Growing numbers of Israeli observers have been saying publicly that Israel cannot win the Gaza war. Their judgment has nothing to do with what a new Human Rights Watch report defines as the war crimes and crimes against humanity that Hamas and its allies committed during their October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Rather, it is a consequence of Israel’s response to October 7: a military strategy prioritizing mass bombardment, the annihilationist rhetoric of its military and political leaders, and media reporting that obscures the massive destruction, loss of civilian life, and humanitarian catastrophe that the rest of the world is witnessing (the daily Haaretz and +972 webzine are important exceptions).
University of Chicago professor of international affairs Robert Pape argues that Israel’s failure is fundamentally due to its “gross misunderstanding of the sources of Hamas’s power…. Israel has failed to realize that the carnage and devastation it has unleashed in Gaza has only made its enemy stronger.” “Hamas is Winning,” Pape’s article in the establishment US foreign policy organ, Foreign Affairs, proclaims.
Perhaps the most basic element of Israel’s failure to understand the Gaza Strip is that some 75% of its inhabitants on October 7 were refugees or descendants of refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. Official and popular Israeli unwillingness to acknowledge the Nakba and the conditions created by Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip since 1967 and siege of Gaza since 2007 (abetted by Egypt) make it difficult to comprehend Palestinian political and military actions.
Figures from the core of Israel’s military and security establishment have been publicly asserting that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s announced war objectives of destroying Hamas and returning the hostages through military pressure were always unattainable. In a TV interview, IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said, “the idea of destroying Hamas is throwing sand in the face of the Israeli public.” National Security Council head Tzachi Hanegbi, a lifelong Likudnik and former minister with an impeccable rightwing pedigree, told the Herzliya Security Conference in June, “Hamas as an idea can’t be eliminated.”
Peter Lerner, who recently retired as IDF spokesperson for the international media, argues that failure to offer a credible post-war plan undermined support for Israel in the international community, despite the broad sympathy it enjoyed in the immediate aftermath of October 7. “Netanyahu promised an absolute victory over Hamas,” he said. “But on the international stage, he and his government led us to defeat.” Lerner sharply criticizes the incendiary statements of government ministers who he called, “a bunch of pyromaniacs who talk nonsense.”
“[A]s early as October 10, Lerner began to receive questions. “What are your goals, what are you trying to achieve, what is your plan for the future? And very quickly, I realized, I didn’t have answers to these questions… because [the government] simply weren’t going to decide.”
Historian Adam Raz wrote in Haaretz that the Israeli public has been consumed by an “annihilation discourse” that blocked the adoption of an effective post-October 7 strategy.
Airstrikes over Gaza in the initial days of the war didn’t prompt criticism from most of the left. On the contrary, it’s only now that former senior figures such as ex-Mossad director Tamir Pardo have been prepared to state publicly that the bombardments were an act of revenge, plain and simple, which actually only further complicated our situation and, to a great extent, foiled our capacity to achieve what we wanted to do.
Tamir Pardo wrote in Haaretz:
Immediately following the October 7 massacre, Israel began to attack Gaza from the air in a massive air campaign, the results of which drew considerable attention around the world – much less so in Israel. For 20 days – before ground forces went into the Gaza Strip – the air force carried out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s instructions, which were … publicly declared: Gaza will become “rubble.” The air force immediately began a process of turning Gaza into Dresden 2. No less important than Netanyahu’s declaration is the legitimization given by the various political strands of the Israeli public to a strategy of revenge, intended to push back the option of peace and a partition of the land. Thus, the strategy of denial allows the Israeli public not to feel guilt and responsibility for what their country did in their name.
According to Yagil Levy, a leading Israeli sociologist of civil-military relations, prioritizing revenge likely diminished the chances of rescuing the maximum number of hostages alive. Levy told Dahlia Scheindlin, a pollster and Haaretz columnist, “the war of no choice in Gaza ended on October 8 … when Israel pushed the Hamas Nukhba (elite) forces back … or let’s say a few days later. After that, Israel could have cut a fast deal to release the hostages or issued an ultimatum to Hamas to disarm.”
The Israeli public increasingly concurs with the “experts.” In her Haaretz article, “Israel Has Not Won the Gaza War. Its Other Wars Weren’t So Successful Either,” Dahlia Scheindlin writes, “the majority of Israelis do not believe Israel can achieve “total victory” in Gaza.”
Yuval Noah Harari, a prominent Israeli public intellectual, told Scheindlin, Israel “is not so successful at war, and that doesn’t stop us from trying another and yet another. Each one led us to an abyss. The time has come to try peace again.”
The current Gaza war and the rhetoric Israel has deployed to justify the slaughter of Palestinian civilians have diminished the likelihood of that possibility. The acceptable range of public debate has narrowed considerably. On July 18, with support from Benny Gantz who is the most likely alternative to Netanyahu in the event of early elections, the Knesset passed a resolution opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state by a vote of 68 to 9. Only the primarily Arab parties voted “no.” Labor Party Knesset members were not present for the vote.
Orly Noy writes in +972 that, “explicitly fascist language…has become part of most Israelis’ everyday parlance: calls for genocidal violence flood social media networks in Hebrew, and the Israeli authorities don’t object or even lift a finger to try to stop it.”
The police have arrested hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel for expressing solidarity with the people of Gaza, opposing the war, or participating in nonviolent protests.
Academic freedom barely exists. Kaye Academic College of Education in Be’er Sheva fired Dr. Warda Sada after 28 years as a lecturer because she distributed flyers criticizing the war on Gaza. Yitzhak Shamir High School in Petah Tikvah fired veteran teacher Meir Baruchin for his comments about the war. He was jailed on suspicion of “revealing intent to betray the country.” The Tel-Aviv Labor court ultimately ordered his reinstatement. Tel-Aviv University Professor Anat Matar faced a vicious campaign of harassment for eulogizing a Palestinian prisoner. I’ve written previously here about the Hebrew University administration’s vilification of Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who was questioned by the police about her research and spent a night in jail. The National Union of Israeli Students proposed a law to mandate the dismissal of any university lecturer who questions Israel’s character as a “Jewish and democratic state.” Israeli-American professors Shira Klein and Lior Sternfeld characterized this as a “big step toward full-fledged fascism” in an article in Forward.
To increase the chances of liberal Zionist representation in the next Knesset, the Labor and Meretz parties have merged to form “The Democrats.” Their chairman, Yair Golan, said he is ready to sit down and talk with the Likud and with Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Islamist United Arab List which participated in the previous Israeli government, but not with other Arab parties. The official leader of the Knesset opposition, “There Is a Future” leader Yair Lapid, would only consider including Abbas in a coalition he would lead if it already had 61 members of Jewish parties (he is unwilling to consider the other Arab parties). National Unity leader Benny Gantz previously refused to include Arab parties in a government he would lead.
According to an average of recent polls, parties opposed to the current government would win 64 of the 120 Knesset seats if an election were held now. Jewish liberal, center-left and center-right parties would get 45 seats (9 for The Democrats; 13 for There is a Future; 23 for National Unity). The other opposition parties are anti-Netanyahu, anti-Palestinian right-wingers. No viable coalition opposed to the current government can be constructed without the projected 5 seats of Arab Movement for Renewal and the 5 seats of the Arab-Jewish Democratic Front for Peace and Equality. Even including them falls short of a center-right/center-left/left majority.
Of course, the distribution of Knesset seats and the shape of a future Israeli government can only be speculative in advance of an actual election.
More importantly, the comments of Golan and Lapid indicate that even nominally liberal Israeli Jewish political leaders can’t imagine Palestinian citizens of Israel as wholly legitimate political subjects. This is the sine qua non as a first step in the democratization of Israeli society and a vision of a regime of equal rights for all who live between the river and the sea.
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