Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013, has rejoined the IDF at the age of 69, serving as a member of a rapid-response force on the northern front. Oren, an acclaimed and prolific historian who takes the long view, believes that “Israel is now fighting the wrong war.” He contends that the war that the IDF should be fighting right now is no longer in Gaza, but in the north, where 80,000 Israelis who were told by the government to evacuate their homes because of the threat of attack from Hezbollah have still not returned home, leaving much of Israel’s northern border area with Lebanon depopulated. More on Oren’s newest role can be found here: “Rejoining IDF, Ex-Envoy Michael Oren Warns: ‘We’re Fighting the Wrong War,’” by Debbie Weiss, Algemeiner, August 5, 2024:
Israel’s former Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren has traded his diplomatic credentials and suits for a dog tag and combat uniform by joining an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) rapid response counter-terrorism unit in a northern kibbutz, warning that the fall of the embattled north would pose the most significant threat to Israel’s central heartland.
Oren recently returned from Washington, DC, where he accompanied a delegation of displaced Israelis from the north for a series of talks and high-level meetings in the US capital. The former envoy criticized Biden administration officials for lacking adequate answers for the evacuees they met with, implying they expected the evacuees to simply accept living in close proximity to a terror threat.
“No one is going to go back to living, say, in Metulla, which is literally a war zone with 150 houses destroyed and with Hezbollah on the other side of the fence,” he said, referring to the powerful Iran-backed terrorist organization in Lebanon. Oren cited army estimates that as much as 40 percent of Israel’s evacuated north, numbering some 80,000 people, would not return home in the event of a ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza.”
“We now know what terrorists on the other side can do to Israelis,” he added.
What Hamas did inside Israel’s southern border with Gaza on October 7, terrible as it was, was far less than what the many times more powerful Hezbollah could do to Israelis if they were to return now to their own border villages in the north.
Oren asserted that Israel was misdirecting its focus with the fighting in Hamas-ruled Gaza to the south, investing its manpower and resources against the wrong enemy. “We’re fighting the wrong war. We should focus our main energy on the north, which is a strategic threat. Hamas was and is a tactical threat. It’s not going anywhere.”…
Hamas has been sufficiently weakened, Oren believes, with almost all of its battalions dismantled by the IDF. And even if Hamas has been able in some areas to regroup — as in Khan Yunis, where the IDF has felt the need to return to re-suppress units that Hamas has managed to reconstitute, it is not a threat to Israel’s survival. Israelis who left the southern border area early in the Gaza war have slowly been returning.
But in the north, from where 80,000 Israelis were evacuated by the government, those evacuees have still been unable to return home because of almost daily Hezbollah attacks by drones, rockets, and missiles.
“Leaders of the United States and the world should thank Israel for eliminating the murderer of not just Israelis, and of Palestinians, but the murder of Americans,” he added.
As the head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh bore the ultimate responsibility for the October 7 attacks in which thirty-two American citizens were murdered, and an indeterminate number were taken as hostages back to Gaza. Some of those kidnapped Americans are known to have been murdered while being held prisoner by Hamas. Oren is outraged at the reaction of some in Washington, and of much of the world outside the United States, which instead of praising Israel for its determination to punish Hamas for raping, mutilating, torturing, and murdering so many people, has been either silent about, or still worse, condemnatory of, Israel’s assassination of two mass murderers, Fuad Shukr of Hezbollah and Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.
Karen Ann Dowden says
I think he is correct. The south is now a distraction. Israel must keep strong.