RUTHFULLY YOURS

Did President Biden try in October to throw Israel off a ground operation in Gaza? If so, Israeli pluck and knowhow are — at least so far — carrying the day.

What is for some a slow go and daunting political landmine is for others a bigger success story than has been publicly acknowledged — namely, Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, and the American outlook on it could be about to change.

It is no secret that the relationship between President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu is about as warm as the month of February. What is lost in the miasma of increasingly strained relations between Washington and Jerusalem is that irrespective of attempts by the White House to micromanage the conflict and despite comments by Mr. Biden himself that Israel’s military response has been “over the top,” the truth is that some bumps in the road notwithstanding, it has mostly been spot on.

For proof of that, one can look at how all of Hamas’s terrorist battalions in the northern Gaza Strip have been decimated or how the Hamas mastermind, Yahya Sinwar, is said to be cowering like a rat in a dark tunnel somewhere underneath Khan Younis.

One can also look at an underreported meeting that took place in Israel about a week after Hamas attacked on October 7. As journalist Amit Segal reports in this weekend’s edition of the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, at that time Mr. Biden dispatched a three-star Marine heavyweight, Lieutenant General James Glynn, to Israel as well as two senior officers with a view to advising Israel on what to do — and what not to do — in  its operation to rout Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

According to the Yedioth report, the Americans sought, at the president’s behest, to “help the commanders of the IDF think about the difficult questions before them.” That thinking hinged mainly on trying to dissuade Israel’s military leaders from launching a ground operation in Gaza.

It was done by playing the Jewish guilt card: to wit, by prognosticating 20 daily IDF casualties if Israel went forward with a ground invasion, which by Mr. Glynn’s estimation, Mr. Segal writes, would be “time-consuming and bloody.”

While no one can dispute the fact that most wars inevitably come with a cost in human lives — and Israel’s war against Hamas is no exception — the reality is that the American casualty forecast was wrong. “The price we have paid since then is heavy,” Mr. Segal states, “but it is about a tenth of that.”

That is not to diminish in any way American military expertise. Mr. Glynn is a highly decorated general with no fewer than 23 medals, and no shortage of mettle either. He commanded the United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command between June 2020 and May 2022. He helped to liberate Kuwait and also led American units in Iraq as they fought against ISIS.

While the October meeting was characterized as advisory in nature, one need only glance at the names of the Israeli interlocutors present to comprehend the stakes: the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, the chief of the general staff of the IDF, Herzi Halevi, Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, and Mr. Netanyahu.

Instead of a ground op, the American team reportedly proposed a more targeted operation with correspondingly minor targets — the subtext there being: Don’t rock the boat too much. To that Mr. Gantz reportedly replied, “Your plan is feasible if the target is thousands of miles from the country [but] not when the target sits 500 yards from your people.”

As Mr. Segal points out, “there is no other example in modern warfare of what the IDF is doing in the Gaza Strip. It is fighting a monstrous tunnel system and dismantling it piece by piece, eliminating and paralyzing half of the opposing fighting force, and capturing targets that seemed unconquerable.”

Mr. Segal adds that in the last divisional operation in the northern sector of the Gaza Strip, “it took only an hour to reach the Shifa Hospital area from the [Israeli] border” and that now, “foreign militaries are interested in the air-land-sea combination operated by the IDF.”

Is it conceivable that one of those foreign militaries “interested” in Israel’s hard-fought Gaza battlefield successes and how they scored them is ours? If it is, don’t look for Mr. Biden to issue a press release. Don’t count on one from the president’s deputy national security advisor, Jon Finer, either: The Sun reached out to Mr. Finer for comment but as we headed toward Friday evening had not received a reply.

One thing, though, is clear. With a possibly imminent expansion of the Israeli campaign to Rafah in order to rid Gaza of Hamas’s remaining infrastructure, the dialogues of October are reverberating. Mr. Segal reported that last week Messrs. Netanyahu and Gantz both alluded to the Americans’ “warnings against entering Gaza” but proffered that “in fighting against a terrorist army our soldiers demonstrate extraordinary determination and groundbreaking abilities that the world will learn from.”