Is Israel Losing the Gaza War?
Aeschylus, the ancient Greek originator of tragic drama, coined the maxim, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” Historians therefore typically refrain from assessing the outcomes and consequences of wars and similar momentous events until after some time has passed, more evidence is available, and long-term contexts can be considered.
Throwing caution to the winds, Tony Karon and Daniel Levy boldly proclaimed two months ago, “Israel Is Losing This War” (The Nation, Dec. 3, 2023). Karon is the editorial lead of Al Jazeera’s AJ+ and a former senior editor at Time magazine and activist in the South African anti-apartheid movement; Levy is a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians under prime ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. They argue that Israel is seeking an impossible absolute military victory and Hamas is seeking a long-term political victory.
In a wide-ranging interview on Democracy Now! two months later, Levy confirmed and expanded on this judgement. He quoted former Israeli Chief-of Staff and current member of the war cabinet Gadi Eisenkot’s assessment that “complete victory over Hamas is unrealistic” and that “it’s not possible to return the hostages, alive, in the near term, without a deal.” Levy termed US proposals for a post-war arrangement – essentially a recommitment to establish Palestinian Bantustans that would be called a “state” – “magical thinking.”
Israel has so far failed to accomplish its declared war aims: the elimination of Hamas and the safe return of the hostages. Four senior Israeli military leaders told the New York Times that these aims are mutually incompatible. Many seasoned Middle East observers doubted from the outset that even a resounding military defeat and the death of its leadership could “eliminate Hamas.” In addition to its armed wing, Hamas is a religious ideology and a social movement. Military force cannot eliminate ideas.
After four months of fighting, Hamas forces remain in the field and their leadership remains alive. In asymmetric warfare, a guerrilla force wins if it is not defeated while a regular army loses if it does not win decisively. This is the lesson of the US wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
The claims of the Netanyahu government that the hostages will be released by the aggressive application of military force have been belied. A series of negotiated hostage/prisoner exchange agreements in November returned 105 hostages alive to Israel (81 Jews, 23 Thais, 1 Filipino); 4 were released by Hamas unilaterally; 1 hostage was rescued by the IDF. Since then, no hostages have been released.
On December 16 Israeli soldiers killed 3 hostages who were attempting to escape while shirtless and waving white flags. Israeli authorities have informed the families of at least 30 people held in the Gaza Strip since October 7 that their relatives are dead. As many as 20 more of the remaining 136 hostages may also have died.
Israel has already lost the war at the global political and cultural level. Initially, there was broad international governmental and public support and sympathy for Israel after the horrendous October 7 attack in which Hamas and its allies committed many atrocities. Israel forfeited much of that support (the major exceptions are the governments of the USA, UK, and Germany) because, instead of ordering a measured and focused response to the Hamas attack, Israel’s leaders loudly proclaimed their intention to execute a vengeful assault on the entire population of the Gaza Strip and make the area unlivable.
Israel implemented those declarations so thoroughly that South Africa, which has great credibility in the Global South despite its flaws, filed a complaint charging Israel with genocide to the International Court of Justice. The Court found that, “At least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza “appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the [Genocide] Convention.” South Africa then announced that, “There is no credible basis for Israel to continue to claim that its military actions fully comply with international law” and that “there is plausible evidence that Israel is committing the crime of genocide.” Israeli claims that the court’s majorities of 15-2 and 16-1 on the six interim measures it required Israel to adopt to prevent a genocide were motivated by antisemitism are unreasonable. Israeli judge Aharon Barak approved two of the interim measures.
Israel has also lost the battle to determine the historical significance of the events. A week after the Hamas attack President Biden told 60 Minutes that Israel’s retaliatory war was justified and necessary because Hamas “engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust.” At least some of what Biden thought was Hamas’s barbarism didn’t occur (see below). Even if it did, the Holocaust is a high bar for barbarism.
I have always considered such comparisons a devaluation of the significance of the Holocaust. How does the mass murder of 6 million Jews along with perhaps 6 million more Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, disabled people, LGBTQ people, and leftist political opponents of Nazism in the context of a global struggle between democracy and fascism compare with even the most horrible deaths of 1,200 people? Israel portrays its conflict with Iran as having global significance. But a Middle East regional conflict between a theocratic and undemocratic Iran and its allies and an undemocratic Saudi Arabia, large elements of whose public culture are still influenced by 18th century religious norms, and its allies (importantly, the United States and Israel) is a very different thing than the World War II era Allies vs. the Axis.
President Biden further told 60 Minutes, “The Israelis are gonna do everything in their power to avoid the killing of innocent civilians.” Over 27,000 dead Gazans, some 70% of them children and women, undermine claims that Israel has exerted serious efforts to avoid civilian casualties. Two months later President Biden said Israel was losing global support because of its “indiscriminate bombing” of the Gaza Strip.
The high civilian casualty toll follows logically from Israeli President Chaim Herzog’s assertion to an October 12 briefing for the international press that, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware not involved. It’s absolutely not true.” South Africa’s “Application Instituting Proceedings” against Israel to the International Court of Justice quoted this and numerous other statements of genocidal intent by Israeli political and military leaders with “command authority.” Haaretz reported that President Herzog was “disgusted” that South Africa had “twisted” his words. But it re-quoted them in a way that leaves little room to doubt their meaning.
Israel has lost the battle over the medium-term contextualization of the events. Coverage of the events by The New York Times and other major US print media was skewed towards the Israeli narrative for the first six weeks after October 7. On Nov. 9 media workers led a march to The Times building in Manhattan that occupied the premises for an hour to protest the paper’s coverage. The Times subsequently began giving space to at least some Palestinian voices and more critical accounts by its own reporters (notably Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley and Ronen Bergman, Raja Abdulrahim, Declan Walsh, and photojournalist Samar Abu Elouf). The Nakba, the destruction of Palestinian society and the flight or expulsion of 750,000 refugees in 1948, was never mentioned as prominently and as frequently before October 7 by The Times and Western media.
The shift at the NYT was exemplified by Palestinian journalist Dalia Hatuqa’s guest essay (Nov. 14, 2023) entitled “This War Did Not Start a Month Ago” discussing the Nakba and reminding us that the history of Palestine/Israel didn’t begin on October 7, 2023. A NYT Magazine story (Feb. 1, 2024) about “The Road to 1948” featured the views of three Palestinians, two Israelis and a North American Harvard professor. While the story was imperfect, nothing like it has previously appeared in The Times in my memory.
Dalia Hatuqa also recalled the 16-year-long Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip which led UN agencies to predict as early as 2012 that the territory might become “unlivable by 2020.”
In 2006 an influential Israeli government advisor acknowledged that government policy was, “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” In 2012 an Israeli court compelled the release of government documents that literally calculated the number of calories Palestinians in Gaza needed to consume to avoid malnutrition. This is less egregious than Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s order of October 7: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed…. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” The first is evidence of the war crime of imposing collective punishment. The second is evidence of genocidal intent.
Israel has also, at least in part, lost the battle to control the narrative detail of the events because it has officially promoted falsehoods about what happened on October 7.
A journalist for i24 TV News reported that Israeli soldiers saw beheaded babies decapitated by Hamas during the attack on Kibbutz Kfar Aza. A spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amplified the claim. On October 11 President Joe Biden told credulous Jewish community leaders in Washington, D.C. that he saw pictures of the scene.
The Israeli government subsequently admitted it has no evidence that this occurred. The IDF refused to confirm that babies’ heads were decapitated. President Biden never saw pictures of the scene because there are none.
Two months later Haaretz reported that while there was “extensive evidence” of Hamas atrocities on October 7, false accounts “by Israeli search and rescue groups, army officers and even Sara Netanyahu” strengthened the claims of those who rejected all or some of that evidence.
Jeremy Scahill reports a similar campaign of disinformation connected to Israel’s assertion that 12 (out of 13,000) UNRWA employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 attacks. UNRWA was established in 1949 to care for Palestinians who became refugees during the Nakba. Israel has long targeted it for the offense of keeping Palestinian identity alive. Israel “coincidentally” condemned UNRWA right after the ICJ ruled it must implement provisional measures to protect the people of Gaza from genocide.
The Biden administration, without independently examining Israel’s evidence for its claim, immediately suspended its funding to UNRWA. Several Western countries followed suit. A reporter for The Wall Street Journal, who happened to be an IDF veteran, amplified Israel’s accusations based on an Israeli “dossier” purporting to prove that fully 10 percent of UNRWA’s employees in Gaza were connected to Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
Journalists from British Sky News TV who reviewed the dossier reported, “The Israeli intelligence documents make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA.” The Financial Times of London, which also reviewed the dossier, reported it contained specific allegations that 4 Palestinian UNRWA employees, not 12 as Israel asserted, were involved with October 7. Perhaps other journalists on this side of the pond will follow Jeremy Scahill’s lead in critically examining Israel’s claims in this story.
The Israeli public is mostly unaware of Israel’s public relations mishaps. But confidence in the IDF has been shaken because it has killed Israeli civilians in addition to the 3 hostages shot on December 16.
On October 7, Israeli Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram ordered a tank commander to fire on a home in Kibbutz Be’eri where Hamas fighters were holding Israeli civilians “even at the cost of civilian casualties.” Thirteen Israelis died as a result, and one more from a second tank shell.
In mid-December, the IDF discovered the bodies of 3 male hostages in the Gaza Strip. Their families were informed that they had been killed by Hamas. Ma‘ayan Sherman, the mother of Ron Sherman, does not accept this. After reading the pathology report, Ma‘ayan wrote on her Facebook page on Jan. 16, “Ron was indeed murdered,” but “not by Hamas.” Rather she claimed he was killed by Israeli “bombings with poisonous gasses.” The IDF does not rule out this possibility.
Forty-two survivors of the Nova music festival massacre, where Hamas murdered some 360 civilians on October 7, have filed a lawsuit against the IDF, the Shin Bet security service, and Israel Police for failure and negligence to protect them. This is the largest tort claim ever filed in Israel against state bodies. It signals that even as Israelis have become more right-wing, they have lost confidence in their political leaders and the security establishment, long the most respected element of Israeli society.
One explanation for the lackluster performance of the Israeli military to date is that since the suppression of the 2nd Intifada, Israeli ground forces have functioned mainly as a colonial police force maintaining the occupation of the West Bank. The air force and the celebrated signals intelligence unit 8200 recruit the physically and mentally fittest youth and have received the most resources. Ground forces have been relatively neglected. Unit 8200 was not operating near the Gaza Strip on October 7 because it was a weekend.
Haggai Matar, executive director of the (highly recommended) +972 webzine, wrote early on in the war that Israel’s military and intelligence failures were a symptom of much broader political dysfunction:
The collapse of our sense of security came hand in hand with the realization that the entire Israeli state is, in fact, nothing more than a hologram. The army, rescue services, the welfare services, and more have all been dysfunctional. This has left Israeli survivors, the internally displaced, and the families of the hostages without anyone to turn to, pressing civil society to step in to fill the void where the government should have been. Years of political corruption have left us with an empty shell of a state, and with no leadership to speak of.
Or, as former Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg warned twenty years ago:
[A] state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies….A state lacking justice cannot survive…. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger forever, it won’t work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself.… Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism.