The Tet offensive haunts Netanyahu – 10/10/2023 – Elio Gaspari

Israeli diplomats compared the Hamas terrorist attack to September 11, 2001, when planes hijacked by Al Qaeda suicide bombers destroyed New York’s Twin Towers, killing around 3,000 people. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu avoided that comparison. It did very well, because if there is an original similarity between the two episodes, the closest parallel is another, with the offensive of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, during the Tet celebrations, in January 1968.

The Tet offensive failed militarily, but it broke the backbone of popular support for American intervention in Vietnam and cost President Lyndon Johnson political ruin. In March, he announced that he would not run for re-election, went to his ranch, let his hair grow and died in 1973. It took more than 30 years for him to be defended as a great president, nine years apart from Vietnam.

Until last week, the Israeli generals and their famous intelligence service were calm. The Egyptians would have warned that something “big” was on the way. Whether this warning reached Tel Aviv is unknown, but the “big thing” happened. In December 1967, American generals were sure of themselves.

At the end of January, more than 50,000 North Vietnamese soldiers and around 250,000 Viet Cong attacked American bases and dozens of cities in the South. The unthinkable happened. (Unthinkable, but several warnings were ignored.)

Despite this military similarity, the parallel should not go very far. Even though they committed atrocities, especially in the city of Hue, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong did not act like terrorists, kidnapping innocent people to use them as human shields. The Viet Cong attacked the American embassy, ​​Hamas killed 260 people at a youth festival. (In 1968, two American generals and an admiral considered using tactical nuclear weapons to defend a besieged military base. Johnson vetoed the idea.)

In 2014, when Israeli troops entered the Gaza Strip, 1,462 civilians died. At least 142 Palestinian families lost three or more members, 18,000 homes were destroyed and 108,000 people were left homeless. Israel lost 67 soldiers and six civilians.

Hamas has made the killing of civilians and the kidnappings of some 150 civilians, including women and children, the heart of its offensive. One episode had military characteristics, the other had terrorist characteristics.

The use of civilians as human shields is violence as old as war. In the civil war of the late Yugoslavia, it resulted in heavy sentences for military leaders, leaving the International Tribunal in The Hague. In the battle for possession of the city of Mosul in 2016, the Islamist group Isis used human shields to move its fighters. Prime Minister Netanyahu compared Hamas kidnappings to the practices of Isis. In some ways, what Hamas did was more radical: Mosul’s human shields were civilians living in the city. Hamas victims were kidnapped in Israeli territory.

The pillars of Netanyahu’s policy fell into the frying pan that fried Lyndon Johnson. Unlike Arab regimes in the Middle East, Israel has a democratic regime and freedom of the press.

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