[Salon] Israel at War—In Gaza and Elsewhere

Israel at War—In Gaza and Elsewhere

Rajan Menon
Unherd
October 2, 2024

Israel’s armed forces and intelligence services, admired by the
country’s friends and allies, feared by its adversaries, were
stunned by Hamas’s October 7 assault that killed 1,200 people,
mainly civilians, and spirited away at least 230 hostages. The
worst attack on Israel’s soil since the country’s creation in 1948,
it occurred on the watch of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
who, for decades has touted himself as the leader Israelis could
count on more than any other to keep them safe—Mr. Security,
if you will. The ferocity of Israel’s retaliation in Gaza owes to
the shock and horror that swept the country but also to
Netanyahu’s desperation to redeem his reputation.
Even before the Gaza war, there were massive demonstrations
against Netanyahu. The protestors denounced him as a threat to
Israeli democracy and the rule of law, and his embroilment in
various corruption charges added to their anger. But to many
others, Israelis Netanyahu is a peerless leader, even a savior. The
war has increased the polarization within Israel, especially over
the fate of the remaining hostages—to the point that former
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert warned in a late July
interview the that country could descend into civil war, a view
shared by nearly half the respondents in an August poll.
Netanyahu’s future and the outcome of the war are inseparable;
hence his determination to continue it all costs—not just to
Gazans, more than 40,000 of whom have been killed and
another 1.9 million (90% of the population) displaced, but the
Israeli hostages as well.
Yet Netanyahu’s vow to destroy Hamas has proven chimerical.
And his refusal to abandon it has created a rift between him and
the most hawkish members of his cabinet—National Security
Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel
Smotrich, who lead far right religious parties—and senior Israeli
military officers and intelligence officials who insist that it
cannot be achieved.
Netanyahu has yet to explain what it would mean to destroy
Hamas. The IDF’s overwhelming superiority in soldiers,
military technology, and firepower, may well demolish Hamas’s
fighting force, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and eliminate
its senior commanders. (The Brigades’ leader, Mohammed Deif,
has most likely already been killed.) And even if the Brigades
won’t disappear, they will have been battered badly, though for
now Hamas’s refusal to surrender or even accept a ceasefire on
Israel’s terms attests to its combatants’ continuing resolve to
resist.
But destroying Hamas altogether is all but impossible. Hamas is
a political movement with a distinctive ideology, which includes
ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control of Gaza
through a draconian blockade. So long as both continue it will
have a cause for which it can rally support (though its refusal to
relinquish the goal of eliminating Israel will never succeed but
will surely bring more suffering to Gazans). The IDF will
deplete Hamas’s ranks and kill several senior leaders, such as
Ismail Haniyeh, assassinated in Tehran in July. And many
Gazans may blame Hamas for the October 7 attack that turned
their lives upside down. Yet many others will direct their anger
at Israel. Thousands of vengeful young men whose mothers,
fathers, and siblings have been killed by Israel’s war machine
will join Hamas or a successor movement, the suffocating Israeli
blockade adding to their resentment.
No matter Hamas’s future, once the war ends Israel will have to
arrange for Gaza’s governance. None of the available choices
are workable. Netanyahu has ruled out a coalition government
containing the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas or even
one run solely by the PA. As for the possibility of a government
staffed by Gazan’s notables, after what Israel has done to Gaza,
any who step forward will be condemned as quislings and may
even jeopardize their lives: the more acceptable they are to
Israel, the more they will be mistrusted by Gazans. Israel could
run Gaza through a military occupation but that, sooner or later,
will restart the familiar cycle of repression and resistance.
It is in this context that the prominent Yedioth Ahronoth
columnist Nahum Barnea asked recently, “There is technology
[Israel’s military power]. Is there a strategy?” The answer:
There isn’t.
To complicate matters, Israel is waging a war of sorts on a
second front, the West Bank, where tension and violence are
increasing. State-sanctioned seizures of land there have
accelerated: the largest single authorization in three decades
occurred in July. The government also greenlighted three times
as many settlement housing units last year than in 2022, marking
“a 180 percent increase over a period of five years” according to
the EU. Then there are the “outposts” (though illegal under
Israeli law, many eventually gain legal status, plus even more
land), nearly 200 altogether, the number created last year
unmatched in any other. Settlers’ attacks on Palestinians have
surged: 1,270 between last October and this August alone
compared to 856 in all of 2022. Add to this the settlers’
destruction of Palestinians’ olive groves, gardens, and orchards;
the killing and stealing of sheep and cattle; the demolition and
defacement of schools; and the takeover of water sources,
sometimes assisted by the IDF—all with the state’s
encouragement or complicity and refusal to intervene.
Worse, as Israel’s +972 Magazine reports, the security forces
and settlers killed nearly 700 West Bank Palestinians between
October 7 and this September. Israel’s far-right parties, and
notably their leaders like Ben Gvir and Smotrich, cabinet
members both, have praised attacks and denounced foreign
criticism as smears; the government they are part of cares not a
whit about marauding settlers. Ben Gvir has even given
violence-prone settlers leeway by relaxing gun ownership laws:
within the first two months of Hamas’s attack 250,000 firearm
applications were filed, more than in the past 25 years.
West Bank Palestinians, though powerless, are seething.
Unsurprisingly, support for armed resistance has increased and
Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and to a lesser
extent Hamas, plus similar groups, have sunk deeper roots in the
territory. The bomb attack in Tel Aviv this August may be a
harbinger. Israel’s army and security forces have increased their
raids, laid siege to the towns of Jenin and Tulkarm, and resumed
air and drone strikes—46 between October 7 and June,
compared to five in 2016-2023. Violence—by the IDF, settlers,
and militant Palestinian groups— had increased by 50% even in
the 12 months preceding the Gaza war. Current trends could
culminate in a third Intifada.
Criticism of Israel’s actions in the West Bank often evoke
accusations of opposition to the country’s very existence, anti-
Semitism, or whitewashing terrorism, so it’s important to
understand that the abuses occurring in the West Bank are
covered routinely in Israel’s press—a far more reliable source of
information on the occupation than the most prominent Western
media outlets—and discussed by prominent Israeli intellectuals.
Here’s what one of the latter, David Shulman, a renowned
Hebrew University of Jerusalem Indologist and a staunch
believer in the necessity and legitimacy of a Jewish state but
also of Palestinian self-determination, observed recently:
“Stealing Palestinian sheep has become a habit of the outpost
settlers throughout the Jordan Valley and the Central West Bank,
along with nocturnal raids, burning homes and vehicles,
destroying solar panels and wind turbines, shooting live
ammunition at the villagers, breaking anything breakable, and
beating anything beatable.” Left unchecked, he warned, these
acts “will lead to Hamas and Islamic Jihad taking control of the
West Bank.”
The relentless, accelerated approval of settlements has all but
destroyed the already-dim prospects for a two-state solution,
which in any event Netanyahu has flatly rejected despite
American entreaties. His stance has been reinforced by the
“basic law” passed in 2018 by the Knesset, which declares that
national self-determination is “unique to the Jewish people.” If
Hamas views Israel as illegitimate, Smotrich believes that the
very idea of a Palestinian people “is an invention.”
The campus protests against the Gaza war prompted many
American politicians to condemn the “From the River to the
Sea,” rallying cries, heard during some rallies, as an anti-Semitic
call for Israel’s destruction, and the House of Representatives
even passed a resolution characterizing it as such. Lost amidst
the passion was any awareness that Israel’s far-right uses this
same catchword as a call for denying Palestinians living
between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea basic rights
and even expelling them from Gaza en masse.
This same refrain appears in the 1977 founding charter of
Benjamin Netanyahu’s party, Likud (“between the Sea and the
Jordan there be only Israeli sovereignty”) and on the social
media site of Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister's son. And it
underlies the even more expansive Eretz Israel trope of the far-
right (included in the platform of Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit
party), a claim to rightful possession of the entire land of biblical
Israel.
To complicate matters, Israel now faces an all-out war on a third
front: in its north, against the Lebanese Shiite political party and
paramilitary force, Hezbollah. Each has been attacking each
other since October 7, Hezbollah has aimed missiles and drone
at northern Israel, Israel has retaliated with air strikes on
Hezbollah redoubts in southern Lebanon. More 100,000 Israelis
and Lebanese have fled their homes in the border regions,
Hezbollah vows to continue its attacks so long as the Gaza war
persists, and Israel is bent on enabling the return of people
displaced from their homes.
As Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon and Hezbollah’s rocket
attacks on northern Israel increased, Netanyahu decided to take
off the gloves. Israel’s boobytrapped pagers, and later walkie-
talkies, used by senior Hezbollah commanders, killing a number
of them as well as some civilians. Then the Israeli air force
struck Hezbollah’s strongholds using bunker-busting bombs,
killing the movement’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as well as
twenty or of its top military commanders, aided by a covert
operation by Israel’s military intelligence service, Aman, which
after more after more than decade of effort, had managed to
hack the mobile phones used by Hezbollah’s senior leaders and
top echelons, track their movements, and pinpoint their
locations.
Hezbollah has suffered a massive blow, but if Israel follows up
with a full-scale ground invasion of southern Lebanon, it will
still face a foe far more formidable than Hamas, something
seasoned Israeli military veterans understand. As retired Maj.
Gen. Yitzhak Brik wrote recently in Haaretz, “The IDF, which
failed to destroy Hamas, certainly won't be able to destroy
Hezbollah, which is hundreds of times more powerful than
Hamas. Because the IDF's high command slashed the ground
forces by 66 percent compared to what they were 20 years ago,
it doesn't have enough troops to remain for long period of time
in any territory it conquers, nor does it have troops to relieve
those who are fighting.”
We don’t yet know how Israel will respond to Iran’s barrage of
missiles fired yesterday evening or whether the United States
will limit itself to helping Israel shoot down Iran’s missiles, as it
did in April, or decide to strike Iran directly. In response to a
full-on attack by Israel (whether with or without American
participation), Iran could go so far as to close the Straits of
Hormuz, a step whose ripple effects would course rapidly
through the networks of the global economy.
One year on from October 7, the combination of increasing
violence in the West Bank, an Israeli war in Gaza and ground
invasion of southern Lebanon, and an Iran that feels pressure to
shore up its credibility given Israel’s attacks against its allies —
Hamas and Hezbollah but also the Houthis of Yemen —
amounts to a tinderbox. The consequences of an explosion are
impossible to predict with precision. But this much is clear: we
will only see more death, destruction and suffering. Wars are
easy to start but hard to end — and quickly spiral out of the
control of those who initiate them.