There is no alternative
It's fight now or fight later as Israel faces survival-level threats.
There is no alternative.
That is the profoundly depressing conclusion I have reached as Israeli bombing and incursions inflict a nightmare of urban warfare on innocent people in Gaza — and on Israel’s ground troops, most of them kids just out of high school.
To explain why, I want to focus in this post not on morality, but on strategy. While strategy and morality should inform one another, they are analytically not the same thing, and muddling them up only leads us to talk past each other.
Of course, there are moral calculations embedded even into the assumptions I make in the analysis that follows, e.g., Hamas is a terrorist dictatorship with no interest in peace. If you cannot accept these premises, or cannot accept them without immediately telling me about offsetting Israeli sins, I’m happy to talk in another context — it’s important to keep talking — but this post probably isn’t for you.
As Benjamin Wittes notes, the Israeli state — by virtue of being a state — needs to protect its territorial integrity and its citizens. The attacks of Oct. 7 jeopardized both, on multiple dimensions.
In the immediate term, Israel faced:
1) Hundreds of terrorists within its borders torturing and massacring people.
2) The taking of hundreds of hostages, including women and children, whose sacrifice would severely damage Israeli morale and split the society itself.
3) Barrages of rocket fire that forced hundreds of thousands into shelters and that, absent defensive measures, would have taken many lives.
In the medium term, Israel faced:
4) Continued rocket fire from the south as Iran’s proxy Hamas sought to consolidate its success and continue disrupting a peace deal with Saudi Arabia.
5) Massive missile attacks from the north as Iran’s other proxy, Hezbollah, felt pressure to join the action.
In the long term, Israel faced:
6) New Hamas plots to infiltrate its territory and kill its citizens, employing strategic and tactical capabilities that turned out to be far greater than assumed.
7) A strengthening of Hamas and other radical groups in the West Bank, which is much more deeply intertwined with Israeli territory and society.
8) A breakdown in the deterrence that since 2006 has kept Hezbollah, a much stronger force than Hamas, from taking the initiative to attack Israel on its own.
9) A weakening of its deterrent against Iran itself, which is close to a nuclear bomb.
10) Depending on its response, a collapse of its recent peace efforts with Arab countries and a collapse in Western support.
11) Depending on its response, the problem of a failed state in Gaza.
These are profound security problems. These are survival-level security problems. If these problems are not solved, then at minimum Israel faces the prospect of its south being permanently depopulated as citizens fear going back; its society going back to the brink of civil war (or over it) amid discontent with the government; and its economy crashing under the pressure of nonstop aerial attack. The worst case could be worse.
And it matters what was fueling this 11-alarm fire. What the atrocities of Oct. 7 revealed was that legitimate Palestinian grievances were not the primary accelerant. That doesn’t mean solving them isn’t a critical part of the solution. But make no mistake: What Israel faces is encirclement by radical, hate-soaked forces organized against it by Iran. And Iran is a state nine times the size of Israel, whose regime views Israel as its primary challenger for regional hegemony, and has made hatred for Israel a foundation of its rule.
How could Israel mitigate these profound security problems while causing the least harm to innocents? I’m going to walk through a couple of plausible strategies. It’s important to note that some of these strategies presume a different Israel government, because they include ideas that Benjamin Netanyahu and his radical coalition partners would never contemplate. If I conclude that Israel is now doing the right thing, it’s not because I think Netanyahu soberly reasoned through the options with apolitical intentions.
I. The first plausible response might be called harden-and-bargain. In this scenario, Israel would kill and capture all terrorists on its territory, then surge troops to the border with Gaza and monitor it far more intensively to prevent further incursions. Israel would also cut off all funding sources to Hamas (looking at you, Qatar) and negotiate a surge in international assistance that sought to bypass Hamas to make up for any shortfall in social services.
At the same time, Israel would accelerate peace talks with Saudi Arabia, using its restraint as leverage for a better and quicker agreement. Closer to home, Israel would freeze expansion of settlements in the West Bank as a goodwill measure to bring the Palestinian Authority back to the bargaining table.
This approach has the virtue of not giving Hamas what they want — a war that results in many dead Palestinian civilians and global condemnation of Israel. But in the short run, I don’t think it actually solves that problem. As far as I can tell, this approach does nothing to the immediate and medium-term security threats elaborated above. It may help weaken Hamas in the West Bank by enhancing the legitimacy of its rival Fatah (which controls the Palestinian Authority). But it could also do the opposite by suggesting that violence produces concessions (even if I believe those concessions should have been offered long ago). It could conceivably deter Hezbollah and Iran by teaching them that violence will backfire in isolating Israel. But I think it would be far more likely to do the opposite. It would cause them to double down on disrupting an Israel-Saudi rapprochement by turning attacks up to an even more intolerable level. Then you’re back to war, not only in Gaza, but also in Lebanon.
II. The second approach might be called slapping the head of the snake. In this scenario, Israel would respond by punishing Qatar and Iran — Hamas’ sponsors — with targeted but damaging blows they had not expected. Perhaps it would kidnap the Hamas leaders living in Qatar and agree to let them go only in exchange for its hostages. Perhaps it would set off further sabotage against Iran’s nuclear program or other elements of its military. And it would combine these tactics with a diplomatic effort to rally global sympathy and, again, accelerate a deal with the Saudis. The problem here is that I don’t know if Israel has any of these capabilities. Even if it does, they could also provoke Iran into attacking with the full might of Hezbollah, or even its own military — leaving you, again, with a multi-front war.
III. That leaves the third approach: dismantling Hamas. I think this is the approach with the best odds of solving the problems of short-term and medium-term attack, and long-term deterrence. It leaves Israel in a difficult position, however, with regards to the West Bank, the future of Gaza, and its global legitimacy.
I think the West Bank problem — and to a lesser degree, the global legitimacy problem — could be mitigated with creative diplomacy that credibly commits Israel to a serious peace process with the Palestinians. Of course, it’s hard to imagine Israel ceding security control over the West Bank after what has just happened. But I can imagine Israel freezing and evacuating settlements (on the assumption that a Palestinian quasi-state could not guarantee the security of Jews within its borders) and recruiting Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia into some kind of productive role cultivating moderate governance in the West Bank. All this would be incredibly difficult — it would require statesmanship and skill that Benjamin Netanyahu could never muster.
The argument against this third option is that between the present impossibility of credibly committing to a deal with the West Bank Palestinians and the problem of Gaza, the potential progress you’ve bought on short- and medium-term security threats and deterrence will be doomed in the long run by problems in the West Bank, Gaza, and the court of global opinion. I think that’s a real possibility.
But Israel must put out the fire it faces now in order to survive, even if that means other fires will immediately appear in its place. Out of all the bad strategic options, I think the third is the best — the one with the greatest chance of ensuring Israel survives. But it must be done with care to minimize civilian casualties, and still it will come at a high cost in Israeli and Palestinian lives. I’ll turn to the terrible moral dilemmas Israel faces in waging this war in my next post.