The Perils of Predicting Gaza's Forking Path

We don't yet know how the war itself will go, or how it will end; how can we predict its political consequences?

There are still a lot of these to come in the Israel-Gaza war

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Ross Douthat has a very good column today about the war between Israel and Gaza, and how it is already shaking up the politics of the United States and Europe. He identifies six ways in which the war has unsettled preexisting alignments, and ways in which realignment might happen:

• The radicalization of progressivism revealing the likely future of the broader American left;

• The emergence of an “Arab Street” inside the West motivated by ethnic and religious solidarity and the difficulty subsuming this in either left- or right-wing ideological coalitions;

• A possible increasing tilt towards Israel by an increasingly right-leaning Europe where even the formerly liberal center is more skeptical of immigration;

• The unmooring of pro-Israel liberals from the Democratic Party coalition in America as generational change and ideological drift makes that coalition less and less comfortable;

• The emergence of a new kind of neoconservative, mugged by the anti-Israel tenor of the contemporary left as the original neocons were by the anti-Americanism of the 1970s-era New Left;

• Deep tensions in the American right between the profoundly pro-Israel views of evangelical Christianity and the natural tendency toward antisemitism among the new Nietzscheans and skepticism about any foreign entanglements among politically disaffected America Firsters.

Some of these predictions are perennial and perennially false—I’ve been hearing that American Jews will become Republicans any day now for my whole life. Others are obviously already happening—Europe is clearly trending rightward and against immigration, and Israel under Netanyahu was already seen as a model and a natural ally for a big chunk of the European far right before October 7th. Yet others are intriguing possibilities but still highly speculative. The revealed radicalism of the progressive movement could be sign of where the mainstream left is going—but it could also be a turning point toward that movement’s imminent collapse, and an opportunity for the mainstream to plainly distinguish itself from it. A new neoconservative persuasion, meanwhile, would not only have a hard time allying with Trump; it would have a hard time allying with the kind of post-Trump GOP that elevates to Speaker of the House someone who would make wartime aid to Israel conditional on defunding the IRS, not just because of what it says about that party’s priorities but because of its manifest unseriousness. Only time will tell.

But the big question mark hovering over all of his predictions is what will actually happen in the war in Gaza, and in its aftermath. The extreme tentativeness of any answer to those questions makes speculation about the effect of October 7th on American or European politics extremely premature. Indeed, I’d argue that the implicit assumption of all of Douthat’s points is that the war will be at least modestly successful on Israel’s part, and will end with a new status quo resembling the previous status quo, only more brutal and more vigilant. But that’s not the only possible outcome. I don’t even know if it’s the most likely.

So far, the war Israel has conducted has mostly consisted of bombardment, which has caused enormous destruction above ground. Most of Hamas’s assets are squirreled away in its extensive network of tunnels, however, and it’s not clear how much its capabilities have been degraded. Nor is it clear how successful the ground invasion will be at degrading those capabilities more dramatically—that remains to be seen. But the real objective of the war isn’t just degrading capabilities that could be reconstituted after a cease-fire; it’s to destroy Hamas as a functioning organization. Israel’s ability to achieve that goal, or just what achieving it will turn out to require, are even bigger question marks.

I don’t raise these questions to cast doubt on Israel’s ability to achieve its objectives (not here anyway), but to point out that the answers are inherently uncertain and open up a lot of potential space for possibilities of how the war proceeds. Will Israel move in with large forces, or mostly conduct periodic raids from safer positions inside Israel? Will the campaign last weeks? Months? Years? How sustained will the bombardment continue to be, and for how long?

Then: how will the United Nations and various NGOs be brought in to relieve the suffering of the Gazan people? Or will they be firmly kept out—or will they refuse to come because the situation isn’t safe enough for them to operate? Will more and more vulnerable Gazans be evacuated, particularly the sick and injured, women and children and the elderly, to neighboring countries or destinations further afield? Or will Egypt and Israel’s other neighbors and the Gazans themselves refuse to facilitate what they see as a plot to depopulate the Strip and give Israel a freer hand?

Finally, how, more generally, will the other players in the region, hostile and non-hostile, react over time to Israel’s campaign? Will Hezbollah join the war? Will Iran? Will the American military wind up getting drawn in? What about Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia—will they make dramatic efforts to mediate and moderate the conflict? If so, will there be any kind of positive Israeli response—or will they decide these are all just ways to prevent them from achieving a necessary victory over Hamas? Or will they make no such overtures, and just try to insulate themselves as much as possible from the conflict? Or will they even be drawn in on Israel’s side? I note that the Houthi rebels in Yemen, against whom the Saudis have been fighting brutally for years, have taken credit for an attempted attack on Israel. What happens if Iran-backed groups attack targets in Amman or Cairo?

Any of these scenarios—a longer war, a wider war, a war with an unclear outcome—opens up wildly different possibilities for how politics will be shaped in Europe and America in response. But assume that Israel is, at whatever cost, able to deal a crushing blow to Hamas, and bring the war to something like a successful conclusion in a matter or weeks or months without igniting a regional explosion. What then?

Will Israel stay to administer Gaza, with no exit strategy? That seems unlikely right now, but it’s manifestly unclear who might take over in Israel’s stead. Egypt is certainly not going to let itself be sucked in, and no other Arab state is likely to want to do so either. Nor would the United Nations be prepared either to face a new Palestinian insurgency (under Hamas’s banner or another group’s) or to depend on the IDF as a shield against one. The Palestinian Authority is the most sensible answer to the question, but it would define itself definitively as a Quisling regime if it were to come in and replace Hamas after such destruction. Who then?

I’m in the camp that argues that alongside the war, Israel needs a real peace campaign. The most obvious candidate to unite the Palestinian factions and conduct successful and credible negotiations on their behalf for a two-state solution is currently sitting in an Israeli prison. But Marwan Barghouti was an architect of both the First and Second Intifada and only recently was calling for a Third Intifada in the West Bank. I don’t know what he’s said about Hamas’s atrocities, but I doubt he’s issued a full-throated denunciation, and it strikes me as unlikely that, in the wake of October 7th, Israel is going to consider someone like that as a necessary counterparty for peace. But even if Israel released him now as part of some kind of deal to free the more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, do they imagine he would serve their interests in pacifying Gaza?

And what about Israel’s own political situation? Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government will remain in power until 2026 unless either he resigns (which he has shown no inclination to consider) or elements in his own party break from him. What will such a government do next if they prosecute this war successfully? And how will those choices affect the politics of Europe and America? Meanwhile, if the government does collapse after the war, based on current polls a center-right coalition—of Benny Gantz and Gideon Sa’ar’s National Unity, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu—would easily win the election. But it would still constitute only a narrow majority of 61 seats. (The current far-right coalition would get 43 seats, and the remaining 16 seats would be split evenly between far-left, Arab and Islamist parties.) Could such a precarious majority take dramatic steps to change the status quo? If it couldn’t, how would that affect the evolution of the politics of Israel-Palestine in the West? Even more dramatically, though—what if it could take such steps? How would the populist-nationalist parties of Europe respond to Israel where Likud was in opposition? How would America’s Christian Zionists respond to any gestures, whether they went anywhere or not, toward changing direction and trying to resolve the conflict?

Again, my point isn’t to throw cold water on Douthat’s predictions, which are very insightful and are presented by him as tentative. It’s just to point out that just as the war itself is uncertain, the aftermath is uncertain. We don’t know what kind of government Israel will have; we don’t know whether that government will be forced into a long-term occupation of Gaza and face an ongoing insurgency there and in the West Bank, or whether it will try to annex chunks of the West Bank and expel its inhabitants, or whether it will realize that the political status-quo ante was untenable and take dramatic risks to restart peace talks—and we don’t know whether any such talks would go anywhere or whether they would reignite conflict on both sides of the Green Line. We don’t know what’s going to happen yet, so we don’t know what the impact will be on politics here.

I’ll conclude with an analogy. The obvious first-order consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was to bolster Atlanticism in Europe and America, and prompt serious talk of European rearmament—including, most importantly, in Germany. That’s remained the trend in certain ways—Poland, in particular, is in the middle of a very substantial military buildup, and both Sweden and Finland have very logically decided that now is the time to ditch their traditional neutrality and join the alliance that is treaty-bound to defend the Baltic States. But as the war has dragged on inconclusively, the trend has shifted and complicated. In Germany in particular, the big news is the rise of the AfD, which is skeptical of NATO and opposed to continued support for Ukraine. Those most interested in making Germany great again are those least-inclined to do so within familiar Atlanticist and European structures. Meanwhile, in the United States, opposition to support for Ukraine has emerged as a litmus test for being a MAGA adherent in good standing. That was perhaps predictable based on preexisting warm feelings toward Russia in some of those quarters, but had the war gone differently—or had the Biden Administration reacted differently—it’s likely that the valence of the Russia-Ukraine war in American politics would also be different.

So too with the current war launched by Hamas on October 7th. We see the first-order consequences already in the bombs falling in Gaza and the pro-Hamas protests on European streets and American campuses. But these are early days. There’s plenty of time for the fortunes of war to shift over and over, and for polarities to change or even reverse in response to such events. It would be wise for political factions of all stripes to recognize that tying their fortunes to the war’s outcome is making a risky bet they need not make on a conflict that has stymied all efforts at either victory or peaceful resolution for decades. They’d be better off doing the hard work of figuring out whether they can make some constructive contribution to resolving the conflict, or at least ameliorating it, and then making that contribution, rather than try to fold the conflict into their own domestic cultural and political disputes.

Israel and the Palestinians would be better off too.