israel’s military as it approaches the next few weeks?

ADM: There will be a national commission of inquiry, as there was in the wake of the 1973 attacks. This was an intelligence failure but an operational failure as well. Did the Israelis put too much emphasis on technical intelligence? What about human intelligence?

The Israelis completely misjudged Hamas’s capabilities and motives. Because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was so anxious and eager for an Israeli-Saudi deal, he wanted calm in Gaza and was prepared to release or allow more Palestinian workers into Israel. All of this put a major focus on Hamas as a governing entity and not as a force that could pull off an operation like this, which was extremely bold and radical.

It was the failure to imagine and to underestimate, much as the government of Golda Meir did in 1973, the potential and determination of their adversaries.

On the operational side, it’s going to take some serious explanation to try to determine why there were so few Israelis deployed in Gaza. Clearly, the Israelis were focused on the West Bank. They had come to accept a certain amount of complacency at the border. And Hamas did their homework. In the weeks before, there were demonstrations on the border line—they clearly did a reconnaissance to identify points of vulnerability. In a way, it was a combination of Hamas learning from its mistakes—going dark, so to speak—and the Israelis simply not anticipating.

RA: Will Hezbollah join this war? Of all the scenarios that we’re going to be playing out over the next week or two, that is the one that could dramatically escalate things.

ADM: The opening of the northern front would do that, given the incredible superiority both in tactics, training, and the weapons that Hezbollah has accumulated since 2006. Seventeen years later, its repository of high trajectory weapons has increased in range.

Hezbollah’s calculations are somewhat opaque. I think it’s torn by its own awareness as a Lebanese organization. It’s not a wholly owned subsidiary of Tehran and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), despite the incredibly close relations between the two. That’s a calculation I think that Hezbollah has yet to make.

There’s growing tensions on the border. It’s a wait-and-see operation at this point. Hezbollah’s response is going to depend on what the Israelis do with respect to Gaza. To stay out of a massive Israeli ground operation that much broader and deeper into Gaza—I’m not sure Hezbollah could stay out.

RA: Let’s add one more complicating factor to the mix: Iran. Hamas itself has gone on the BBC and said it received help from Tehran. The U.S. State Department, however, has said that it hasn’t yet seen a smoking gun.

ADM: For the Iranians, the Arab-Israeli issue is a window through which they can project their influence and power and take advantage of proxies to further Iranian interests. I’m not sure the full story has yet been told on the degree of coordination, or lack thereof, between Tehran and Hamas. I think Hamas and Iranian objectives on several issues probably coincided.

I’m just not yet ready to buy the notion that this is Tehran operating Hamas by remote control. Yes, the IRGC could have instructed Hamas in tactics and supplied weapons and the like. But part of Hamas going dark meant that Hamas members needed to restrict the circle of who knew about this operation and what they were planning. Adding the Iranians to the mix would open up the circle to intelligence penetration.

On the issue of Israel and Saudi Arabia, I think Hamas and Iranian objectives coincided. I do believe that Hamas’s central objective, in addition to trading hostages for prisoners, was to inflict a level of pain and terror to disrupt Israeli normalcy in a way no other Palestinian group has ever done in the decades of engagement, even during the early ’70s and the airline hijackings. This was a huge motivation on the part of Hamas, as well as to reaffirm the centrality of the Palestinian issue in the minds of the region.

RA: Let’s zoom out a bit more. You have advised so many U.S. administrations now on this very issue. What would you advise them today? How should they think about this? How should they react?

ADM: I’ll just give you my sense of the Biden administration.

I’ll frame it as three concepts, all beginning with the letter P. The first is the president’s persona. The presidential model here to understand is not Barack Obama—it’s Bill Clinton. Joe Biden and Clinton, even though they are part of different political generations, when it comes to Israel they have very similar views. Love of Israel, support for Israel’s security, and support for the idea of Israel are all deeply buried in Clinton’s and Biden’s emotional and political DNA. The idea that you’re going to get this president involved in a way that crosses Israeli lines, particularly now, I think is highly unlikely.

The second is politics. The Republican Party has emerged as the go to party on this. And while what happens in Israel is not going to play a major role in the 2024 U.S. election campaign, the reality is that this administration cannot afford to allow the Republicans to paint it as being hostile or adversarial to Israel.

And this brings us to the third point, which is on policy. There are two issues out there that the administration needs to figure out a way to manage. One is a crisis: what to do about Iran’s nuclear program. And the other is an opportunity: how to deal with the possibility of Israeli-Saudi normalization, which the administration is very interested in. The reality is that Netanyahu sits at the center of both of these.

For all of these reasons, the administration has made a strategic decision to give the Israelis the time and space and the support to do what they’re going to do. What that is, is unclear. Fighting with an Israeli prime minister publicly is awkward, messy, and distracting, and it could potentially be politically costly. All you need to do is look at the past 10 months of the way in which the administration has engaged with the most right-wing, extremist, fundamentalist government in the history of the state of Israel. If they were able and willing to do it before Oct. 7, they are certainly willing and able to do it now.

RA: How do you see U.S. support evolving as Palestinians continue to die in Gaza in the coming weeks? Will that exert a new kind of public pressure on the White House?

ADM: In the wake of Oct. 7, the Biden administration has already built into its calculations the possibility that what you’re going to see in Gaza will go beyond anything that the Israelis have done in the past. The default position, as it’s been for many years, is to emphasize the importance of Israeli security. Looking at the president’s statement and his public remarks in the wake of the attack, there was no mention of restraint, no mention of calm, no mention of finding a way to diffuse, in an effort to create a political pathway forward.

As the stories of what happened in the south of Israel continue to come out, the administration is going to be an impossible position. The administration will be caught navigating the line between a Republican Party that wants them to blindly support Israel and a divided Democratic Party, some of which wants them to impose accountability and costs. It is in the administration’s interest to bring whatever is coming to an end as quickly as possible. We’re in a period in which U.S. influence and leverage, already constrained, is going to be hard-pressed despite the presence of nine Americans who have reportedly been killed, and the likelihood of Americans who are dual nationals being taken hostage. The administration, at least for now, is going to follow Israel’s lead.

RA: Do you see the possibility of a peace process emerging from this attack?

ADM: It’s morally and ethically unconscionable for me to say never, and essentially to abandon hope that any crisis, no matter how irrepressible, violent, and bloody, might not offer up a pathway out.

Right now, Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a strategic cul-de-sac. They’ve been trapped there since our effort during the Clinton administration to bring former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, and Clinton together at Camp David, which I helped plan, and was ill-advised, ill-conceived, and ill-timed despite the profoundly good intentions of Bill Clinton, who may have loved Israelis and Palestinians too much.

The four missing ingredients that are required to create a negotiation that would end in a durable and equitable solution for Israelis and Palestinians have never been present.

Number one is leaders who are masters, not prisoners of their ideologies and their politics. Any time there was progress in this conflict, whether it was Sadat-Begin, Rabin-Arafat, Rabin-Hussein, you needed that. I’m not talking about the Abraham Accords. I’m talking about conflict zone requirements and conflicts that have been bathed in blood and trauma and historical wounding. You need leaders—big leaders. We don’t have them.

Number two, you need a sense of ownership. That famous expression, “In the history of the world, nobody ever washed a rental car,” is a profound piece of personal philosophy. People don’t wash rental cars because they care only about what they own. Almost every negotiation has proceeded without the participation of the United States, whether it was Egypt-Israel, Israel-Jordan for decades, and certainly Oslo in its initial stages. You don’t have that sense of ownership now. Ownership is driven by pain and the prospects of gain.

Number three, you need effective mediation. Despite the transgressions or flaws of the United States, our biases, and our preferential treatment of one side rather than the other, we still potentially have the will and the skill to do this. The will is extremely important. You’re going to have to apply a lot of honey both on the negotiating table and in terms of off-the-table benefits. But you also are going to need to apply a lot of vinegar.

Finally, number four, you need an end state that both Israelis and Palestinians can agree on. I know that the conventional wisdom is that the two-state solution has gone the way of the dodo. It’s virtually impossible to resurrect it. I would still submit to you—and maybe I am going the way of the dodo as well—that separation through negotiation is the only solution that will address the demographic, political, psychological, and historical problem of overlapping sacred space that exists in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount.

The only solution that can address all of that is something called a confederation. Call it two states. Separation through negotiation. Two polities willing to live with each other in peace and security. That seems galactically impossible right now, and it is. But that’s what’s required. We need to look honestly and clearly, especially at the U.S. role, which I have done a lot of thinking about when it comes to this particular question.