Israel Has Already Lost

The War and the Peace

Finally, some welcome news: Both sides in the war seem open to extending the pause in fighting (don’t call it a “ceasefire”) in order to facilitate the release of more hostages. Netanyahu is under significant domestic pressure to get the hostages back, but he and his cabinet may just welcome the time to consider what to do next. Although the Israeli Prime Minister has vowed to continue the war and destroy Hamas, there are signs that that is not an attainable goal. First of all, as the New York Times reports the rate of casualties among civilians in Gaza is horrific. Israel’s indiscriminate use of heavy munitions like 2000-lb. bombs in dense urban areas is causing death like some of the most terrible conflicts of the 20th century:

“It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may “have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.”

Israeli leadership has openly embraced comparisons to the Second World War:

In an address on Oct. 30, for example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the accidental bombing of a children’s hospital by Britain’s Royal Air Force when it was targeting the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen in 1945. And during visits to Israel by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Israeli officials privately invoked the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which together killed more than 100,000 people.

As awful as those analogies are on their own, what Israel doesn’t seem to understand is that a growing number of people don’t have the Allies in mind when the see the devastation in Gaza: They think of the other guys. This is maybe why Israeli hasbarists now have to take the absurd and intellectually insulting line that Hamas is somehow “worse than the Nazis.”

And what has all this death and destruction accomplished for the stated goal of destroying Hamas. Embarrassingly little: “Israel’s military estimates it has killed between 1,000 and 2,000 Hamas fighters out of a military force it believes is about 30,000 strong.” So, at the cost of between 12,000 and 14,000 civilians they have barely hurt Hamas. This is an inexact calculation obviously, but, if they are serious about destroying Hamas, and the rate of death remains comparable, then we would be looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths. At that point talk of “genocide” starts to sound less like rhetoric and more like reality. Some callous or cruel people may be able to say to themselves, “Well, they have it coming” or “This is war,” but that “message” is unlikely to resonate with the world public.

Now, you might object, “Well, it’s unfair that Hamas hides among the civilian population.” Sure, but it must be admitted that this is apparently an effective tactic. As they intended to do from the beginning, they have forced Israel into a compromised position. They knew that Israel, based on its military doctrine and domestic politics, would embark on a campaign whose brutality would quickly eclipse October 7th in the world’s eyes. And, yes, the blood of Palestinian children is also on Hamas: they are intentionally sacrificing them as part of a military and political strategy. "Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs,” as Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas political directorate told Lebanese TV last month.

Israel’s choices seem to be as follows: continue in a slaughter that will permanently damage or destroy its international reputation and perhaps trigger a wider international crisis or give up on its stated goal to defeat Hamas and thereby face humiliation, domestic turmoil, and the appearance of vulnerability. Perhaps there are other options, but the leadership of Israel is completely bereft of imagination. Their society is reeling and on the verge of breakdown. They are lead by settler thugs and their enablers. Even the centrists and moderates are all too IDF-brained to think up anything except, “Tank. Bomb. F-16.” Everything Israeli politicians say and do appears hamfisted and stupid. They are supposed to be the sophisticated, modern, “Western” power but they are completely losing the propaganda war and have walked directly into the trap that Hamas set for them. Israel’s once-formidable public relations operation now just looks like whining while bombing. Again, is any of this “fair?” This is war — It’s not fair. It’s about lies and murder: You tell the right lies and kill the right people. And right now, Israel, supposedly a devious master in the arts of war and politics, looks totally lost.

I’m also shocked and sometimes even angered by the lack of sympathy or outrage that October 7th garners. I, too, strongly suspect antisemitism is the reason that, for instance, people mock a little Israeli boy who had been released from captivity or tear down and deface the hostage posters. Or, especially, as some people have taken to doing now, when they deny that anything really happened or the IDF really did it. I, too, have that dark thought I know every Jew has from time to time: “Do people just not care when we are tortured and murdered? Do they like to do it?” But antisemitism is only part of the story. Again, the total incompetence, shortsightedness, and bloody-mindedness of the Israeli government—and not just in this conflict but this is a historical pattern—has squandered all its goodwill in favor of being brutal and aggressive. They believe the hard lesson of history is that this is the only way to deal with Jew-hate, but it’s an approach that’s increasingly endangering the very nation that’s supposed to exist to protect the Jews. Also, if the world is as totally antisemitic as Zionists believe it to be and if all the negative sentiment directed at Israel is merely the expression of an eternal antisemitism, then all is already lost. As I’ve written before, this is a doctrine of despair. If the world is really just itching for any pretext to kill Jews again, then half-a-million souls in the IDF don’t stand a chance. That sort of apocalyptic fantasy can’t be the basis of action. There must be a political solution — God knows what it is.