Saleh al-Arouri died a failure. The Hamas boss, who was assassinated in a drone-strike on Tuesday evening in Beirut, had held since 2018 the official title of deputy chief of the movement’s political wing. But his lesser-known roles as Hamas operations chief, from afar, of the West Bank and its main coordinator with Hezbollah were more important.
Israeli intelligence believes he is the only Hamas member outside Gaza who had prior knowledge of the October 7 attack and massacre. But he wasn’t central to the planning or the execution. His job, in Beirut, was to notify Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah just before the attack was launched in the hope that their Lebanese ally would join in with a surprise attack of its own from north. It didn’t happen.
Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons were annoyed at Hamas for not advising them earlier of their intentions and didn’t think it was worthwhile sacrificing their resources. They were content to cheer Hamas on from the sidelines.
On October 8, Hezbollah began launching a series of daily missile strikes on communities and military bases in northern Israel, but only at targets close to the border and never on a wide scale. They realised before Hamas’s leaders that Israel would, in retaliation, devastate Gaza City and had no interest in inviting a similar fate to the Dahya neighbourhood in Beirut, where al-Arouri was to die nearly three months later.
Sinwar blamed al-Arouri for failing to get Hezbollah on board and it wasn’t his only failure. Al-Arouri had his own ambitious plan to “unite the fronts”. This meant engineering a full-blown intifada in the West Bank and East Jerusalem at the same time as Israel was fighting in Gaza. Ideally, there would be violent riots within Israel’s “mixed” cities simultaneously.
This nearly happened in May 2021, when after weeks of unrest in and around Temple Mount in east Jerusalem, Hamas launched rockets from Gaza and towns within Israel erupted for a few days. But even then, the combined efforts of the IDF, Shin Bet and the Palestinian Authority tamped the lid down on any unrest in the West Bank.
This time around, the “Al-Arouri Plan” was an even bigger failure. There has been no parallel intifada to October 7 in the West Bank. Palestinians in Israel and East Jerusalem have also remained calm. Gaza has been left to its fate.
As West Bank operations chief, al-Arouri’s chief mission was to undermine the Palestinian Authority and pave the way for Hamas to take over there. For years, he funnelled millions of dollars to Hamas cells in the West Bank and financed terror attacks there. But it was insufficient to provoke a full-blown third intifada. Now it looks more likely that the Palestinian Authority will be taking over Gaza in the not-too-distant future. One veteran Hamas watcher said this week: “Israel got to al-Arouri before Sinwar got his hands on him.”
DIFFERENT PRIORITIES
l spent a significant amount of time over the past seven days with various IDF units and soldiers, who have spent the last three months operating in Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon. These were soldiers from a wide variety of social backgrounds and political camps.
But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t find any soldiers who were particularly concerned about the rulings of the Supreme Court this week. When asked for their thoughts on the matter, their answer was as uniform as their uniforms: “We’ve bigger matters to worry about now.” Which would be a good way to summarise the year that has passed since Justice Minister Yariv Levin presented his “Legal Reform” plan exactly a year ago on 4 January, 2023. Israel now has bigger matters to worry about.
Critics of the Supreme Court condemned retiring court president Esther Hayut for insisting on publishing, in a time of war, the two final rulings of her tenure — disqualifying the law passed last July which eliminated the “Reasonableness Standard” and delaying the law passed last March that only the government itself could pronounce the prime minister as “unfit” to serve in office from going into effect. It was, insisted the government’s ministers and coalition’s Knesset members, an insult to the unity of the IDF’s soldiers and a weakening of their resolve to be dealing with such divisive matters at a time like this.
Not only was this the furthest thing from the soldiers’ minds, but, if anything, it was an insult to suggest that they could be deflected from their mission by the rulings.
The same politicians had spent the last few weeks passing a highly controversial budget, which directed hundreds of millions of shekels to political causes while remaining very unclear on the funding sources for matters directly related to the war, such as compensation for reservists fighting it and civilians uprooted by it. The soldiers I met in Gaza, on the northern border and in hospital wards certainly had a lot to say about that.
If anything, the equanimity with which most Israelis, soldiers, reservists and civilians accepted the Supreme Court rulings, that is the Israelis outside the media and social media bubbles, should give the politicians a moment for reflection on the way they should go about future constitutional changes, once the war is over. No one then will be in a rush to reprise the nine turbulent months of protests that preceded the war which began on October 7. But that doesn’t mean legal reforms are not necessary.
Israel reached the brink of constitutional crisis in 2023 and if a terrible war had not broken out, it would probably have fallen over that brink. Israelis on both sides of that debate now know the country has much bigger matters to worry about. Hopefully, when they return to the debate, they will be able to conduct it in a fashion that doesn’t drive the country to the brink.
