War Is Politics By Other Means

So what is the political objective of Israel's war in Gaza?

Israel is currently engaged in a war in Gaza aimed, so the Israeli government says, at eliminating Hamas as a functioning military organization. The goal is to blow up the tunnels, destroy the rockets, kill the commanders, etc. Achieving that goal has been deemed so obviously necessary, and so difficult to achieve, that there’s been little thought to the day after for what remains of Gaza. The latest statements from Netanyahu, though, suggest that Israel expects their military forces to stay indefinitely—but not to take responsibility for governing the territory.

The stated political objective, in other words, is to establish in Gaza at a minimum the level of Israeli control that has been established for some time in the West Bank.

I want to make two points about this.

First, there has been much talk about reestablishing deterrence, but the stated political objectives are not about deterrence. That’s only logical, since deterrence already failed so spectacularly on October 7th that no amount of retributive violence (such as Israel deployed in 2008, 2014 and 2021) could plausibly reestablish it. Given Israel’s severe response to much less horrific provocations, Hamas could only have reasonably expected an even more massive Israeli response to the massacres of October 7th, and they committed those massacres anyway. So the objective is not to deter Hamas but to destroy it utterly. (I want to be clear that this strikes me as an eminently reasonable response on both an emotional and a practical level, notwithstanding what I’m going to say later on.)

I’m sure Israel’s intention is in part to establish deterrence vis-a-vis Hezbollah—they’ve already warned that if Hezbollah attacks, they will make Beirut look like Gaza—or to warn the West Bank not to follow Gaza’s lead lest it face Gaza’s fate. Even on those other fronts, the events of October 7th have to call into question any confidence that deterrence will prove adequate, which has got to be weighing on the minds of Israel’s military leadership. At a minimum, though, in Gaza itself the goal is not reestablishing deterrence but reestablishing control.

But second, apropos of that reestablishment of control, it’s worth recalling that one of the reasons why Hamas was able to perpetrate such a spectacular attack on October 7th is that, prior to that date, Israel was far more concerned about the possibility of an explosion in the West Bank, which it already controls. To prepare for that eventuality, they moved personnel, resources and attention to defend the settlements there, and took their eyes off Gaza. Israel already knows, in other words, that the situation in the West Bank is unstable and liable to explode, and this situation is already spreading its normal forces thin, which is what made the Hamas attack possible. And yet, that is the situation that Israel wants to replicate in Gaza.

I’ve been anxious from the beginning that Israel will be unable or unwilling to achieve its stated objective of destroying Hamas. Hamas may be sufficiently well dug-in and prepared to defend themselves that there is no practical way to destroy them without collateral damage far beyond the horrors that have already been visited on the civilians of Gaza, and that may be politically untenable even if Israel were willing to consider it morally. Israel is currently closing in on Gaza City’s main hospital (which Israel built), to destroy the Hamas military complex they believe is underneath, and the extreme humanitarian difficulty of combat in such a place should be obvious—both the Gazans in their hospital and the Israelis kidnapped on October 7th are Hamas’s hostages, and the moral quandaries they impose on Israeli forces are also the same (or should be. Then there’s the threat from Hezbollah in the north, with a rocket arsenal ten times Hamas’s in size and much closer proximity to Israel’s population centers. So long as the Palestinians are merely being punished, Hezbollah may be able to limit their involvement to the kind of attacks they’ve already launched—real attacks causing real damage, but nothing like what the group is capable of unleashing. But the prospect of the complete destruction of their ally Hamas could prompt them to enter the war in full force—and that possibility might well deter Israel from administering the coup de grace. Deterrence works both ways, you see.

Even if I were sure, though, that Israel could and would achieve its stated objectives by means of this war, and could do so in an acceptable manner in terms of the collateral cost, those objectives would still amount to an intensification of the situation that prevailed prior to October 7th. This, I cannot stop feeling, is a very inadequate response to such terrible events, on both a political and a practical level. Destroying Hamas may well be necessary; it is certainly a justified response to their atrocities. But it is not remotely sufficient. The military objectives of the war are certainly ambitious enough, but the political objectives are far too limited.

I’m not naive. I understand how the typical Israeli feels. They feel that, from 1993 to 2000, they pursued peace in good faith on the basis of two states, and were met with suicide bombs. Then, having defeated the Second Intifada, Ariel Sharon withdrew unilaterally from Gaza, and in response Israel was met with rockets aimed at Israeli civilians. They managed to defeat the rockets through missile defense, and now they’ve suffered the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Most Israelis are not even thinking right now about peace. They’re thinking about reestablishing security on their own terms, whatever those terms need to be.

(As an aside, I’m also very aware that the typical Palestinian feels this is a totally one-sided description of what happened between 1993 to 2000, leaving out the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli extremist, the expansion of settlements under all Israeli governments, multiple rounds of broken promises, etc. I’m not actually trying to rehash the history of the failure of the Oslo process; I’m just describing how the typical Israeli feels about that process’s failure, because I’m making a point about Israel’s political objectives in this war.)

After October 7th, though, I don’t know how Israel ever gets satisfied that they’ve reestablished security to an adequate degree. That’s especially true since they can rationally expect the actions they take to reestablish security to be met with violent resistance. Not continuously and not everywhere, but routinely enough to make Israel continue to feel insecure, and therefore unwilling to consider any change to the situation. Meanwhile, the elements within Israel that are actively trying to make that situation worse—who are amply represented in the current government—have been emboldened by the events of October 7th, and are hardly going to stop.

The title of this piece derives from Clausewitz, but is often misunderstood to mean something like the opposite of what was intended. Here is the larger quote from which it is derived:

“War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase ‘with the addition of other means’ because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs. The main lines along which military events progress, and to which they are restricted, are political lines that continue throughout the war into the subsequent peace.”

There have been a lot of comparisons of Israel’s war against Hamas to the campaigns to root out ISIS from cities like Mosul, but leaving aside the similarities and differences in the conduct of those battles versus Israel’s war in Gaza, the battle for Mosul had a very clear political horizon: after the war, the city would be reintegrated into Iraq. That is not the case in Gaza. Israel has articulated no political objectives; indeed, in a sense its key political objective is not to articulate one, to deny its opponents the satisfaction of having extracted any political objective through terror. Without a political horizon, though, no military victory that Israel achieves can be anything more than a holding action. And after October 7th, I don’t think Israelis are going to be satisfied with a holding action.

Which is precisely what worries me. Israelis believed that, after the failure of Oslo, they had to take security into their own hands. Peace with the Palestinians might not be possible, but if they could establish security, maybe peace would come eventually when the other side grew tired of failure. Now, Israelis are starting to realize that security without peace may be impossible. But if they still believe peace is also impossible, then truly horrific ideas will start to sound like the only remaining answer to an otherwise insoluble problem.

I really, really hope I’m wrong in worrying about this. Yair Rosenberg’s recent piece in The Atlantic imagining the post-Netanyahu Israel gives me all sorts of reasons for hope. The way Israeli society has come together, and the way the government has so obviously failed, should, in any sane polity, combine to put an end not only to Netanyahu’s career but to Bibi-ism, the politics of internal division that he has always practiced. That, in turn, should mean at least an opening for bolder ideas than Israel has been willing to contemplate of late—including ideas for a real political horizon for the Palestinians.

But that’s certainly not the only way things could go. If more radical ideas for peace may now be on the table, more radical ideas for non-peaceful “solutions” like ethnic cleansing are going to be on the table right there with them—“solutions” already being advocated by far-right parties in the current government. And so, I worry. And I’m not the only one worrying.