Hamas And The End Of Palestine
In a few hours of spectacular but ultimately futile brutality, Hamas has restored purpose to Israel, uniting a politically divided nation against a common threat.
To call the shock Hamas blitz against Israel this past weekend another crushing example of the Postwar order’s ongoing collapse is probably a severe understatement at this point.
It has been almost painful watching the various political tribes in the US work out how to reconcile what just happened as ever more horrific videos emerge on social media. Whenever Israel and Hamas go to war, the debate about the fight usually takes on an almost ritualistic air, everyone trotting out their standard rhetoric until Israel finally kills too many civilians and faces international pressure to call it a day.
But this is unlike any fight Israel has faced in half a century. While comparisons to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 are somewhat overstated, as there is almost zero chance of Israel facing a two-front ground invasion capable of crushing the IDF completely, the echoes are too strong for Israelis to ignore. These are already shaping Israel’s response to suffering over a thousand civilian fatalities with between one and two hundred soldiers and civilians held hostage in Gaza.
There’s a reason why 9/11 comparisons are being made: given Israel’s population (just under 10 million) the impact of the Hamas assault is an order of magnitude worse. Americans, upon learning that their own illusion of invulnerability was a myth, more or less went mad.
If people hate you enough, they will find a way to hurt you. Doing things that generate hate is a bad idea for this reason. Never underestimate the human need for vengeance. This, of course, cuts both ways - I am not trying to exonerate Israel by any means.
It is almost impossible to analyze the bitter Arab-Israeli blood feud without immediately taking sides. How the history of the conflict is told almost always starts from the position that one side or the other occupies some moral high ground.
The vast majority of commentary published since October 7, 2023 is inherently tainted by its bias in favor of Palestine, Israel, or some imagined position of impartial neutrality. And while the roots of this horrible day run deep, listing all the atrocities committed in the name of whatever god is a fool’s errand if the goal is to determine who is more guilty or committed the original sin.
This no longer matters, not in a material sense, which is what drives the conflict now. The sheer horror of what just happened, an atrocity like too many in the past yet this time broadcast live and in excruciating detail, has material consequences that transcend anyone’s beliefs.
What almost no one who talks about the Arab-Israeli conflict will openly admit is that Israel cannot be defeated by force of arms. The open celebration of Hamas’ success in some Al Jazeera op-eds as well as all the reminders about Israel’s absolutely horrific treatment of the Palestinians in the past are, unfortunately, utterly beside the point now. Raw rage will drive Israel for some time, resolving into a cold determination to make sure nothing like this can ever happen again - and it has the power to make good on its will.
To understand why this happened and where the fight is heading requires accepting two simultaneous truths:
Israel’s leaders set the stage for this atrocity by failing to make peace and honor its obligations to uphold longstanding agreements.
Hamas’ conduct demands its total obliteration to ensure it can never mount an operation like this ever again.
Whatever feelings one has about Palestine, the hard truth is that as the weaker party thanks to generations of dispossession and oppression the Palestinians will always have limited options. The landscape isn’t always yours to choose: adaptation is required to survive and prevail. Self-immolation as a political statement is nearly always a dead end, a selfish waste of resources.
The only thing stopping Israel from carpet bombing all of Gaza is the potential for international outcry and a loss of support from the USA. Putin is doing this to Ukraine without suffering direct intervention or even comprehensive sanctions; Israel’s cause will appear far more relatable to most people in countries Tel Aviv relies than Moscow’s.
It bears repeating that the only limit on Israel’s ferocity in its prior wars with Hamas was the international condemnation it faced. This time around, pressure will come too slowly and too late to matter thanks to the video evidence of outright butchery that Hamas produced. Time and again, even as civilian deaths in Gaza mount, it will be broadcast as a potent counter to all criticisms of Israel’s conduct.
On average, scenes of buildings reduced to craters carry less emotional weight than a pretty young woman being dragged into captivity by gloating bearded men. Is this fair? No. But it is reality. After all, if your community was attacked for any reason, it is likely that you’d demand the your government eradicate those responsible.
Over the past twenty years something rather remarkable has happened in the USA and Europe. Tel Aviv’s repression of Palestine and blatant disregard for key aspects of the Middle East peace process had started to turn public opinion decisively against Israel. The rising dysfunction in Israel’s democracy and the influence of Zionist extremists who actively disregard the rights of non-Jews haven’t helped.
Israel was until a few days ago on the verge of political collapse. One election after another over the past few years has led to a democratic stalemate between Netanyahu’s coalition, which aims to enshrine Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority nation-state for all time, regardless of the cost to its reputation abroad, and a polyglot opposition including an Arab-Israeli party.
No one in Israel seemed to be sure how the deadlock would end; Netanyahu is widely seen to be interested in staying Prime Minister mainly to avoid prosecution. While he will almost certainly face a harsh judgement by the public in the future for the astonishing failure to pick up on Hamas’ intentions, so long as Israel is at war his position is secure.
Hamas has managed to unite Israel - quite an accomplishment. But even worse for the Palestinian people trapped in Gaza now, the raw brutality of the attack has largely restored Israel’s status as a sympathetic victim in the wealthy parts of the world.
The perception of Israel as a victim country beset by hostile powers bent on a genocide to rival the Shoah - the term for the Jewish experience of the Holocaust - has been what sustained high levels of international support for Israel since it was founded. Battering Gaza with air strikes in response to mass rocket launches that are mostly knocked down by Iron Dome without doing harm to residents of Israel made the Palestinians into almost equal victims.
Particularly in the United States, where victims must be sufficiently sympathetic to avoid getting blamed for their plight by this country’s elite-manufactured society, the perception of Israeli and Palestinian civilians as something close to equal victims was a truly radical shift. As a result, Israel’s responses to Hamas provocations were increasingly limited as time went by.
Hamas apparently failed to understand just how much this arrangement benefited the group. Hezbollah and Israel perform the same little dance further north to the profit of both - and Lebanon’s misery. A big part of why Israel’s vaunted intelligence services failed so miserably was that Hamas apparently played them perfectly - it acted exactly like a rational actor ought to in its position, living up to Israel’s expectations based on how the game has evolved over the past few years.
It now seems clear that Hamas saw itself as the winner of the last round of fighting back in 2021. Then it demonstrated that Israel could not completely suppress Hamas rocket barrages even if most shots were taken down by Iron Dome. Apparently, the ceasefire convinced Hamas that it was stronger than is actually the case.
All-out attacks are risky, especially when there’s no viable plan to exploit any success made on the ground. Hamas didn’t try to reach the West Bank or Jerusalem or even hold the military bases it seized. It instead retreated into its tunnels and now threatens to execute hostages in retaliation for Israel flattening whole neighborhoods ahead of a major ground assault.
Hamas’ only hope is that Hezbollah joins the fight while the West Bank enters full-on Intifada and Arab Israelis revolt. Unless I’m badly mistaken, that’s as dumb of a play as Putin’s attempt to wipe out Ukraine by bum rushing Kyiv. It represents a complete misconception of what Israel is capable of if not restrained by public outcry abroad.
Now, nothing will stop Israel from exacting an awful price, regardless of the cost to civilians. Even if other parties intervene and the war widens, that won’t save Gaza or the West Bank. Israel has enough troops to lock down its borders; Hezbollah can fire all the rockets it likes, but it isn’t marching in force to Israeli population centers.
As for Iran, while a number of conservative pundits in the US are already trying to find an excuse to bomb Tehran, the fact that Mossad didn’t pick up on the operation before it happened implies that planning was kept in a tight circle in Hamas. Were Hezbollah and Iran directly involved the time to hit Israel was when it was overwhelmed and shocked over the weekend.
Their involvement is not out of the question by any means, as the potential destruction of Hamas could alter their calculations. When Israel is finished in Gaza, the threat of a two-front war will be gone even if it has to commit a lot of reservists to occupation duties for some time to come.
Hamas could well have triggered a broader confrontation, but at this point it appears that Hezbollah wants to trade some fire on a small scale as a statement of moral support. All-out war would devastate the organization at a moment Lebanon is also at a high risk of falling into civil war again. However, it is also quite possible that Hezbollah will see Israel’s fight against Hamas as a unique opportunity to do serious damage even if that likely draws US air strikes from the Ford carrier group presently about 400km off the coast of Israel.
Funny that Biden is faster to act with proper resolve when the threat is Hamas or Hezbollah. Ukraine, unfortunately, is being attacked by an opponent with the capacity to inflict harm on the United States. There’s an old saying that the USA chose well when it selected the Bald Eagle as its symbol: a creature that studiously avoids taking on any threat that could do it harm while chasing down bunnies and other harmless creatures without remorse.
But with Americans among the dead and at least a small number taken hostage, Biden has a responsibility to be ready to go in. This was true in Ukraine, and it is true in Israel.
While I don’t plan to focus as closely on the fighting in the Middle East as Ukraine, it is impossible to set it aside when, as I know I keep repeating, the Postwar Order is in the process of dying and being replaced by something new. It can’t yet be said whether it will be better or worse, but it will be different.
The rest of this post will offer a high-level overview of the fighting without getting into graphic detail. There’s plenty of reporting on the human cost of this miserable war already and I’ve seen so much gruesome footage in the space of a few days that repeating what anyone can easily find for themselves if they really want to isn’t particularly useful.
I do think it worthwhile to lay out how Hamas pulled off the assault as well as Israel’s likely response on the ground in Gaza. I’ll conclude with a brief overview of the grim history of the Arab-Israeli conflict drawn from another of my interest areas while in academia. It’s bias, since one is inevitable, is that the whole nightmare is a product of power relations that are so far out of the reach of the average Israeli or Palestinian that only high-level leaders can be blamed.
This is a multi-generation tragedy that is unlikely to resolve for at least another generation thanks to Hamas. Yes, Israel absolutely shares blame for the overall situation, but Hamas made deliberate choices in the way it conducted this attack that forever set it apart from any true supporter of a free and independent Palestine.
Hamas cares nothing for Palestine: it is nothing more than a terror gang willing to sacrifice its members for nothing. This assault was not an understandable if regrettable act of vengeance or resistance - it achieved no material objectives and undermined Hamas’ position. It was neither accurately targeted against the perpetrators of crimes against the Palestinian people nor proportional in the sense that the damage done to Israel was remotely sufficient to deter it from harming Palestinians in the future.
This was nothing more than base murder of the nearest victims Hamas fighters could get to shorn of any real political aims. It was violence for the sake of it, an attempt to prove that Hamas has power when in fact it has thrown whatever it had away forever.
The assault represented an utter absence of effective strategy. This rendered moot all the military potential presented by the operational successes achieved early on.
Operational Aspects
This much I’ll grant Hamas: once again, a group has proven that low tech plus determination always finds a way to surprise high tech and distracted given enough time. But surprises are inevitable in life and in war. The key is to always have a capable reserve ready to spring into action - that’s the core of what systems scientists call adaptive capacity. You will always be surprised at some point or on some level, so whoever comes better prepared to shift to Plan B or C is the party that tends to survive.
The overall level of coordination was impressive. Paragliders bringing special forces across the border wall under the cover of a rocket launch so massive Iron Dome couldn’t stop it was a clever move, if long foreseen. Drone strikes hit observation posts and even disabled a Merkava tank while the assault forces breached the barriers around Gaza, showing how the lessons of the Ukraine War are spreading fast.
Fighters streamed through on motorcycles and in pickup trucks. Many hit nearby Israeli bases, wiping out the garrisons posted there and taking prisoners back to Gaza. The headquarters of the division responsible for guarding Gaza was overrun, which probably led to the paralysis at the local level that delayed the IDF response.
Other groups of fighters pressed deeper into Israel. But they did not target military sites; instead, they went after civilians. Kibbutz collective farms are scattered across the desert, ordinary families living and working in small communities. Several were invaded and their occupants simply slaughtered, young and old alike.
A techno dance party dedicated to love and togetherness was targeted by multiple teams of Hamas fighters who cut off the roads and gunned down anyone trying to escape by car. Thousands of people escaped across open fields under fire while heroic security guards did their best to hold off the invaders. Many people tried to hide - Hamas fighters threw grenades at them and shot anyone who ran away.
I’m not dwelling on the brutality for propaganda purposes - the choice to commit combat power to this mission says everything you need to know about Hamas’ strategy. It did not target military or government sites, but aimed to inflict maximum casualties to provoke an Israeli response Hamas hopes will trigger an even wider war.
The initial attack itself was bold and well-planned. However, it’s important to keep in mind that none of this would have worked had Israel not been encouraged to believe that Hamas was content with the status quo. Hamas can only pull off this trick once: it’s now used up a powerful advantage to accomplish little more than mass murder. 1,500 Hamas fighters allegedly perished in the assault, with a few still trying to hide inside Israel to launch sporadic attacks.
The utter self-destructive stupidity of Hamas’ rampage ought to be self-evident when you consider that Israel has called up 300,000 reservists. That’s the level of force required to sweep through Gaza like a flaming scythe and lock down the survivors for months, using water and food as tools of control until people submit to the kind of intensive occupation regime so far only seen in dystopian cinema.
And unlike prior Hamas-Israel wars, no amount of international outcry will stop Israel until it is satisfied that Hamas is destroyed. Hamas sent a powerful message: the same one Putin’s forces delivered to the world in Bucha, Irpin, and Mariupol. Here’s a map of confirmed events showing the scope of the assault and depth of Hamas’ ground penetration.
Here’s a more zoomed-in view, focusing on the major confirmed breach point and the Merkava tank Hamas destroyed with a drone-dropped grenade early on. Just northeast of Reim is where the music festival came under attack. Several of the smaller settlements visible are Kibbutz agricultural collectives where whole families were wiped out. Because clearly Israeli policy towards Gaza and Palestine is their fault.
I recently discovered that a huge amount of remote sensing data from earth observation satellites is available through the Sentinel EO Browser, something that makes the remote sensing nerd in me happy - I did a masters thesis on wetland change using Landsat 7 in grad school. Turns out, Sentinel-2 took a shot of Gaza and southern Israel while the Hamas assault was underway. The false color view nicely shows the extent of the fires caused by the fighting in the same area as the image above.
The bright spots are active fires. Just to the northeast of Reim, near the bottom, cars are burning near the doomed music festival.
In nearly every conflict there are savage atrocities committed by both sides. You give enough people guns and explosives and some will eventually use them for wretched purposes. And governments only care about the damage they do to people in other places to the degree their own citizens make them pay a price.
But it’s when crimes become systematic that a powerful message is sent requiring a change in how a threat is approached. It bears repeating that Hamas could have focused its combat power on the Israeli Defense Forces alone and likely achieved far more in the process.
Imagine if, instead of wasting time slaughtering civilians, columns of fighters waving Hamas flags had driven all the way to the West Bank and Jerusalem while the IDF was paralyzed. Consider the power of that symbology as well as the practical impact of seeding the West Bank with well trained fighters! If you want a full-on Intifada you have to actually help other groups launch one, not just demand they sacrifice themselves to keep you from being overwhelmed.
But what did Hamas’ “well-drilled” fighters do? Roam around killing civilians and looting corpses. In doing so, Hamas sent a powerful signal about itself. Today it’s easy to forget that back in the 1990s Israel was routinely assaulted by waves of suicide bombers targeting bus stops and restaurants. Back then, criticism of Israel’s brutal responses against families of accused terrorists was muted even when outright war crimes were committed in every round of violence. Why? The pure horror of thinking about being killed while dining at a local restaurant.
What’s old is set to be new again in this regard because the logic of the Israeli state demands that anyone who threatens it suffer an order of magnitude more pain than it can possibly hope to inflict. To stop Israel from focusing all its power on Hamas requires the international community coming to the rescue when conditions in civilian areas become so severe that people feel like Israel has gone too far. Even if Hamas gets its wish and Hezbollah intervenes that won’t save Hamas or Gaza: Israel has enough bodies to defend on one front while pouring firepower and steel into the other.
Joe Biden is in no political position to attempt to restrain Israel at all, even if he had a mind to. He’s already on thin ice politically as it is - yet another total failure on the part of the US intelligence community represents one more reason why his entire national security team should have been fired long ago. In his position, an all-out war with Iran would likely be less politically fatal than trying to restrain Israel now.
Israel is undoubtedly preparing a major ground invasion of Gaza. While Hamas likely hopes that the IDF will simply charge into the urban warrens of the Gaza Strip, I see a more cautious and ruthless approach to be much more probable.
Most of the Gaza strip is complex terrain packed with civilians. Fighting among them will be difficult even if you don’t care about civilian casualties. So I expect that Israel will move to segment Gaza by pushing through to the coast across less built up areas between major neighborhoods, perhaps something like this:
The first step to defeating a group like Hamas is to restrict its movement. The US learned in Baghdad fifteen years ago that concrete is an excellent solution to an insurgent group’s tendency to move between friendly neighborhoods when one gets too hot. As it has dug extensive tunnel networks across Gaza, Hamas fighters can emerge anywhere. This makes it necessary to take a slow, methodical approach to clearing areas then filling them with enough fighting positions to strangle any attempts at infiltration.
An advantage of pushing across open areas is that you can annihilate any structure that looks occupied with a lower risk of mass civilian casualties. This approach would push people into the denser urban areas to seek shelter, the predictability of the advance giving civilians time to escape. Hamas will no doubt fire a lot of anti-tank missiles from the built-up areas, but their hunter-killer teams will face constant attack by helicopter gunships and artillery.
It’s about six kilometers from the barrier fence to the Gaza coast and five between Gaza city and the Neseirat and Bureij neighborhoods to the south. Because this isn’t Ukraine where dense concentrations of tanks and people are bound to come under heavy attack, Israel can afford to literally pack the area with troops to leave militants no room for maneuver. A literal wall of fire can precede Israeli ground forces while they clear areas and set up barriers to protect their flanks from Hamas counterattacks.
A 5km wide corridor would allow personnel moving in the middle to be reasonably sheltered from direct fire, though mortars and rockets would still pose a threat. Israel will have absolute air superiority, however, meaning that shooter survival time will be brief. Dozens of tanks in fighting positions will allow Israeli forces to create a free-fire zone stretching into the urban zones, making attacks with anti-tank missiles less effective with time.
By segmenting the more built up areas Israel can play divide and conquer, cutting off Hamas groupings and trying to force side negotiations with civilian groups desperate for aid. Any wise Hamas member or civilian near them will soon realize the value of hostages as bargaining chips for keeping Israel from launching major incursions into their areas.
This is going to be ugly, cruel fighting for all involved. Israel will likely suffer hundreds of casualties, Palestinian civilians thousands. Civilians will be placed under siege until lack of food and water and sleep - so Israel will calculate - punish them sufficiently for harboring Hamas members. Israel will inflict collective punishment on the people of Gaza to send a message: we can always be more savage than you, because we’ll always have more firepower.
The reality is that Israel’s leaders will now feel little choice except to eliminate the possibility of suffering another shock like this ever again by destroying the possibility of Palestinian statehood. First in Gaza and then in the West Bank Israel will surround Palestinian communities with a wall of guns and steel, then concrete. It will probably develop an outright apartheid system to maintain control of expanded Israel’s vast population of discontented Arabs.
As is generally the case with tragic historical events, it didn’t have to be this way. This is the product of generations of agony.
An Over-Brief Overview Of The History Behind The Mayhem
I’m far from an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict, but I have spent a good deal of time studying the history and dynamics over the years.
The key trouble with anything related to the Arab-Israeli Wars is the hyper-intense politicization around them. What people know and think about it is deeply impacted by what country they grew up in.
In the USA, for example, Israel’s existence is presented as a kind of justice for the Holocaust. That framing tends to render the suffering of Palestinians displaced, often by force, during the violence during Israel’s founding akin to that of German and Japanese civilians in cities targeted by Allied mass bombing raids: regrettable, but necessary (so goes the conventional thinking).
Unfortunately this one of those conflicts where there is no clean, easy resolution. You have two social identities trying to occupy the same space when neither trusts the other and a huge power imbalance makes it way too attractive for leaders on either side to play dangerous games. It’s a recipe for disaster.
And there’s no point in trying to pretend that one side or the other ever fights clean in this conflict. Israel kills civilians and justifies it using the most tortured logic, while everyone pretends that Palestinian leaders aren’t mostly corrupt hacks leeching off international aid while their people are left destitute.
Still - what Hamas has done can’t be justified under the logic of war or anti-colonial resistance. This was violence without purpose other than to inflict pain for the sake of it. No lesson was taught to the occupier other than to presume the worst of Palestinians at all times, forever.
Prison riots rarely result in improvements for the inmates. All the guards do is devise more effective means of repression. Once burned, the tendency is to become even more cruel.
To translate Hamas’ shocking success into anything lasting required more than gunning down Israelis. All this has accomplished is to give Netanyahu an excuse to cling to power while the fighting lasts.
Will he face a reckoning as Golda Meir did after failing to spot the Egyptian-Syrian joint attack coming in 1973? Probably.
But until then Israeli’s rage is about to be channeled into something close to a holy war. The Gaza strip will probably cease to exist as we’ve known it, and much of the West Bank not long after.
There are events that tend to reset a country’s trajectory. The adaptive cycle is once again a useful tool for understanding what happens. A status quo persists so long that it becomes inflexible, blind to threats that in retrospect seem obvious.
Then comes a shock and the old order crumbles. People fall back on what and who they know, their shifting expectations about the future causing changes in behavior that ripple from there, creating new instabilities and shocks.
Hamas threw all its power into one single punch in anticipation of wasting the rest fighting the IDF. Its leaders believe that Israel will be forced to negotiate - apparently they’ve forgotten the fate of Arafat, dying - possibly poisoned - while under house arrest, living at the mercy of Israeli leaders.
Instead of that, Hamas has chosen to go out like a suicide bomber. Tens of thousands of Gazans will pay the price just as their elders did during the Nakba that came with Israel’s victories in the first Arab-Israeli war, back in 1948.
It is rarely mentioned today when people talk about the conflict, but the truth is that it doesn’t go back hundreds of years like some claim. The real roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict are to be found, as is so often the case around the globe, in European colonialism.
After the First World War, the Ottoman Empire collapsed. Britain and France stepped in to take over management of the Ottoman colonies in the Middle East. They carved it up into zones, with the French getting modern-day Syria and Lebanon and the British Jordan and what was then called the Mandate of Palestine.
Jews, Muslims, and Christians had lived together in as much harmony as anyone has ever achieved in the region for centuries. While pagans and heretics are despised by Islam, other “peoples of the book” were protected so long as they paid a special tax that stood in place of the regular charitable donations expected of Muslims.
When Britain took over Palestine, it immediately set to running the place along the lines of its other colonial possessions. That is to say, it used minority groups as wedges that kept the locals politically divided.
Jewish people began settling in large numbers around this time because in Europe centuries of Christian bigotry and anti-Semitism had forced most Jewish communities to be come close-knit affairs ever fearful of pogroms or other tools of dispossession. The idea of nationalism - that people belong to a country with its own distinct character and history - first became widely popular in Europe during the 19th century as powerful people sought for a way to keep a newly literate and urbanized public under control.
A group of Jewish thinkers naturally came to conclude that their unique position in European society required that they return to their ancestral homeland to form their own nation. Many wealthy Jewish groups began buying property and settling, the rate accelerating after Britain took over. This is the movement that is today called Zionism, and at first it was not anti-Arab.
The influx of migrants naturally had an impact on relations between Jewish and Muslim communities already coexisting in the area. For a long time the influx of new workers was a net gain to landowners of all backgrounds. But the Zionist movement was deeply European, and slowly the character of the Jewish community in the area changed. Already tending to be insular and suspicious as a result of the long contact with Christian Europe, a new divide between Arab and Jew was produced that only grew more potent with time. The relationship between the average employer and employee began to shift as well, with Arab and Jewish employers starting to compete over the same labor pool.
Some wonder why Israel doesn’t just wall off Palestine today - the answer is that cheap Palestinian labor is valued by many Israeli businesses. Economics is part of the Arab-Israeli conflict, even if social differences are played up by all parties.
In any case, the Second World War and Shoah shocked the world; Hitler’s particular obsession Jewish people made the plight of the survivors of his monstrous rule a matter of global sympathy. As the United Nations formed and the Postwar Order took shape, its creators attempting to build out a set of international rules meant to secure a just peace for all, an international Zionist movement pressed for the establishment of a formal sovereign nation-state that would become a protected homeland for all Jewish people.
A lot of wealthy and influential people liked the sound of Zionism, especially after many Jewish refugees from Hitler had been kicked around the world with no one willing to take them in. So they went with it. With the wretched treatment of Jewish people in Europe across history bolstering their case - plus the British being stung by constant terrorist attacks launched by Jewish extremist groups - made the creation of Israel in 1948 out of a chunk of the Mandate of Palestine seem entirely reasonable.
Whether true or not, the fact of the matter remains: a political entity was established that its neighbors violently opposed. Israel’s first years were beyond fraught, a parade of Arab armies throwing bodies at the young country - and somewhat miraculously losing.
During the fighting many Palestinians fled of their own accord; hundreds of thousands were forced to leave their homes in acts of outright ethnic cleansing. This was the Nakba, and the reason millions live and die in refugee camps that are so old the tents were long ago replaced by often poorly constructed permanent structures.
The Israel that emerged was one whose government was fundamentally committed to ongoing active defense of the perimeter. In 1956 Israel cooperated with Britain and France in an effort to take control of the Suez canal from Egypt that was halted by a unique joint effort by the USA and USSR. In 1967 the Six Day War saw Israel launch a pre-emptive strike against several Arab countries it claimed were planning an all-out attack. It also blew up an American intelligence gathering ship, the Liberty, in an incident Israel still insists was a tragic accident but most members of the crew testified was clearly deliberate.
The fighting in 1967 led to Israel taking control of far more territory than it was originally intended to have. It found itself with more defensible frontiers in a conventional military sense, but a whole lot of angry dispossessed Palestinians inside, too. And fighting didn’t really stop, particularly along the Suez canal, which for some time was the frontier between Israel and Egypt.
In October of 1973 Egypt and Syria, with tacit backing from the USSR, launched an all-out surprise attack on Yom Kippur. The IDF came dangerously close to collapse, leading to Israel arming jets with nuclear bombs. Both the USA and USSR began shipping supplies and even making moves like they might soon intervene, transforming the crisis into a Third World War.
Thanks to heroic efforts by IDF members the invaders were defeated and thrown back. In the aftermath Israel saw a major political shift and embraced negotiations with several neighbors mediated by the USA. This was the start of the peace process that was about to culminate in the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the biggest Arab power still officially hostile to Tel Aviv - until Hamas launched its grand attack.
Since 1973, though it fought brief wars beyond its borders, Israel has never truly faced the threat of annihilation. None of the regimes in its vicinity are capable of beating it in a war thanks to decades of strong support from the US. Which has backed Israel for two reasons: it likes having a friendly military island of sorts in that part of the world, and there are longstanding close ties between Jewish communities in Israel and the USA, where many Jews took refuge from Europe’s bigotry - those that could.
But the violent repression of the Palestinians in the territories occupied after 1967 has slowly eroded the connection between Israel and much of the diaspora, especially in Europe and North America. It is much easier to support the idea of Israel from afar when you can believe it to be a noble project beset by enemies than when you’re seeing constant evidence of cruelty directed by the occupation forces at impoverished families just trying to get by.
International support for the Palestinian cause has, though always weak and struggling against powerful forces, slowly brought a semblance of accountability to Israel. A lot of people in Israel’s core allies have finally started accepting that Palestinians aren’t the raging terrorists that many of Israel’s propagandists insist.
The two-state solution, which recognizes that Israel’s expansion in 1967 was not right and creates more problems than genuine security, depends on the international community restraining Israeli power while Palestine develops its economic and political systems. If forced to, Israel has always been willing to establish a tight occupation marked by use of extreme force. The only limit to this has been outcry from abroad. Ignoring this fact was a dramatic strategic error on Hamas’ part that has made all Palestinians unwilling participants in its suicidal war.
The only way to bring peace to the Middle East or anywhere else is to establish enough trust between warring parties that they will consider raising their threshold for retaliatory violence when accidents or incidents invariably occur. Ideally an impartial third party comes in and takes over all security functions - that, unfortunately, is still a service the international community cannot reliably provide.
In the absence of some kind of global defense force, the next-best option is to use the next relative settling point reached as an opportunity to reset the system. When Israel has conquered Gaza and probably doubled down on its occupation of the West Bank, world leaders will have to push for an internationalization of the relief and reconstruction effort.
Gaza’s institutions will have to be rebuilt from the ground up because Hamas, like most groups of its kind, survives by offering basic governance services like security and justice more effectively than any competitors. Economics comes second to that, which is why these groups are so difficult to isolate - they’re complex and adaptable because they have to be.
In the long run, the cheapest and most humane alternative is to build a system that decentralizes power to the degree possible. Israel’s government has propped up Hamas until now because it’s useful to have a semi-authoritative force to bargain with. To counteract the worse imitators it will spawn in the future requires that Palestinians have a legitimate alternative that offers them hope.
The only way the cycle of violence will ever end is if enough resources are applied to make the people of Gaza and the rest of Palestine wealthy enough that their kids no longer care as much about the Nakba. Almost everyone alive has ancestors who were dispossessed, abused, or enslaved to some degree - not all of us will ever be able to assert indigenous rights over a scrap of territory, least of all through the deployment of indiscriminate violence.
I might be very wrong, and rather hope that I am. But if my studies have taught me anything, it is that Israel will see no going back now. Never again means something to a people whose self-narrative is steeped in the memory of people trying to wipe them out.
Unless Palestinians somehow amass power enough to counter Israel’s, wanton slaughter will only bring ten times the pain upon people who are only trying to live their lives. That, as well as accepting the fundamental lunacy of repressing people based on their identity in the first place, Israel, is the best path to a better future that my flavor of systems theory can describe.