Gaza school attack spotlights pitfalls of Israeli strategy
Credit: Amazon
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If Israel’s high-casualty strike against a Gazan school proves anything, it's Albert Eistein’s definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
The strike at the Al- Taba’een school that killed scores, mostly, if not all, civilians, was grounded in a decades-long strategy that has all but backfired.
The strategy assumes that sledgehammer approaches to expressions of Palestinian national identity and resistance to the occupation of Palestinian lands conquered in the 1967 Middle East war, the assassination of “pragmatic” or “moderate” Palestinian leaders, collective punishment, and mass incarcerations will beat Palestinians into submission.
At the outset of the Gaza war in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the strategy translated into the false hope, if not expectation, that indiscriminate bombing and restricting, if not halting, the flow of essential goods and services would spark a popular revolt against Hamas.
Credit: Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research
It did not. Despite seemingly widespread criticism of Hamas, opinion polls suggest that a majority of Gazans condone the October 7 attack and that the war has reinforced their support of Palestinian national aspirations.
The polls also indicate that Hamas’s popularity in the West Bank has increased significantly.
Ten months into the war and more than five decades into the occupation of post-1967 Palestinian lands, Israel seems stuck in a cul-de-sac it doesn’t know how or want to exit. Hence, Mr. Einstein’s definition of insanity.
Israel’s stubborn clinging to a failed strategy manifests itself not only on the battlefield and the assassinations of political and military leaders that put little dent in the operations of Palestinian groups or Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia.
Israel's "insanity" is also reflected in its underwhelming effort to score points in its uphill battle for hearts and minds.
Source: YouGov April 2024
Once a master of public relations and ensuring control of the narrative, Israel has resorted to coercion and repression in its information warfare with a significant degree of success in Western democracies, identifying criticism of its policies and Zionism, its founding ideology, as anti-Semitism.
Oblivious to self-inflicted reputational damage, Israel’s information war failed to adjust to a world in which its assertions are no longer accepted at face value, and fact-checking has, more than ever, been embedded in journalism and become a social media pastime. It fails to either produce evidence for its assertions or presents flimsy proof.
The Gaza school is a case in point.
Israel asserted that it was a precise intelligence-based strike intended to kill Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives in a command and control centre but provided no evidence. Israel also cast doubt on the casualty toll.
The visuals and witness statements emanating from Gaza told a very different story. They suggested a massacre of civilians and the devastation of a school-turned-shelter for Palestinians displaced multiple times by the war.
Israel’s version of events was further undermined by questioning of its assertions against a record of having to repeatedly correct its alleged facts on earlier incidentsbecause of incisive reporting and international pressure.
Credit: Israel Defense Forces
To prove its assertions regarding the school, Israel’s military published photos of 19 alleged Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants in the operation.
Israel published the photo to justify its claim that the school was a legitimate military target. If assertions about the 19 men are accurate, Israel would likely argue that the attack was proportionate with a ratio of five civilians for every fighter, a lower ratio than in past attacks.
Not included among the 19 was an Islamic Jihad brigade commander, Ashraf Juda, who, according to Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari, was probably in the school at the time of the attack.
Countering the Israeli identification of the militants, various people said on X that Munzer Nasser Daher, one of the 19, was killed together with his sister a day before the strike.
Source: X
In a series of tweets, law professor and chairman of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor Rami Abdul said he knew many of the 19, claiming they were not fighters.
“Four of them were from the Jaabari family, whom I personally know—they never engaged in any political or military activities. Another was an imam; one was my neighbor from the Habib family who had a serious dispute with Hamas, and a university professor from the Kahlout family who never participated in any political work,” Mr. Abdu said.
Mr. Abdu claimed that Israel killed one member of the Jaabari family, Ahmad Ihab Al-Jaabari, on December 5. He described another member, Ihab Al-Jaabari, as a civilian employee in public services “who has never been involved in any political or military activity and does not support the agendas of Palestinian factions.”
Mr. Abdu said the same was true of two others listed by the Israeli military, Abdul Aziz Al-Kafarneh and Muhammad Hamid Al-Taif.
The activist described a ninth figure on the Israeli list, Abdul Karim Hamad, as a devout man who sympathized with Hamas but never joined its ranks.
The Israeli military drops leaflets in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on December 1, calling it a “fighting zone.” Credit: CNN
More broadly, Israel’s insistence that it seeks to minimise civilian casualties is not only called into question by facts on the ground in Gaza, like the latest school attack, but also by the contradictions inherent in its military strategy.
Irrespective of the veracity of Mr. Abdu’s denial of Israeli claims, it is one-and-one-is two that Palestinian militants would seek shelter for their families and themselves in Israeli-declared safe zones.
Israel implicitly admits this by asserting that Hamas embeds itself among Gaza’s civilian population, which means the zones are, by definition, Catch-22 death traps given that Israel strikes wherever it suspects the presence of Hamas associates with no obvious consideration for innocent civilians.
Credit: Israel Defense Forces
the eighth Gazan school attacked by Israel since the beginning of August, may have been intended to take out Palestinian militants.
Even so, it's hard to separate the latest Gaza school attack from Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s insistence that Gazans need to be deradicalised and re-educated before they can govern themselves under Israeli tutelage.
United Nations experts labeled the destruction or damaging of the vast majority of Gazan schools during the war ‘scholasticide.’
“These attacks are not isolated incidents. They present a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society,” the experts said in April.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey. -