It's still complicated, part I
Why I think more Gaza fighting was probably inevitable - but Israel went about it the wrong way
I’m posting this piece the morning after a beautiful young couple was murdered in downtown Washington, D.C., where I work, after leaving an event at the Jewish Museum. May their memories be for a blessing.
Their murders reflect a rising tide of anti-Semitic hate as the Gaza war drags on. Meanwhile, much of the analysis of the conflict, even among Israelis, has polarized into oversimplifications, in my opinion. It is now commonplace on the Israeli left to accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of perpetuating the war only to ensure his political survival. Meanwhile, European leaders have stepped up their condemnations of Israel. The UK’s foreign minister called the renewal of the war “repellent” and “monstrous” as the British suspended trade talks with Israel.1 The prime minister of Spain called Israel a “genocidal” state.2 Emmanuel Macron said Israel’s temporary blockage on humanitarian aid, much of which is diverted to Hamas in contravention of international law, was “shameful.”3
To be fair, some Israeli leaders are using sickening rhetoric. Here is the Finance Minister of the State of Israel: “They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.” But intolerable as this language is, I still do not believe it reflects the Israeli mainstream of public opinion, or the actual policy of the Israeli government in which this dangerous racist sits.
There are times in human affairs when such judgments as the European leaders are proclaiming are accurate and such language is necessary. But there are also times when truths are complicated and hard to come by, and simple moralizing only makes things worse. We are in one of the latter periods when it comes to Israel and Gaza. In the next few posts, I will explain why.
Last month the Israeli television news showed a young boy, maybe about 10, covered in dust and stepping out of an ambulance on his way to the emergency room, presumably to be checked after surviving an explosion. He screamed with a despairing fury. “Look at my clothes!” he cried, insisting on moving into view after others tried to turn the camera away. “These are my holiday clothes!”
Something about that broke my heart. It was Eid al Fitr, and at a time when there is very little to celebrate in Gaza, this child had found joy in being dressed up for the holiday. And then even that was taken from him.
The war in Gaza is back on again, and again we bear witness to grinding scenes of suffering. Palestinian civilians are once again dying in bombings — we may not know how many, but it’s certainly happening. They are again being forced to move, from one zone of rubble to another. Israeli soldiers are back in harm’s way, and once again risking both physical and moral injury. And the hostages remain captive, alone, wretched.
I have been grappling with a lot of cold analysis of the war in the last few weeks — the kind of cold analysis that war requires. The upshot of the lengthy discussion below is that I think the odds that Israel could avoid a return to fighting — and eventually a full-scale occupation of Gaza — were always going to be low. But Israel should be doing everything it can to maximize those low odds, and it isn’t.
***
When the war began, Israel announced two contradictory goals: the destruction of Hamas’ “military and governing capabilities,” and the return of the hostages. Of course, a major reason Hamas took hostages in the first place was to ensure its survival. I did not believe the parallel pursuit of these contradictory goals could last more than a few weeks. I was incredibly wrong about that. Israel managed to get most of its women and children out early in the war, when Hamas was desperate for a ceasefire and perhaps aware that holding those people was a net propaganda loss for it. In the following months, Israel proceeded to decimate Hamas militarily throughout Gaza. My rough sense is that the major portion of this work was done by June, after weeks of vacillation over the invasion of Rafah in the face of American pressure (and warnings about the civilian cost that turned out to be wrong).
At that point, Israel and Hamas famously came close to a hostage deal that many people (including me) suspected Netanyahu had torpedoed to preserve his hard-right coalition. But it’s also a strategic reality that the failure of a Gaza ceasefire in the summer is what enabled Israel to wage its incredibly important and successful campaign against Hezbollah in the late summer and fall. This campaign finally brought some quiet to Israel’s north and established conditions that could eventually enable the return home of the many thousands of Israelis who were displaced by Hezbollah attacks in October 2023.
With Hezbollah apparently contained, the focus could turn back to Gaza — and the hostages. The argument that the Israeli left has been making for months is that Israel should offer Hamas a guaranteed end to the war in exchange for all the hostages. No partial deals, nobody left behind. Indeed, the three-stage deal that Israel abandoned after the first stage called for just such an offer to be made in the second stage. According to the Israeli left, such a deal would include provisions allowing Israel to resume fighting if Hamas began rearming or attacking — and as it’s a certainty that Hamas would eventually do so, the goal of destroying the organization could be achieved after the hostages are saved.
This strikes me as an illusion. There are three problems.
First, I can’t imagine, especially under a Trump administration, what kind of guarantees Israel could offer that Hamas would believe.
Second, I can’t imagine why Hamas, given that it’s raison d’etre is to attack Israel, would ever give up all of its hostages. One thing that makes this so complicated is that the logic quickly collapses on itself. If Israel knows that Hamas will never give up the last hostage, Israel has no incentive not to destroy Hamas. If Hamas knows that Israel thinks this way, it understands that the hostages actually provide it with no insurance at all. Moreover, it’s important to understand that the function of the hostage-taking is not just defensive. It’s also offensive. By keeping the traumatizing and polarizing issue of the hostages at the center of Israeli consciousness, Hamas hopes to further destabilize and weaken the nation’s sense of solidarity and collective will. (So far, the Israeli leadership is making this work easy for Hamas by its utter failure to reassure the families of the hostages that it genuinely cares about their fate, and is doing everything in its power to save them.)
Third, even if those issues could be overcome, an “end to the war” has to include some kind of scenario for rebuilding Gaza, or at least continuing humanitarian aid. It’s hard to imagine Israel agreeing to release money into Gaza while it is ruled by Hamas. It’s hard to imagine Qatar, Egypt, and the U.S. (not to mention a Hamas that is already seeing protests against its rule) agreeing to a deal that just leaves Gaza in a shambles. The Arab proposal for Gaza attempts to square this circle — to my mind, unpersuasively.
In my next post, I’ll explain why despite all this, I think Israel should put a comprehensive deal on the table. After that, I will share thoughts about Israel’s temporary blockade of humanitarian supplies.
Nothing in the footnotes that follow makes abuses by Israel okay. It does suggest the Europeans might want to tread with caution and contemplate their own history as a reference point for these debates. It is notable that Germany, which has done the most to face its history, has also been the most measured.
In the Bengal famine during World War II, the British Cabinet “was warned repeatedly that the exhaustive use of Indian resources for the war effort could result in famine, but it opted to continue exporting rice from India to elsewhere in the empire.
“Rice stocks continued to leave India even as London was denying urgent requests from India’s viceroy for more than 1m tonnes of emergency wheat supplies in 1942-43. Churchill has been quoted as blaming the famine on the fact Indians were ‘breeding like rabbits’, and asking how, if the shortages were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study
Francoist Spain brutalized its colonial possessions through the 1940s, including the Rif War, in which it deployed chemical weapons against civilians. “Beginning in 1924, the Spanish used chemical weapons during the conflict, which marked the first widespread employment of gas warfare in the post-WWI era.[52] The Spanish army indiscriminately used phosgene, diphosgene, chloropicrin and mustard gas also against civilian populations, markets and rivers.[53][54] While Spain signed the Geneva Protocol in 1925, which prohibited the use of chemical and biological weapons, such use was not illegal in internal conflicts.[55][56][54]
“Some have cited the Spanish chemical weapons as the main reason for a widespread cancer occurrence in the Rif region, which is still the highest in Morocco;[57][58] for example, according to the Head of the Association of Toxic Gas Victims (ATGV) research has shown "there are strong indicators that the cancer is caused by the gases that were used against the resistance in the north."[59] Writer Juan Pando, however, pointed out that areas of France and Belgium, which were gassed far more heavily during World War I, do not have abnormal cancer rates.[60]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rif_War
“In Algeria demonstrations in May 1945 were repressed with an estimated 6,000 to 45,000 Algerians killed.[116][117] Unrest in Haiphong, Indochina, in November 1945 was met by a warship bombarding the city.[118] Paul Ramadier's (SFIO) cabinet repressed the Malagasy Uprising in Madagascar in 1947. The French blamed education. French officials estimated the number of Malagasy killed from a low of 11,000 to a French Army estimate of 89,000.[119]
“Also in Indochina, Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh, which was backed by the Soviet Union and China, declared Vietnam's independence, which started the First Indochina War. The war dragged on until 1954, when the Viet Minh decisively defeated the French at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ in northern Vietnam, which was the last major battle between the French and the Vietnamese in the First Indochina War.
“French involvement in Algeria stretched back a century. The movements of Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj had marked the period between the two world wars, but both sides radicalised after the Second World War. In 1945, the Sétif massacre was carried out by the French army. The Algerian War started in 1954. Atrocities characterized both sides, and the number killed became highly controversial estimates that were made for propaganda purposes.[124] Algeria was a three-way conflict due to the large number of "pieds-noirs" (Europeans who had settled there in the 125 years of French rule). The political crisis in France caused the collapse of the Fourth Republic, as Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958 and finally pulled the French soldiers and settlers out of Algeria by 1962.[125][126]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_colonial_empire