"There is no hope whatever."
The worst moment in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict
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I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’ve been quiet for a few days. As you probably guessed, it all hit me at once. I spent the weekend sleeping. Even when I woke up, I still felt exhausted. And to be honest, I still do.
Judith told me she refuses even to look at the news right now. She just can’t take it. I told myself that I didn’t have that option—it’s my job to look at the news—but I suppose my body had the final word on that. It just said, “Enough.”
Today I have to finish a now-overdue assignment for Politico. And I have to answer all the email that piled up over the weekend. I expect that I’ll soon feel tough enough to return to my usual schedule. For now, though, I’ll turn the newsletter over to my friend Arun Kapil. He put into words a thought that I’ve been trying to suppress: It’s hopeless.
You can read the original essay on Arun’s blog here.
Arun Kapil
It went without saying that the IDF’s response to Hamas would go well beyond a “mowing the lawn” operation, or even an invoking of the Dahiya doctrine. Thomas Friedman, in his October 14th New York Times column, “Why Israel is acting this way,” tersely asserted that in Gaza, “Israel will apply Hama Rules.”
America’s most prominent journalistic authority on the Middle East of the past four decades, suggesting that Israel—a country he knows and loves—will wage war with the same regard for civilians as the Ba’athist regime in Syria …
Not to equate the powers-that-be in Jerusalem with those in Damascus—present and past; the latter really are far worse—but the fury of the IDF’s carpet bombing plus the sanguinary outbursts of angry politicians, military people, and ordinary citizens lends credence to Friedman’s prediction.
When Hamas planned its October 7th operation, it knew full well that Israel would react in the way that it has, that the Israelis would feel they had no choice. Given the scale of the massacre on October 7th, it was inconceivable that Israel would not strike back at Hamas with unprecedented violence, with a fury that would inevitably cause suffering for the entire population of Gaza. Hamas was ready and willing to see this happen, to sacrifice countless thousands of its subjects in its long game to eradicate the state of Israel and extinguish Israeli society. Hamas was ready to see the mass of its population suffer because … it’s Hamas: the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—a totalitarian Islamist movement inspired at its inception by interwar European fascism and Nazism—and with a terrorist militia.
Hamas and the Lebanese Hizbullah are the most redoubtable enemies Israel has ever faced. They are far greater threats to Israel than the Egyptian and Syrian armies ever were (Iran is a crucial actor here, which is another matter). What Hamas did on October 7th—the sophistication of the operation—was simply incredible—and all the more so in view of the unbelievable incompetence of the Israeli army and intelligence services on that day. Again, the Israelis—humiliated, shocked, traumatized, and enraged—were obviously going to respond not by “mowing the lawn” but with massive force à la Hama.
Hamas, which has had this all worked out, has set a trap for Israel, that the Israelis are inexorably walking straight into. And so far, Hamas looks to be winning. There are alternative courses of action the Israelis could pursue to avoid catastrophe, for themselves and the people of Gaza, e.g. here and here, but this would require cooler heads in Jerusalem making the decisions. And there are no cool heads in Israel right now. France Inter’s geopolitical commentator, Pierre Haski, observed on Thursday that “The most incredible thing about this week’s sequence of events is that the horror of the October 7 terrorist attacks is already fading.”
This may be the case in much of the world—insofar as there was focus at all on the victims of October 7th—but the horror has certainly not faded in Israel. And it never will. Ever. Pour mémoire, some 1,400 Jews were massacred by Hamas gunmen on October 7th (and the number is sure to rise). As any minimally informed person has heard by now, more Jews were murdered on October 7th than on any single day since the Holocaust. Maurading Hamas gunmen—recalling the Einsatzgruppen in Lithuania and Ukraine circa 1941—murdered every last Jew they came across (who they did not kidnap). One can only imagine what would have happened if thousands of Hamas gunmen had stormed and overwhelmed Israeli defenses on the northern end of the Strip, thereby entering Ashdod and Ashkelon—cities with a combined population of 400,000—in the early hours of the morning—and with an open route to Tel Aviv.
I imagine there’s a word in Arabic and Hebrew for bloodbath on a Biblical scale. Or just the beginning of genocide.
This interview with Yuval Noah Hariri is worth ten minutes of one’s time.
One detail about the martyred communities along the Gaza envelope that I wasn’t aware of is that most of them are populated by secular Jews who disproportionately belong to Israel’s lingering peace camp (likewise with the participants at the rave party). Here are some of the faces that have appeared on my Facebook and Twitter/X feeds, this first one posted by several leftist academics, including the gauchiste, anti-Zionist political scientist Neve Gordon, mourning his brilliant former student (who, one learns, received his doctorate from the University of Washington and was a rising star in the field of Israel studies, as well as anti-occupation militant)
Translation:
Eyal Waldman, Israeli high-tech tycoon, founder and CEO of Mellanox Technologies, stunned the tech industry and the whole Arab world by creating R&D centers five years ago, first in the West Bank and then two years ago in the Gaza sector, hiring hundreds of Palestinian developers. He said then: ‘Today we have 25 employees in Gaza. There are talented and smart people out there, economically it pays off. We have good staff, within one hour zone, with high motivation, availability and opportunities. And I think it’s very important for the two nations to come together. People used to be afraid of each other and didn’t talk. But the positive thing is created when people begin to work together and see how tensions decrease and cooperation work. This is good for all sides.’ And on October 7, 2023, Hamas killed his daughter Danielle. It happened near Kibbutz Reim, less than a mile from where her father opened the most innovative factory in Gaza.
Joel Beinin, of Stanford University, is a well-known historian of the Middle East and a longtime anti-Zionist.
And the rave party.
They were at the rave party.
Translation:
Among all the difficult news we heard yesterday is the shocking loss of Shlomi Matias and his wife, Shahar. They were killed together in the criminal attack. Shlomi was a friend and partner, who led the musical side of the protests for democracy in Beer Sheva. Creative, committed and kind hearted. May their memory be blessed and blessed forever!
Le Monde dated October 18 has a full-page interview with Franco-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz of the EHESS in Paris, in which she says that “for Israeli society, Hamas has become the Nazi,” explaining “that the terrorist attack on October 7 has engaged both sides in a ‘full-scale war,’ and will irrevocably change Israelis’ perception of Palestinians.” As Le Monde has translated the interview for its English edition and Illouz says it better than I can, here are some key passages:
It’s hard to find the right words to describe this unprecedented event. Terrorist attacks on this scale have never been seen before, in any country. There have been massacres, of course, but not a terrorist attack whose number of victims in proportion to the population is much greater than that of September 11. It was the equivalent of 10,000 people in France massacred in a few hours. I would venture to add that there were a series of unprecedented variations of horror: waking up on a holiday to the sound of machine-gun fire with an enemy infiltrating your home, the weak becoming the strong, the strong becoming the weak, the army we’ve been waiting for not coming, terrorists killing babies, decapitating people, killing children in front of their parents, and parents in front of children, kidnapping old people, children, men, women, recording and broadcasting massacres on social media, all this has no precedent. There has been an increase of horror techniques.
It has been the biggest shock in post-Holocaust Jewish history. The whole ontological reality of Israel has been called into question. The Nazis were trying to hide atrocities, not broadcast them. Death itself has become a propaganda motif. There has been a regime shift in atrocity. This is why the war has become total and existential. Israel appears strong, but this strength is underpinned by an existential fear that has become radicalized. For an Israeli, the possibility of genocide never seems far away. (…)
In equating Hamas with the Nazis, Godwin’s Law does not apply. Hamas’ view of the Jews is genocidal. I invite anyone who does not agree to explain why.
The horror and fear are on such a scale that the whole of society has rallied around one objective: to restore a sense of security to its citizens. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War also came as a shock, and there were 2,800 deaths, but these included zero civilians. In the present situation, the division between civilians and soldiers has been erased. This is not only characteristic of terrorism but also because states such as Iran act as terrorist organizations. (…)
N.B. The armed Palestinian movement never really distinguished between Israeli soldiers and civilians, contending that the latter are reservists and minors are future soldiers.
The fact that the global post-colonialist left refused to condemn the massacres will have repercussions on the Israeli left. After the Intifada in 2000, which left 1,000 Israelis dead, the left collapsed because so many people had come to the conclusion that the Palestinians didn’t want peace. It’s going to be more dramatic today. One of the things that will disappear is the idea of a binational state for both populations, which became fashionable over the last decade.
Comment: The idea of a binational state has always been a marginal one, adhered to by Jewish far-leftists (minuscule in number) and Palestinian citizens of Israel (who have a singular relationship with the state of Israel). Palestinians have otherwise never accepted the binational idea, as this posits that Jews are a nation, not merely a religious community, and with an equal claim to Palestine. Jewish nationhood is Zionism, which Palestinians, regardless of their political family (nationalist, Islamist, Marxist), have vehemently rejected. Palestinians will never accept the legitimacy of Zionism—and Israeli Jews will never renounce Zionism. For Palestinians, Palestine—from the river to the sea—is Arab and with Islam as the official religion (as is the case with the Palestinian Authority), with Jewish and Christian minorities recognized solely as confessional groups. Period.
[T]he right, which led us into this disaster because of the security doctrine it defended: The idea that relations with the Palestinians could be managed indefinitely as a low-intensity military conflict is a failure. Netanyahu and his allies wanted to use Hamas against the Palestinian Authority to make the creation of two states impossible; they failed to see that the blockade of Gaza would create an explosive situation, and let people think that Hamas was a bunch of pathetic people easily controlled by money from Qatar. (…)
[M]any Israelis believe that Palestinian civilians and their leaders share a radical hatred of Jews. All the more so as images of the bloodied bodies of young Israeli girls paraded through the streets of Gaza in the midst of excited crowds appear incriminating to civilians. These images make it difficult to distinguish between the people of Gaza and their leaders. We see a population united with Hamas in its hatred of Israelis and Jews. Israelis’ perception of Palestinians in Gaza is very different from that of Iranians, where it’s much easier to distinguish between the ayatollahs’ regime and a civilian population in insurrection. With Hamas, the distinction becomes blurred. (…)
This war is different: It’s an enemy that wants to obliterate Israel and its population. It is a full-scale war. Israelis think of this war in the following terms: It will be us or them. When one side officially declares that its goal is to wipe you off the face of the earth, it becomes difficult to think of proportionality. I would add, however, that the IDF’s aim is to eradicate Hamas and Hamas alone. Will they achieve this without affecting civilians on a massive scale? Probably not, and I deeply regret this.
What was once seen as a century-old military or colonial conflict is now interpreted through the lens of anti-Semitism. There is a shift from the political to the racial and religious. For Israeli society, the genocidal anti-Semitism that inhabited the lands of Europe has migrated to Islamism. Until now, the Palestinians, in the eyes of the Israelis, were not the Nazis. I think that changed after the terrorist attacks: Hamas has become the Nazi. There’s a risk that, through a contamination effect, the Israelis will see all the Palestinians in Gaza in the same way. Would Europe have compromised with the Nazis? Churchill decided to bomb Dresden, even though Germany had already lost. I’m not saying that Hamas is a Nazi. I’m aware of the historical and ideological differences. But that’s how it will be seen from now on. (…)
A categorical assertion: October 7th was the worst day in the history of the Arab-Zionist/Israeli conflict. Ever. Since its origins in the 19th century. This for the reasons specified by Eva Illouz and more: of 14 million Jews and Arabs, evenly divided, living in a land the size of Vermont or Normandy, hating, fearing, and distrusting the other more than ever, with no desire to coexist in the same space but unable to separate. I pronounced the Israel-Palestine conflict to be insoluble years ago but now it is definitive: there is no hope whatever. Except that the conflict can no longer be managed (from the Israeli standpoint) in the way that it has been. And the implication of the rest of the region, notably Iran and its clients, in the conflct, i..e, in a war, cannot be excluded. An apocalypse is not out of the question.
As I concluded my random thoughts of two weeks ago, this will not end well, for anyone. There are no best case scenarios, only least worst ones. And even then. But whatever one’s sympathies in this conflict, there can be no dispute over what Hamas did on October 7th—and for which it must pay the maximum price.
There will be more. À suivre.
Claire—the world is hyper-saturated now with news from Israel and Gaza, but here are a few resources and items of note that you may have missed.
The Data Analytics Desk at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University is one of the best sources I’ve so far found for data on the war, with multiple maps and graphs like these:
Here’s an excellent list of Israeli think tanks. The analyses coming out of these think tanks tends to be more useful than most journalism.
Here’s another list of think tanks with relevant analyses:
Amir Weitmann, a senior Likud official, went on Russia Today:
Weitmann: I understand you are on the Russian payroll and I understand this is Russian propaganda. But you have to be very careful, because let me tell you: We’re going to finish this war. We’re going to win, because we’re stronger. After this, Russia will pay the price. Believe me, Russia will pay the price.
Interviewer, incredulous: Russia will pay the price?
Weitmann: Russia is supporting the enemies of Israel. Russia is supporting Nazi people who want to commit genocide on us and Russia will pay the price. Russia, also. Now, listen to me very carefully: We are going to finish with these Nazis. We’re going to win this war. It’s going to take time but we’re going to win this war. Afterwards, we’re not forgetting what you are doing. We’re not forgetting. We will come. We will make sure that Ukraine wins. We will make sure that you pay the price for what you have done. You, as Russia. You, as all the enemies of Israel. We are not forgetting. You will pay the price.
Interviewer: Amir, I think it’s safe to say that this is a very passionate conflict that is—
Weitmann: People have been massacred. My people have been slaughtered by your proxies, and you will pay the price. Is it clear?
(It certainly took Israelis long enough to appreciate that Russia wasn’t their friend.)
ISIS called for attacks on Jews around the world, Israeli embassies, Israeli allies, and “apostate” Arab countries, saying, “Jews will realize they have yet to experience the Holocaust.”
Yossi Klein Halevi: What happens on the battlefield in the coming weeks and perhaps months will help determine the next iteration of Israel:
… the pilots who had announced they would not serve an anti-democratic government are now flying sorties over Gaza. The Brothers in Arms movement that had supported their refusal is helping shell-shocked residents along the Gaza border with food, clothing and psychological counselling – taking the place of government ministries that are barely functioning, a result of the coalition’s systematic replacement of professional civil servants with incompetent political hacks. Astonishingly but not surprisingly, the government that failed to protect the residents of the Gaza border communities while they were being massacred has effectively abandoned the survivors.
This is a joyless unity, imposed on a nation whose bitter divisions will take years to heal. Never has the country gone to war with so many Israelis faulting each other for catastrophe. Those of us who oppose the government blame it not only for the disaster of failing to secure the Gaza border, but for dividing the country over the past year, signalling a fatal weakness to our enemies. Netanyahu ignored the urgent warnings of the IDF about the impact of his judicial policies on the cohesiveness of Israeli society and of the army itself, even refusing to meet with the IDF Commander-in-Chief Herzi Halevi. Just days before the attack, Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid went on television to warn that, based on briefings he’d received from the military as head of the opposition, Israel was facing a major and perhaps imminent security threat on its borders. Netanyahu ignored all those warnings, insisting on moving ahead with his divisive agenda, as though nothing was more fateful for Israel’s future than restraining judicial overreach. And now of course, the leader who is always claiming credit for national achievements, whether or not they are his, is acting as though someone else were prime minister on October 7.
Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the former Saudi chief of intelligence:
It is a dignified speech, and under the circumstances, a welcome one. But my skin crawls when I hear that the occupation is the cause of terrorism. It’s just as logical—and it is closer to the truth—to say that terrorism is the cause of the occupation.
If no Arab country had ever tried to invade Israel—and if Palestinians had never embraced terrorism as a strategy—does anyone doubt that a Palestinian state would have been established long ago?
It is all just such a pointless pity.
It’s not the occupation. David Benatar makes a similar case here:
The problem in 1929 was not “the occupation,” but a refusal to accept any Jewish state in Palestine. This refusal stands in contrast to repeated (if not always full-hearted) Jewish acceptance of a two-state solution, including the Jews’ acceptance of the Peel Commission in 1937 and the UN Partition Plan in 1947. The Arab rejection of partition then and the Hamas rejection of a Jewish state now are both rooted in the same claim that the Jewish state is a settler-colonial enterprise. But this characterization is simply false.
First, Israel is not a colony of any country, nor was it established as one. It is not like the British colonies in America and Australia, nor the Belgian or German colonies in what were the Congo and South West Africa. Jews were not sent by anyone, nor did they migrate from a single country or even a single region. In other words, they had no metropole. Moreover, they have ancestral ties to the land. It is the place from which they came, and from which they were exiled. This is not to deny that Palestinians have ties to the same land, but it is not colonization when those who are driven out of their land return to it. Those Palestinian exiles who deny this, might ask themselves whether their own claims to some part of Palestine will evaporate in time, and if so, when?
Second, a very large proportion of the Jewish Israeli population is descended from refugees. These include not only refugees from pogroms and the Shoah in Europe, but also around 650,000 Jews who fled persecution in Arab countries and Iran. Other Jewish Israelis are migrants who have moved to Israel because, for any number of reasons, that is where they prefer to be. Refugees and migrants are not colonialists. Those who reject this distinction will be forced to acknowledge that there is now a substantial Muslim colonization of Europe, America, and other Western countries. That is not a reasonable characterization, nor is it one that Palestinians’ Western supporters will be eager to defend.
Benjamin Wittes: On strategy, law, and morality in Israel’s Gaza operation:
[If] Israel is not operating pursuant to clear objectives that warrant the cost it is exacting, that is a grave moral problem irrespective of whether the individual strikes are lawful. And it’s a problem that Israel needs to rectify immediately. To be clear, I don’t know that Israel has no coherent strategy. But I fear that the strategic thinking has been inadequate. And while this is understandable if it’s the case, it would be a grave failure nonetheless. …
While law plays a real role in the Israeli response to Hamas, the fundamental questions here are not legal, but moral and strategic. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict won’t be resolved by legalistic arguments regarding who should follow what supposedly binding legal principle. And the law will get us only so far in evaluating or managing the current spasm of violence. It does nothing—literally zero—to restrain Hamas. And while it does restrain Israel in some meaningful ways, it will not prevent an Israeli response to Hamas that will morally discomfit not only those who hate Israel but many of its friends as well and, if not particularly well thought through, may prove of limited strategic value.
So what’s the right approach for Israel? I have no idea—except to suggest a relentless focus on what happens after a lot more Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians get killed. The law doesn’t require that Israel have a strategy. Israel needs to require that of itself.
Here’s Peter Zeihan arguing that this isn’t as bad as it seems:
I don’t think he’s correct, unfortunately. He’s in effect arguing that enlarging the war wouldn’t be in anyone’s interest. But none of this is in anyone’s interest. Yet it’s happening, isn’t it.
This report seems more realistic: A regional-political perspective on the Gaza Campaign:
The Gaza campaign is not a local conflict. Although the fighting is confined to a specific geographic area, it risks spreading and turning into a regional campaign that involves the United States and its regional allies in shaping the war and its aftermath. Understanding the attitudes, interests, sensitivities and capabilities of each country in the region regarding the campaign is thus of great importance.
Eitan Shamir responds to Tom Friedman: If Israel wants to continue to exist, it must uproot Hamas from Gaza:
… The events of October 7, 2023, mark a significant departure from the “Mowing the Grass” strategy and the limited-round approach against adversaries like Hamas in Gaza. There are voices that do not understand this change. For example, well-known Jewish-American columnist Thomas Friedman argued in an article in The New York Times on October 16 that Israel should not enter Gaza due to the likelihood of instability there and the fact that groups like Hamas, with its deep religious and ideological roots, cannot be completely uprooted. What should be done, then? Well, Mr. Friedman, writing from the safety of his home in the United States, has no answer. “I don’t know,” he writes. But we need to stop the fighting and think about alternatives, he instructs us.
In stark contrast to what Friedman believes, in the Middle East, there is no place for the weak. Israel has attempted to reach agreements with Hamas, all of which disintegrated because they made Israel appear weak. Deterrence has completely collapsed, and Hamas allowed itself to embark on an immensely vicious and destructive campaign against Israel precisely because it knew people like Friedman would inevitably press Israel not to react to unspeakable provocation.
Hamas couldn’t care less what the consequences of its attack on Israel will be on the Gazan population. Indeed, their suffering serves their interests. The only thing that threatens Hamas is the destruction of its military capabilities and the loss of its control over Gaza. Israel has an urgent necessity—indeed, a survival imperative—to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities and bring about the collapse of its authority in Gaza.
The Washington Post reports that the Biden administration “is preparing for the possibility that hundreds of thousands of American citizens will require evacuation from the Middle East if the bloodshed in Gaza cannot be contained, according to four officials familiar with the US government’s contingency planning.” … “The administration is very, very, very worried that this thing is going to get out of hand.”
Meanwhile
Russian missile strikes killed at least six postal workers and wounded 16 others when they hit a mail depot in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region.
Russia advances near Avdiivka, but suffers “significant losses.” The battle for a huge slag heap in the town of Avdiivka continues with Russian forces advancing but unable to hold their positions due to intense Ukrainian artillery fire.
Send JASSMs Air-Launch Cruise Missiles to Ukraine. Robert Zubrin argues that it would just take few JASSMs to destroy the Kerch Strait Bridge and isolate the Crimea Peninsula.
Finally, here’s an apposite article by Robert Gates, which he wrote before October 7: The Dysfunctional Superpower. Can a divided America deter China and Russia?
The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia. And no one alive can remember a time when an adversary had as much economic, scientific, technological, and military power as China does today.
The problem, however, is that at the very moment that events demand a strong and coherent response from the United States, the country cannot provide one. Its fractured political leadership—Republican and Democratic, in the White House and in Congress—has failed to convince enough Americans that developments in China and Russia matter. Political leaders have failed to explain how the threats posed by these countries are interconnected. They have failed to articulate a long-term strategy to ensure that the United States, and democratic values more broadly, will prevail. …
The United States finds itself in a uniquely treacherous position: facing aggressive adversaries with a propensity to miscalculate yet incapable of mustering the unity and strength necessary to dissuade them. Successfully deterring leaders such as Xi and Putin depends on the certainty of commitments and constancy of response. Yet instead, dysfunction has made American power erratic and unreliable, practically inviting risk-prone autocrats to place dangerous bets—with potentially catastrophic effects. …
Xi and Putin, cocooned by yes men, have already made serious errors that have cost their countries dearly. In the long run, they have damaged their countries. For the foreseeable future, however, they remain a danger that the United States must deal with. Even in the best of worlds—one in which the US government had a supportive public, energized leaders, and a coherent strategy—these adversaries would pose a formidable challenge. But the domestic scene today is far from orderly: the American public has turned inward; Congress has descended into bickering, incivility, and brinkmanship; and successive presidents have either disavowed or done a poor job explaining America’s global role. To contend with such powerful, risk-prone adversaries, the United States needs to up its game in every dimension. Only then can it hope to deter Xi and Putin from making more bad bets. The peril is real.
And with that, I’ll sign off for the day.
May I put in a word for that perennial wallflower, moral clarity? Can we all not agree that the Jewish state is righteous in its determination to eradicate the virus that infects Gaza and, indeed, the Palestinian Arabs? What other hope is there for peace? The UN? The US State Department? Harvard University?
One thing is unambiguous; the status quo needs to end. We need a paradigm shift of thinking. Both sides have only paid lip service to a two state solution.
Hamas should definitely never be allowed to govern. Any regime that uses women and children as human shields doesn’t Hamas doesn’t deserve to live, never mind governing.
Einstein once said, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.”
I’m not sure how this ends, but it won’t end well for anyone involved. That said, Israeli’s and Palestinians will face a stark choice; either work towards a two state solution, or expect much of the same in another two or three years.
And make no mistake, as technology gets more sophisticated, so will the killing and violence. I hope sanity will prevail for all involved. Otherwise, Rinse, lather, repeat?