[Salon] Israel at War—In Gaza and Elsewhere - Guest Post by Rajan Menon, Unherd

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.