In a Middle East Forum (MEF)/American Jewish University (AJU) October 7 podcast (video), AJU’s Rick Richman moderated a discussion about the first anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel.
Guest speakers: Jonathan Spyer, director of research at the Middle East Forum and editor of its Middle East Quarterly; and Gregg Roman, director of the Middle East Forum, who previously served as political advisor to Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister and worked for the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
The following summarizes their comments:
Jonathan Spyer:
For the past year, Israel has been engaged in a three-phase war. The first phase, when Israel was solely at war with Hamas, began on October 7; the second was Israel’s war with Hamas plus Iran’s proxies; and the third, the looming potential for Israel “facing Iran itself.” In its attempted genocide by rape, enslavement, and wanton mass killing of civilians, the October 7 attack “was a Sunni jihadi event par excellence” in that it resembled the “tactical particulars” of “Sunni Islamists and Sunni jihadi rampages” that have ravaged the Levant region for close to two decades. The shock was that the safeguards Israel had labored to put in place to protect its people from such an onslaught utterly failed on October 7.
October 7 was the “trigger” that clarified the need to grapple with the “the long challenge” that political Islam has imposed upon the Middle East for the last half century.
The second phase began October 8, when the Islamic Republic of Iran’s “Shia-led power bloc” partially mobilized “in defense of its [Iran’s] beleaguered client” Hamas, its Sunni jihadi proxy in the Gaza Strip. Iranian proxies as diverse as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iraqi Shia militias, and even “Iran itself on two occasions” launched drone and missile attacks against Israel. This phase has continued until the present day.
In the wake of Hamas’s invasion, any doubts that the Israelis would confront the threat have been dispelled with the “extremely impressive” performance of Israel’s army. Its initial task of destroying Hamas’s military capacity has been “largely completed,” save for remaining “sporadic guerilla resistance.”
The military’s next task of addressing the Hezbollah threat at Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has been “remarkable on the intelligence field.” Although Israel’s goal of returning the “60,000 Israeli internal refugees to their homes” in the north through its conventional military force has scored “tactical gains,” translating those gains “into Israel’s stated goal remains for me something of a question mark.”
In general, “we are step-by-step heading into something much bigger” than the enormity of October 7, given what will be “Israel’s retaliation for the Iranian ballistic missile attack” that occurred October 1. “There isn’t going to be a Middle East in which a flourishing Jewish state of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran [and] its proxies co-exist over a long period of time. One or the other is going to go.”
Iran attacked Israel twice with ballistic missiles, and it is imperative that Israel’s “response be a determined one.” Following Iran’s first missile attack on April 13, Israeli and allied air defenses successfully mobilized over the region with little damage. However, Jerusalem heeded President Joe Biden’s request to “take the win” and merely carried out a “minor response.”
Iran’s second missile attack is proof that Israel’s limited response to the first attack “must not happen again.” An “insufficient response” guarantees that if it defends itself against Hamas or Hezbollah, Israel will be in the untenable position of being struck each time with Iranian missiles. In the power calculus of the Middle East, a shower of Iranian missiles coming down on Israel would quickly become a “norm.”
Israel must “respond disproportionately” to deter the Iranians, but the Jewish state “must not be afraid to escalate, if necessary. Being afraid to escalate will end up in the ongoing gradual deterioration of Israel’s strategic position.” The three targeting options for Israel are Iran’s nuclear program, its oil installations and ports, and its military installations that are “specifically connected to the governance of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Iran’s second missile attack is proof that Israel’s limited response to the first attack “must not happen again.”
The stranglehold that Iran’s proxies have on the region, such as the ability of the Houthis to “close down a rate of 90 percent of commercial shipping” on the Gulf of Aden/Red Sea route to the Suez Canal, must stop. It “can only end through a determined response, not only by Israel, but also by the custodians of global waterways, which means the United States and the British and the French. … [It] can’t only be Israel’s job to take on the Iranian challenge because [it] encompasses dimensions vastly beyond those of the Jewish state and the Middle East.”
In Gaza, “Israel needs to be present in the Philadelphi Corridor, and it needs also to maintain the Netzarim Corridor.” It should also be a condition of any ceasefire that it addresses the “future nature of Gaza governance itself.” Hamas’s version of a ceasefire is unacceptable because its only priority is the survival of the organization. There needs to be a “buffer zone of three or four kilometers” in Gaza, and in Israel’s north, a “buffer zone in between the Israeli population and Lebanon.”
October 7 was the “trigger” that clarified the need to grapple with the “the long challenge” that political Islam has imposed upon the Middle East for the last half century. The goal for Israel and its Western allies should be bringing about the end of Iran’s Islamist regime. “The way this thing gets solved is not only the destruction of the Islamist proxy statelets that Iran established to Israel’s south and to its north, in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon, but it must also be eventually the goal of the Islamic Republic of Iran ceasing to exist.”
Gregg Roman:
Over the past year, Israel has not only faced external threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, but internal challenges. The trauma of October 7 is compounded by the 700 soldiers who have fallen in Gaza and Lebanon since that day. Five hundred and forty thousand were mobilized to join Israel’s standing army, and because there are so few degrees of separation in so small a country, “there is not one Israeli who will tell you they have not been touched by this war.”
The time has come to set “a strategic goal for the government of Israel to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
“There must be fortitude on the home front” to weather a threatened economy “which is coming under increasing pressure by its neighbors, the total blockade of the Turkish economy where Israel was a major trading partner, the increasing challenges to Israel’s currency, [and] the massive hits to Israeli businesses, some 60,000 of whom some small businesses, have shut down over the past year.” However, as a result of the Negev Forum, which strengthened the Abraham Accords under the Trump administration, there have been hopeful signs in that “there are now investment opportunities which are taking place for companies to be able to continue their initial public offerings, to be able to buy up Israeli intellectual property.” This is happening because of the support of the U.S., some Western allies of Israel, and some of the Sunni Arab states.
The American Jewish community, along with “global Jewry,” has been touched by October 7. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI issued warnings that day for Jewish institutions to be alert for any potential “Hamas-inspired attacks.” While “Israelis are fighting their war on seven fronts, the global Jewish diaspora is also facing their own sense of danger and starting to question their place in Western liberal democracies, many of whom [are] in Europe.” The U.S.-Israel relationship is also undergoing scrutiny among some political parties in the U.S. “who are starting to question and challenge and really share, in some cases, antisemitic beliefs as it relates to the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
For those who are immersed in the immediacy of the war in Israel, as well as for the members of the Jewish diaspora who follow reports of what is occurring in Israel, keep in mind that “it’s important to focus on the battlefield, but it’s also important to focus on the war at home.”
Between the efforts to obtain a ceasefire in Gaza and the agitators demanding a hostage deal, “Israelis realize that now is the time to give Iran a knockout blow.” Policymakers in Washington, D.C., may not be supportive to “go all the way,” but the time has come to set “a strategic goal for the government of Israel to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
