Eyeless in Gaza

Reflections on a catastrophe (perhaps too soon)

Fires in Israel and the Gaza strip, October 7th 2023. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2023], processed by Pierre Markuse

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I pride myself, most of the time, on being able to look at the world with objectivity but without coldness. To be able to say, simultaneously, this is where my sympathies lie, and yet to understand the logic of the less-sympathetic side to be, and to be able to honestly assess the facts and the odds—that’s always been my standard as a pundit.

Hamas’s invasion of Israel from Gaza has put that standard to the test. I first learned of the attacks Saturday morning, but I didn’t quite absorb their magnitude from a quick glance at the headlines, and then I headed to synagogue for Shabbat and Shemini Atzeret services. Needless to say, they fell somewhat short of their usual joyous exuberance—but I don’t think anyone else there fully grasped the magnitude of the tragedy that had unfolded. It was only later in the day, when I got home and started poring over the news (yes, I doom-scroll on Shabbos), and reached out to people I know in Israel, that I started to understand just what had transpired. And it’s still getting worse. I got a call yesterday from a cousin to tell me that another cousin, whom I have never met, is missing and presumed to have been among those kidnapped to Gaza, and other friends of mine have similar stories. [UPDATE: my cousin has thankfully been found.] And of course everyone knows people who have been called up to serve in what everyone assumes is going to be a difficult and long war.

It’s hard to be objective when one has friends and family literally on the front lines. I feel a great deal of anger, and not all of it—or even most of it—for the murderers of Hamas, and that anger will tend to cloud my judgment. Nonetheless, I’m going to do my best to analyze the situation, and even my own anger, to try to shed some light on what happened, and what is likely to come.

The first and most obvious thing to note, which has been noted by everyone, is that this was a spectacular failure by Israel’s military and intelligence services, and hence by the government. In that regard, though not in regard to the nature of the threat, comparisons to the Yom Kippur War are entirely appropriate. Hamas’s invasion required meticulous and extensive planning and coordination, yet Israel had no inkling that any such thing was being planned. They were caught completely unprepared, and, to compound that failure, were unable to muster up any kind of response for hours after the scale of the invasion was clear. Those failures are far more significant than the failure of deterrence implied by the fact that Hamas dared to try something like this in the first place. It is a vastly greater failure than, for example, the failure to prevent the September 11th attacks by al Qaeda on New York and Washington. In the wake of Hamas’s success, Israelis can have no reasonable confidence that their military and civilian leadership have any idea what they are talking about. That is a psychological blow that will ramify for years.

The second thing to note is that this was undoubtedly what Hamas wanted to achieve most of all by their attacks. As this piece by Haviv Rettig Gur convincingly delineates, Hamas has been clear in explaining why they launched their invasion, and the reason was explicitly to show Israel to be weak, because showing Israel to be weak would rally support to the Islamist cause, as strength attracts strength. That piece is the best thing I’ve read so far about the attacks, their motive and their consequences, but it ends on a note of brutal confidence: that a weakened and wounded Israel will also be fiercer, more willing to respond without restraint, and hence more likely to triumph. I’m not so sure about the last part.

After all, if demonstrating Israel’s weakness was indeed their motive, then Hamas is not finished. It would hardly demonstrate strength for Hamas to attack Israel only to be obliterated in turn by an Israeli response that Hamas surely knew would follow. I agree with Gur that if Hamas’s plan was to provoke a disproportionate Israeli reaction and thereby win global sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, or simply to scuttle the prospective peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia (which I wrote about last week, and will return to later in this post), a fusillade of rockets would have sufficed. By invading Israel and slaughtering civilians in spectacular fashion, as well as overrunning under-defended Israeli military positions, Hamas has demonstrated conclusively that it has not been deterred or contained, and that Israel therefore cannot safely leave them with the capability of launching such attacks in the future. That means Israel is going to have to invade Gaza and engage in urban warfare with Hamas on their own territory, to effectively destroy the organization and its fighting capability. Hamas surely expects this, notwithstanding their having taken dozens of Israeli hostages to use as shields. So the fact that they launched the attacks anyway suggests that they believe they can win such a fight.

Of course they may be totally wrong in that belief; Hamas is as prone to overconfidence as any other group, and may have drunk their own Kool-Aid about Israel being a paper tiger rather than a real one. But Israel has avoided a ground invasion of Gaza in the past because of its uncertainty about success at any reasonable price. Their estimation of what price is reasonable has gone way up as a consequence of Hamas’s actions, but by the same token those actions, which took Israel so spectacularly by surprise, should make them far less confident in their own estimation of the likelihood of success. Hamas clearly has capabilities that Israel was unaware of, and Israel has already had the unpleasant experience during the Second Lebanon War of being unable to destroy a well-armed and well-trained Iran-backed militia. If Israel invades Gaza with the intention of obliterating Hamas, and Hamas survives, that will be a Hamas victory, and everyone in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and around the world knows it.

Nor is it obvious that brutality could achieve what intelligence did not. Gaza is not Nagorno-Karabakh, and not only in that the world is not going to be so willing to turn a blind eye in Gaza. Israel can besiege the Palestinian territory, as Azerbaijan did the Armenian enclave before attacking, but strangling the civilian population will not defeat Hamas’s fighters, and Israel’s aim isn’t to impose their sovereignty but to crush an enemy military power. Nor, and I mention this only for the sake of completeness, is ethnic cleansing a practical possibility. The Palestinian population of Gaza is over twenty times the size of the Armenian population of the erstwhile Republic of Artsakh, and unlike the Armenians, who overwhelmingly fled rather than be conquered and, potentially, killed or expelled, the Palestinians have nowhere to flee to.

Israel ultimately withdrew from Gaza because it didn’t really want the territory and holding onto it was getting progressively more costly from every perspective: economic, diplomatic and military. Israel acquiesced in Hamas’s takeover of Gaza because Hamas was so obviously unwilling to be a peace partner that with them in charge Israel could simply wall Gaza off and ignore it. Now Israel is going to return, united and determined to do whatever is necessary, but with little better idea of what to do than they had before. The former is ample reason for hope; the latter is reason to temper it with some pessimism.

Now, I said I would attempt to analyze my own anger. But what I’m really going to do is give a little vent to it.

The government responsible for this catastrophe is the government in power. Netanyahu today is like Golda Meir in ‘73, and if he had any shame at all he would follow her example as soon as the military situation makes it practical for him to resign. But I do not expect him to demonstrate any sense of shame, or any sense of honor, and that is the deeper reason why I am so angry at him: because apart from the immediate responsibility of having been in charge when it happened, I blame his character for this disaster.

Netanyahu’s hallmark with respect to the Palestinians has been to kick the can down the road and count on Israel’s obvious superiority in arms and intelligence to replace any kind of forward-looking strategy. Since the pullout from Gaza in 2005, he has a lot of company in Israel for that approach, but it is nonetheless his legacy, and it has effectively left Israel with no real options in the wake of its spectacular failure.

But it is for his domestic politics that I really blame him. He formed the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, and that government from its inception has been determined to overturn the consensus in a host of areas, beginning with the constitutional role of the Supreme Court. This has so alarmed the half of the country that didn’t vote for it that a substantial share of the Israeli population have been in the streets protesting for months; tech entrepreneurs and their investors have talked about abandoning the country; reservists have protested by going on an unprecedented strike; and, most chillingly, the cry of the protests has been democratia o mered — “democracy or revolt.” This should have alarmed any sane government, but to date it has been to no avail. The government understood fully well that they were tearing Israeli society apart, and felt they were entitled to do so because they had the majority, and the losers simply had to suck it up or leave—with the implication that from their perspective, leaving would be just fine.

I cannot believe that this manifest disunity went unnoticed in Gaza. Hamas believes that Israel is weak for deep reasons related to their theology and their desire to serve as their people’s vanguard fighting for their land (and I reiterate that I do understand why Palestinians would rally to that standard, given what they have suffered at Israel’s hands). But they had good proximate reason to believe that their fondest hopes were coming true and that Israel was coming apart. And even if they didn’t, Israel’s willingness to indulge in this kind of self-destructive politics was a sign of its arrogance and unseriousness that it itself chose to ignore despite plenty of warning from its friends. There’s blame to be apportioned in a variety of directions for that failure, but the lion’s share of the blame belongs to Netanyahu personally, because his refusal to step aside after being indicted is the only reason why Israel didn’t have a stable, competent center-right government, which could have been formed the moment he left the stage.

And yet, I fear he will not get the blame he should. Moreover, I fear that if he does, the political reward will go to genuine extremists (which the opportunistic Netanyahu has never really been) who promise a psychologically-appealing brutality that would lead Israel further down the road to disaster.

This post has been a downbeat one, for obvious reasons. But I’m going to end on a more hopeful note.

First of all, notwithstanding the scale and horror of Hamas’s attacks, Israel is not facing remotely the existential situation that it was in 1973 or 1948 (which was the last time enemy forces actually captured Israeli villages). Israel is a vigorous and powerful society with, notwithstanding this debacle, an extraordinarily capable and technologically advanced military that is also a true citizen’s army. It is much more capable and resilient than it probably feels itself to be right at this moment.

Second, notwithstanding that the war it is about to prosecute in Gaza to destroy Hamas will cause great suffering among the Palestinians (who have surely already suffered enough), Israel’s diplomatic situation is also historically strong, and I believe could remain so. The United States has been unequivocal in its support, and Germany’s left-wing government lit up the Brandenburg Gate with Israel’s flag, but what’s most important has been the reaction of other countries in the region who have relations with Israel. The United Arab Emirates’ response to Hamas’s attacks was to describe them as a “serious and grave escalation” and they called the kidnapping of Israeli citizens “appalling.” Egypt has positioned itself, as in the past, as a potential mediator between the two sides, which it will have little opportunity to be in practice, but that doesn’t matter; the important fact is that they are not justifying the attacks. Turkey’s response has been more pointed in saying that Israel needs to resolve the Palestinian problem for there to be peace, but Israel continues to speak as if the rapprochement that had been developing before these attacks could continue. Any kind of normalization with Saudi Arabia is undoubtedly on hold now, but Saudi Arabia’s and Israel’s objective interests remain what they were, so it would be foolish for either side to abandon the goal of normalization, or to ignore what each side needs to get to an agreement on the assumption that they will inevitably be too far apart for too long to make it worthwhile.

That last part is the rub, though. I said in my last post that “the Arab-Israeli conflict is long since over” and that “the occupation is still a very serious matter, practically and morally, but it’s no longer the organizing principle of Arab politics.” I still think those statements are true—the murderers of Hamas and their delusional Western left-wing cheerleaders are the only ones who actually believe that Israel is a temporary intrusion on an inherently Arab and Islamic Palestine that will one day simply melt away. But the moral and practical seriousness of the occupation is now so manifest that if Israel continues to ignore it, its potential partners in neighboring states will have every reason to question Israel’s own seriousness, and therefore the value of exploring deeper ties. I’m under no illusions that the Palestinian Authority could simply be propped up as a peace partner, but Israel needs some kind of strategy now, aiming at some kind of endgame. Strength, after all, attracts strength, and part of projecting strength is convincing people that you are pursuing actual solutions to problems, and aren’t just dismissing them. If part of Israel’s solution is destroying Hamas, as I assume it will be now, they are going to need a plausible answer for the question of what will replace it, not only in the short term but for some kind of enduring stability, and ultimately peace.