Israel’s Strategic Calamity. Its brutal war on Gaza is turning it into a pariah state and risking regional war.
December 11, 2023
Mohammed Dahman/AP Photo
A Palestinian woman gestures following Israeli airstrikes in Khan Yunis refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, December 7, 2023.
Every day, the news from Gaza somehow gets worse. Hundreds of civilians are being killed every day, mostly women and children, and the rate of killings seems to have accelerated after the brief truce. Most Gazans are packed into desperately crowded refugee camps in the south after being driven from the north, and many of those locations have been bombed repeatedly. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have concluded that an October 13 strike that killed several journalists, including a Reuters videographer, was done deliberately.
At the time of writing, an estimated 17,500 Gazans have been killed, and an untold number injured and disabled. It sure looks for all the world like an ethnic-cleansing campaign, which some Israeli government ministers have openly advocated. But the war is also posing a greater and greater threat to Israel itself.
The biggest immediate risk is that the war will spiral into a regional conflict. Tensions have been escalating along the border with Lebanon for weeks now, and American officials tell Akbar Shahid Ahmed at HuffPost that Israel is considering using U.S. aid for attacks in Lebanon. “There is a will on the Israeli side to take advantage of the current rise in tensions to change the realities on the ground … to push Hezbollah far from the Israeli border,” a European diplomat said. Fighting against Iran-backed militias has long since spread to Syria, and massive protests have put major pressureon the Jordanian government to cut its relatively close ties to Israel. (Some Israeli extremists call for a “Greater Israel” including most of Jordan, by the way.) Egypt has forcefully criticized the Gaza war, and categorically refused to accept large numbers of refugees.
So Israel could see itself bogged down in street-to-street fighting against Hamas in Gaza, a shooting war with Hezbollah (which is far more formidable) in Lebanon and Syria, while greatly damaging its relationships with its other neighbors, all at the same time.
A more nebulous yet still serious risk is that Israel’s unending civilian massacre will alienate its allies, above all the U.S. Now, the power of the Israel lobby can be seen in the yawning gap between, on the one hand, Congress and the Biden administration, which have backed Israel almost in lockstep, and on the other the American people, who favor a permanent cease-fire by a 2-to-1 margin.
But Israel’s U.S. government credit may be running out. While the Biden administration has enabled Israeli brutality (to its discredit), it is also plainly and increasingly exasperated at Israel’s utter refusal to even pretend to minimize civilian casualties. On the contrary, +972 Magazine reports that Israeli forces have detailed files and artificial-intelligence data on location of civilians, and have directly targeted “private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as ‘power targets’ (‘matarot otzem’).”
The only figures that benefit from this war are the incumbent government members, above all Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Whether or not the claims about AI are true, the plain fact is that Gaza has been carpet-bombed more or less indiscriminately. By way of comparison, the hardest fighting in the Iraq War was the six-week Second Battle of Fallujah, during which U.S. forces notoriously used white phosphorous munitions. Civilian casualties from the battle were perhaps between 600 and 700—a terrible atrocity in a pointless, illegal war of aggression, to be clear. But that is only about 3 or 4 percent of the Gazan death toll thus far. The Fallujah numbers were relatively low in part because civilians were allowed and encouraged to leave the city, but that only underlines the inhumanity of Israel’s refusal to allow Gazan civilians any kind of refuge that isn’t also under threat of attack—not even mothers of premature babies being sent to Egypt.
Warnings and leaks from the Biden administration to the Israeli government have become steadily more stern. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently warned that excessive civilian casualties risk “strategic defeat” for Israel. The administration also has publicly placed sanctions on several extremist settlers who had attacked Palestinians in the West Bank, in what was widely seen as a warning shot. “This is a pivotal moment in history, and we should feel angry about how Netanyahu has literally put our reputation on fire to advance his personal political agenda,” one State Department official told HuffPost. “The collateral effects to American security are extremely consequential.”
Joe Biden himself has reportedly followed a “bear hug” diplomatic strategy in an attempt to contain and direct the Israeli response. But if the Israeli government continues to blithely ignore his requests while demanding unlimited military aid—doing major damage to Biden’s domestic coalition in the process—he may decide it’s time to pull back on his full-throated Israeli support. Even if he doesn’t, Israel’s war crimes are certainly increasing the likelihood that a future president (though not Donald Trump) will do so.
Finally, there is the risk that Israel is creating a new generation of terrorists. The median Gazan is 18 years old. It’s not exactly implausible to suppose some of those children, or others watching from outside, will grow up boiling for revenge. “An unbridled and terribly cruel attack against Gaza creates hatred of Israel at levels we’ve never seen before, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in the Palestinian diaspora, in the Arab world and everywhere in the world where people are seeing what the Israelis don’t see and don’t want to see,” writes Gideon Levy at Haaretz. “And what’s even more terrible is this hatred will be justified.”
All this raises the question of just why the Israeli government is doing this. After the appalling 10/7 attacks, Israel enjoyed a wave of international sympathy. An actual counterattack on Hamas specifically, even a fairly brutal one, would not have inspired much outrage. Instead, Israel has acted like Vladimir Putin in Grozny, if not worse.
The only figures that benefit from this war are the incumbent government members, above all Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is widely and correctly blamed for enabling the attack, he is facing criminal charges, and his popularity has collapsed. The moment the war is over, his political career is almost certainly over as well. This may explain why the Israeli government seems to be trying to start a regional conflict rather than avoid one. One is reminded of Henry Kissinger’s intrigues in 1968 to undermine negotiations to end the Vietnam War by lying to the North Vietnamese delegation about the seriousness of the Johnson administration’s position.
Whatever the case, this war is a disaster for Gaza, Jews around the world, and Israel itself. A wise friend of the country would convince it to end the bloodshed, now.
Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is the Prospect’s managing editor, and author of ‘How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics.’ He was previously a national correspondent for The Week.