JERUSALEM, Israel — Peace in the Middle East depends on war — that is, on a successful Israeli war to destroy the Palestinian Hamas terrorist group.
That’s the view of Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy Senior Fellow, an IDF veteran and Harvard graduate who has spent the past several years helping to develop connections between Israel and Arab states in the region.
“Israel must defeat Hamas in a way that Hamas itself, and all these other radical groups in the region, understand that Hamas was defeated,” Fredman told me Saturday evening.
“There’s no doubt that Israel’s deterrence, Israel’s standing as a military and intelligence superpower, was hurt, weakened on October 7th. Now Israel needs to make clear … that this is something you don’t even think about doing.
“And the way you do that is to destroy, uproot Hamas, and make it lose in a sense that it feels, not in the sense that Western military planners think it’s been defeated, but that it itself understands that it’s been defeated.
“If Israel does that, it will gain the respect of the other countries in the region that are opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood extremists, that are opposed to Iran. Only by doing this can Israel re-win that respect and advance on the path of regional integration and cooperation.”
Fredman acknowledged that it was difficult to move peace efforts ahead now, and that talk of “normalization” between Israel and Saudi Arabia had been set aside — though he also noted that he had been receiving text messages of support from a variety of Arab countries, including Sudan.
“I do believe that in the end an Israeli victory will, over the long term, make it more likely to have normalization. An Israeli half-victory, or withdrawal, will make it more difficult,” he noted.
Tune in to SiriusXM Patriot 125 on Sunday, Oct. 22, from 7-10 p.m. ET, for an interview with Asher Fredman on Breitbart News Sunday.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
