I can't help but contrast demands on Israel with demands on Ukraine.
Blinken recently stated that Ukraine will not hold elections until it reclaims all of its territory, which more or less means it won't hold elections again ever. It is not only not required to negotiate, but actively discouraged.
Regarding point 3 from Gantz, Netanyahu has mentioned similar ideas in several interviews: cooperation between Arab states and Americans, along with a temporary security presence of the IDF during the transition period.
There seems to be, if not a consensus, then at least an understanding among a significant portion of the Israeli political class that something like this should happen. However, when reading Israeli media and analyses from different Israeli analysts, many avoid calling it nation-building. This is because a) they do not believe in a Palestinian state, and b) for purely pragmatic reasons, it is better to focus on practical governance tasks – such as building infrastructure in Gaza, fixing potholes, registering births, and issuing construction permits. A lot of governance consists of mundane, technocratic, non-ideological tasks, and Israelis prefer to focus on these. Starting with nation-building introduces controversial issues that create significant divisions within Israeli society and even larger gaps between Israelis and Palestinians, which could derail the entire process.
As for Gantz, he is a typical opposition politician (even if he is technically part of the government). This means he is not making decisions or facing trade-offs. He is in a position to make promises to all constituencies, even if those promises contradict each other. He can go around saying what listeners want to hear.
I am not Israeli, but I have professionally covered European-style parliamentary coalition politics for a couple of decades. In this sense, Israeli politics is much more like politics in Europe. Americans, with their more winner-takes-all system, sometimes struggle to understand parliamentary politics in Israel. Israeli politicians, who have grown up in a parliamentary coalition system, often have "plans" that should be taken as broad directional guidelines rather than literal proposals because they know that in reality, there will be compromises, trade-offs, and no plan survives reality.
1 Israel and others may not have known how extensively the tunnels were built but it was known that it was happening. Allowing it was a mistake.
1a Given the size of Gaza I have a hard time believing an eventual surrender or fleeing of Hamas leadership can't be accomplished and mostly maintained (not saying it would be perfect).
2 I don't think Gaza or West Bank is comparable to Vietnam, Iraq, and certainly not Afghanistan. The size seems small enough to make a huge difference. That said, Israel, and almost as certainly US, could not successfully co-govern Gaza but I'm far less certain it is ungovernable. What if a team of western leaning Palestinians were working with support from UAE or Qatar? I'm not saying it would work but is it certain it wouldn't? How much disruptive power would Hamas have if they didn't lead the government?
Agree with all of this. Regarding Point 2, if I understand Netanyahu correctly, identification and installation of moderate, peace-inclined Palestinians is not possible yet. Few would voluntarily stick their necks out while Hamas still wields power in Gaza.
I'm not at all sure it could be accomplished. For decades, marijuana was illegal everywhere in the United States, and lots of people were arrested and lots of police time and effort used to try to stamp it out. But many, many millions of people sold it, bought it, and smoked it.
Great post. I appreciate how you don't just fall into either camp. You demonstrate how all options are misguided. Unfortunate situation we find ourselves in...
I think Israelis had two options in regards to Gaza after October 7th- drive all the Palestinians onto the sea/Egypt, or mine the border with Gaza up to a depth of 500-1000 meters, close all foot, road, and air traffic over the land border cut off all the water and electrical power coming via Israel, shoot down anything that attempts to fly over that border and sink any boat that tries to come from Gaza's coastal areas towards Israel's.
I think it obvious that neither of those are likely to be Netanyahu's plans and certainly aren't the plans of his political opponents in Israel and the United States. So, I suspect that Netanyahu will wrap up the conflict by July, allow the Gazans back into northern Gaza, and we will repeat this cycle again in about 20 years after Gaza is rebuilt and Hamas II takes over and starts lobbing rockets and drones over the border while looking to repeat October 7th when the Israelis have once again grown soft enough to let it occur.
I don't see an outcome that avoids involving Hamas. The IDF won't be able to eliminate them completely because they have infiltrated Gaza so thoroughly. Either Hamas will be part of a negotiated "Day After" or they won't. If the former, they will repeat 2007 when they murdered their political opponents and took over Gaza completely. If the latter, they will mount a guerrilla insurgency and render Gaza impossible to govern peacefully or fruitfully, like Afghanistan or Iraq. No good outcome.
Well there is a solution. It's not one that anyone outside Israel is willing to accept because it involves the deaths of a very large number of Gazans. I.e. everyone in Hamass, the UNWRA and the Gaza government and anyone who is seen carrying a weapon of any sort.
No one has tried the kill a large percentage of the population as a warning to the rest since WW2 (and then that was mostly Stalin). Fundamentally until Gazans accept that Hamass has lost and that supporting Hamass is a personal death sentence they have no incentive to get rid of Hamass.
I "liked" this. Not because I like what it's saying but because it may actually be true. If nothing else, maybe it will shock some people out of their shallow, unrealistic "the only reason bad things happen is because some bad people keep the arc of history from bending toward justice" thinking.
(When you read "bad people", did you think Hamas? Netanyahu? Someone else?)
That is not true. HAMAS members have good reasons to not be HAMAS members now. This is one of the reasons that HAMAS (in the English language they are Islamic Resistance Movement or IRM) relies heavily on their interpretations of their holy book, celebration of martyrdom, and the like. They do not actually have strong, practical reasons to keep fighting on behalf of a goal of defeating Israel, there are much better alternatives, such as building a new country that works productively with Israel and the other countries of the region. Notwithstanding their anti-Israel propaganda and their ability to recruit adherents, there are also many Arabs and Muslims who see through ,and reject, HAMAS.
Israeli Arabs are not blocking rush hour traffic, they are not disrupting and vandalizing universities, they are not engaging in a cancel culture targeting zionists, they are not calling for a “globalized intifada”, a “free Palestine״ from the “river to the sea” to be achieved “by any means”. That is happening in the U.S. and Europe. Do the people in Europe and U.S. doing all of that shit ever wonder why Israeli Arabs are not?
Arabs are exempt from the military draft (Druze males and Circassians are drafted, they do not consider themselves to be Arab). More than 1,000 Israeli Arabs nevertheless volunteered to serve in the IDF as conscripts or reservists in 2020.
It doesn't work, they just hunker down and become crypto-hamas until it blows over even if decades like the crypto-jews of the Spanish Inquisition.
If you really want to solve the problem Israel just needs to remove all barriers on the Egyptian border and simply start an overt 100% kill slash burn movement from the northern edge of Gaza south one step at a time. Palestinians can simply flee into Egypt or die effectively recreating the Romans which created the Jew diaspora.
The alternative to this is a surrender of hostages by Hamas. Not sure Hamas has to actually surrender. In either case, I'm not saying it is likely but it is worth noting it is not impossible.
At this point I think it's more like Hamass provides the bodies. Sadly I'm fairly sure that by now all the hostages are dead. But yes, if Hamass did that things would change.
This about trying to diminish the spoiler role of Hamas. If Hamas governs then their control over Gaza empowers them act as the spoiler, whereas if Hamas operates underground in a diminished capacity, then they will have less success being a spoiler. This matters because Arab countries will be more willing to reconcile with Israel if they anticipate their attempts to do so will not be defeated by Hamas.
If I were the Israeli government Id ignore international opinion and wage war upon Hamas until they surrender unconditionally. My plan for the rest of Gaza would be something akin to Bukele’s methods for dealing with gangs in El Salvador. Anyone who identifies as a threat is imprisoned. Over time, begin releasing those who, after interviews and demonstrated willingness to live peacefully, merit that trust. Otherwise, they stay interned like any captured soldiers of a beligerant nation.
I think the PA controls the West Bank quite well given the circumstances.
it's complicated. because the Netanyahu governments have strategically harmed the PA in so many ways!
they always did it in non obvious ways. removing funding for "justifiable reasons". building settlements "why should the PA care" etc.
after all the damage done to it by Israeli right wingers, the PA still holds, barely with security support.
saying that the PA cannot efficiently control Gaza in security terms, if Israel actually helps it instead of sabotage it all the time, seems a reasonable claim
but Israel has done so many things in the West Bank in bad faith. that saying "why can't the PA control Palestinian Terror 100% Vs the current 95%" is disingenuous
Mr Abbas said Adolf Hitler ordered the mass murder of Jews because of their "social role" as moneylenders, rather than out of animosity to Judaism. He claims people who identify as being Jews who lived in Europe in the nineteenth century are instead non-Semitic descendants of an ancient Turkish people known as the Khazars who converted to Judaism en masse. He claims there is no evidence that there was ever an ancient jewish temple in Jerusalem and accuses Israeli Jews and their supporters of promoting false historical narratives of having a past presence in what is now, comparing such claims to Nazi propaganda. The foreign ministry of the PA that Abbas controls asserts that Israeli helicopters bombed Israeli civilians on October 7 during the Supernova music festival. The PA statement casts doubts on Israeli accounts of the atrocities. Abbas and the PA he leads are far from being an archetype of diplomats on a mission to promote peace and coexistence. On the contrary, they regularly incite again peace and coexistence and instead promote antagonism, hostility, and hate. This a centrally relevant fact.
Yes and no. There are degrees of relevance and politicians need some elbow room to appeal to their audience. Yet what people choose to say in public is also one of things people do, and what he says here reveals he is not preparing his side to live in peace with the other side. What he says is sometimes off of the charts in a consistently biased and revealing direction. We expect religious people to adhere to an ideology that undermines their willingness to face all of the facts, but insofar as Abbas represents the more secular perspective he is nevertheless still an ideologue who selectively favors far-fetched tall tales that he misrepresents as facts.
To be fair Hitler didn't execute Jews over Judaism, apostate and atheist Jews got killed too. Also the Khazar thing is openly being talked about more and more since the fall of the iron curtain and there is possible teeth to it, it's not a closed book anymore with DNA testing. All Jews trace back to a single ancestral mother (Sarah) and yet we are starting to find many European Jews without a trace of semitic DNA in them.
Not that Abbas cares nor am I defending him but some of those points are legitimate.
There is now a fair amount of genetic work done on where different groups of Jews came from. The Khazar thing hasn't panned out. Razib Khan is the go to here. You might start with:
Peter: Two Jewish scholars writing long after the Khazars’ nationhood had expired said that their governing elite converted. The available historical documentation traces a flow of Jews escaping religious persecution from the Byzantine Empire to the Khazars’ famously tolerant domains. It is likely that some Turkic Khazars’ converted to Judaism. But it does not follow that that Ashkenazi Jews - whose ancestors led the Zionist drive to establish the Jewish state - are not also descendants of the ancient Hebrew tribes, and therefore have no historical claim to the land where Jewish people previously resided, as Muhammad Abbas claims, just like it does not follow that because a small minority of Jews were money lenders (laws restricted the occupations Jews could engage in), that Hitler killed the Jews “only because they dealt with usury and money,” as Muhammad Abbas claimed. There is no legitimacy at all to those claims. No doubt Jews sometimes interbred with non-Jews, people converted both to and from Judaism, and every civilization from the past is not going to be reestablished, but that is not what Abbas claims. The problem of incitement by the PA and Muhammad Abbas is genuine. The European Parliament recently criticized the incitement in school textbooks utilized n Palestinian schools.
I am afraid you are completely misreading the situation. The only reason the Palestinian Authority survives in the West Bank is because Netanyahu sends the Israeli army to destroy Hamas and prevent it from threatening the Authority. Don't confuse mainstream media clichés with the reality on the ground.
There are recordings of Netanyahu saying that he enabled Hamas to a degree so as to continue to weaken the PA. This, and the redeployment of Gazan guard forces to the West Bank, is going to sink him when an election happens. So he has a significant personal desire to make sure one doesn't. Not having a coherent "day after" policy is amazingly helpful to him in this regard
I suspect things are a bit different. First, I don't think one can say that the PA "controls the West Bank". Unlike Gaza (beginning in 2005), Israel has always maintained a robust presence in the West Bank which is probably the reason less trouble has emanated from that region. Second, my understanding is the PA has very little political support among Arabs and would fall to Hamas if elections were held (the PA avoids this by not holding elections). Third, and probably most important, I do not believe the PA has ever clearly accepted the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Hamas and the PA differ primarily in their justifications (religious vs. secular), not their goals. Consequently, if Hamas were destroyed and the PA became the unchallenged, dominant ruling power in Gaza, it takes little imagination to see where things would go from there.
1. the PA has most of the local control. Israel has higher level general military control from the outside.
most of the time Israel tries to avoid entering PA territories unless strictly necessary. and they provide details for the PA to handle in many cases.
2. PA had majority support until maybe a decade ago. even in the famed "Hamas won" elections, PA candidates won most votes. they were just too split and lost in the seat count.
much of what caused the PA to lose popular support (besides it's own weaknesses and a certain hardcore Hamas support) is Israel undermining the PA at every juncture. basically making the PA looking like a weak puppet if Netanyahu right wing governments. this was very damaging
3. PA recognised Israel since the Oslo Accords in 1993.
the Israeli extremists are trying to play high school word games to make the PA looking like it doesn't accept Israel existence.
"Will you say after me xxx 'Jewish state' blah blah blah"
no. the PA isn't Netanyahu puppet to repeat whatever wording Netanyahu tries to pull their legs with.
I do not know what Israeli "word games" you are referring to. Just look at the words of the PA itself. In its 2003 Constitution, it describes the Palestinian Arabs' "clear national rights, the foremost of which are the right of return . . . ." This "right of return" has been reiterated by the PA many times.
According to UNWRA, the Palestinian "refugees" and their descendants now supposedly number 5.9 million. Insistence on a "right of return" is obviously inconsistent with the premise of a two-state solution, one being for Jews and one being for Arabs. Consequently, Israeli skepticism of the PA cannot be said to be without grounds.
Are the ultra-Orthodox Jews with the draft exemption the same “conservative” Israelis who seem to be the biggest proponents of the war?
I’ve always been confused on this point. What are their politics? Are they the Israeli equivalent of the Amish - non-political, religiously peaceful, easily identifiable (as opposed to a “conscientious objector”?)
The ultra-Orthodox are disengaged from the rest of Israel. Politically, they seem to care most about issues related to religious observance and their religious schools. My understanding is that they are not particularly hawkish or dovish. The hawks come from the Jews of Middle Eastern descent, called Mizrahi ("from the East"). They make up about half the population, and once they started voting in large numbers the Israeli left became a minority. Of course, the unrelenting hostility from militants on the Palestinian side did much to drive the rest of Israelis to the right on foreign policy.
So are they a distinct sect, like the Amish, or is it more of a coalition of highly religious Israelis - more of a broad philosophy?
Im trying to understand why this issue seems to have such high valence in Israel. Why is it one of six demands by Gantz? The Amish represents such a distinct, small, and highly respected population in the US that giving them such extreme self-governance is pretty simple and not broadly impactful. But if the group is more amorphous - if it becomes a haven of draft dodgers - I guess I see the concern.
I am not an expert on Israeli society, but my impression is that there are deep emotional divisions between a large secular population and a sizable Orthodox population. The seculars fear that the Orthodox will create a theocracy. The huge demonstrations against "judicial reform" that were roiling Israel before October 7 were largely driven by the fear that without a very strong Supreme Court the theocracy scenario would play out. At least, that is my analysis, which others may disagree with.
Imagine if the Amish were a much large % of society and growing. They don't have a foreign policy, but they support "conservative" candidates by temperament and as a result your state makes abortion illegal or something. Such a policy doesn't even have to be a particular goal of the Amish, only that they are a visible minority that drives electoral outcomes you don't like.
The actual Amish in America have very low voter turnout, but they are also exempt from a lot of what normal American citizens are. They aren't liable for the draft, they are allowed to homeschool their kids, and they don't pay for or receive social security, medicare, or medicaid. The deal essentially is that the Amish leave politics alone if politics leaves them alone.
If you break that deal and make politics affect them, then they will likely get more involved in politics. Imagine for instance if leftists decided that Amish homeschooling should be illegal because it harms the children (lots of governments make homeschooling illegal).
Likewise the Amish are a majority in the many rural counties they live in hence if they ever had to go political they could, and have historical. You don't win an elected office in Amish country campaigning against the Amish.
One wonders how “day-after planning” fits into Israel’s broader geopolitical strategy, in particular its future relationship with the US and whether it would be feasible to pivot to a non-aligned posture given the presence of significant pro-Hamas elements in the US and its remaining allies. And at this point the US’s military aid to Lebanon appears as to be little more than funding for Hezbollah as a US proxy for keeping Israel from achieving more influence in the region.
In this regard, it is an uncertain world: resilient arms supply chains and relations with other nations in the region would seem to be important factors in how far Israel is willing to allow the US to dictate its policies. Israelis no doubt realize that Obama’s MOU providing defined annual levels of military support expires in 2028. Renewal is by no means certain and the US will likely demand significant concessions. US aid was about 15 of Israeli defense spending over the period of the MOU up until October 7. And, perhaps as important, that figure includes $500 million worth of Iron Dome missiles from Raytheon annually. Finding an alternate supplier or substitute seems like it ought be a factor in determining Israel’s negotiating posture and ability to walk away from whatever deal the Obama-Biden foreign policy establishment puts on the table.
Israeli weapons exports to India are an important part of the Israeli economy.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/israels-military-exports-top-buyer-india-unaffected-by-gaza-war-2024-02-23/ One wonders whether a BRICS that is flexible enough to have both Iran and Saudi Arabia as members, is flexible enough to accommodate Israel as well. Israeli-Indian relations may well increase in strategic importance and with India having its own problems in the Punjab and elsewhere, may well be a more sympathetic potential ally in the future. An increasingly belligerent and powerful Turkey appears to have increased its NATO and EU influence rendering Europe less relevant to Israel’s needs.
The worst thing the Israelis could do to themselves is to cower before the United States. When the US chose to invade Gaza by building the pier, it placed the pier’s security in Israel’s hands. Since the US is withholding promised weapons, Israel ought be be demanding something in return. Israel could, for example place tariffs on aid deliveries as a price for providing security to the allegedly humanitarian aid flowing to Hamas.
Reparations ought to be the foundation of any day-after plan. Just as the Germans suffered reparations as part of settling with the Allies to end WWII, so must the Gazans. WWII reparations were largely not in the form of cash payments. Rather, part took the form of dismantling Germany’s industrial capital and relocating it to the Allies. Since Gaza has negligible industrial machinery, land might be substituted. Perhaps allotted to the families of the October 7 terror victims. But a significant portion took the form of forced labor. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II ) Forced labor would be very helpful in giving the Gazans something to do to keep them out of trouble and perhaps earn their keep. As well as building some basic social capital and new organizations oriented towards a productive future rather than wallowing in recriminations. Israel might retain supervision of such a plan but insist on cooperation from international organizations in carrying out the day-to-day operations. The Jordanians and Egyptians don’t want anything to do with the Gazans, they might see a benefit from a forcefully reorganized and reconstituted Gazan governance infrastructure as a tolerable outcome for accepting labor reparations in day-after plans.
Being an old coot, I can't help thinking of WW11 where we faced two pathogenic belief systems of the Nazis and Japanese, both of which had beliefs similar to Hamas that survival depended upon the elimination or complete domination of all "others". Tolerance and "live and let live" were not part of their beliefs. The benefits of specialization and trade were ignored and the benefits of organized terror and theft were central in their thinking.
This changed with unconditional surrender and total victory. It forced the Germans and Japanese to look at the option of economic success through positive sum "specialization and trade" which demands that you don't dominate and kill your trading partner.
Hamas and its religious/legal system are addicted to a negative sum game of theft and oppression learned from the middle aged barbarians and like all types of addicts, it has to hit bottom before recovery is possible. It took killing ten of millions of Japanese and Germans to change their minds, but their thinking was changed.
Since Israel is already convicted of "genocide" by so-called "international opinion", perhaps they should get the benefits. Note that we killed a 100,000 Japanese in Tokyo in one night using < 5% of the munitions already used by Israel in there highly targeted attacks. Biden wants them to use dumb bombs, like we did in WW11, and they could also easily kill 100,000 Palestinians in one night.
You are misremembering the Japan/Germany story, the real thing that made that work was Soviet Union, i.e. everyone at every level from the Emperor to the street sweeper could see they had two options knew the Soviet alternative was worse. It has nothing to do with the amount dead.
If you live in Gaza, you don't have any other option, no one is going to free you from Israel nor is someone worse then Israel going to take over.
Peter: If you look at the numbers, being a Palestinian living in Israel, which makes up about 20% of Israeli citizens, is a lot better life with more opportunities that living in Gaza under the UNRWA welfare state as a parasite on the world. Your children can be actually educated including medicine and scientists instead of being trained to become a martyr.
The Germans did give up their Nazi belief system in both East and West Germany which negates your argument that the Soviet Union was a factor rather than the strong emotional factor of absolutely loosing the war with an unconditional surrender after millions were killed.
Right but what you don't have is your freedom. Many people, including those in Gaza, would rather die free than live as a slave.
There was no option in Germany to retain your Nazi beliefs, you would be jailed or shot depending which side the border you were on nor were you required to give up being German.
On the other hand in Gaza you have nothing to give up but your life or ethnic identity. You think Japan would have went over well has we required them to identify as Chinese and adopt Chinese culture and customs as a condition of surrendering?
Is the ethnic identity of Gaza citizens just to kill the Jews as stated in the Hamas charter and all their statements indicating total intolerance and the impossibility of taking advantage of "specialization and trade" with Israel to improve the lives of the Gaza citizens?
The overwhelming number of dead in Gaza as well as those harmed aren't members of Hamas, they are simply Palestinians. Hence once again their choice is to give up be Palestinian and become Arab-Israeli at 20% you mentioned did or die.
Relative to other city wars, the IDF has the lowest ratio of civilians to Hamas fighters of any combat at any time in history. The numbers demonstrate the fact that Israelis are fighting a very civilized war and not adopting the rules of barbaric rape and murder of civilian set by Hamas on 10/7. They only have to give up their barbaric beliefs and join the world of civilization and progress. Is giving up being a martyr such a big deal? Even getting your family paid for becoming a martyr, that belief is a bit hard on the believer. These are irrational beliefs not based in observable reality but in mythical magic.
Note the numbers from Hamas are known to be propaganda not valid numbers and even the BBC, NYT, and UN have recognized the numbers as nonsense BS. For example, you have about 80 people/day dying of "old age" (at 80+ I watch it happen to all my friends) in a population of 2.3 million. That is just life except in Hamas nonsense statistics. Like today when they claimed 90 were killed, they have 80 dead geezers like me plus 10 probably fighters and they can still claim more females than males (old people have higher female % than young people) and if the fighters are under 18 they can add in children.
I fear this analysis may be right. But I think it would help to unpack the idea of “nation-building”. In several of the relevant literatures nations are distinguished from states. And “state-building” may be what is relevant here. The development of a single national identity (“nation-building”) was a possible goal for Iraq or, at some time, Yugoslavia. Obviously many will not want to use the term “state-building” for Gaza as that would imply support for some kind of two-state solution. So perhaps the term needed would be “government-building”, the development of the multiple institutions that are needed to govern the populated polity of Gaza. It seems that the US/Allies “government-building” experiments in post-war Japan and Germany were successes. And that may be because existing governing institutions were not destroyed and individuals in the agencies were not all fired — see Bremmer’s Iraq for object lessons here. So might it be possible to preserve many government agencies in Gaza, even if the employees were Hamas affiliated, and merely to restrict high-level Hamas officials? If so, perhaps that form of “government-building” is what ought to be tried. It’s possible that Egypt might even lend a hand here, despite its hatred of Hamas. (These brief remarks may be opaque.)
I'm not sure that Insurgency is the right model for any part of the Israel-Palestine conflict, of which Israel-Hamas is a part.
It might be useful to clearly define "insurgency". I think it's generally taken to mean armed conflict by some part of a local population against existing authorities. So, Northern Ireland was an insurgency, because it was some residents of Northern Ireland fighting to force the UK to give up Northern Ireland. The Korean War was not an insurgency, because it had no South Koreans fighting to topple the ROK government. Vietnam was partly insurgency (the Viet Cong fighting to topple the RVN government) and partly conventional war (North Vietnam Army fighting RVN army).
There have been successful counterinsurgency campaigns. As Rory Armstrong says, Northern Ireland is one. Malaya after World War II is another. Greece after World War II is another. Contra Arnold, I'd say Vietnam is a fourth. By 1968, the Viet Cong had been defeated; from that point on, the war was carried on only by the North Vietnamese Army. This didn't result in victory for the RVN, but the counterinsurgency part of the conflict was won.
It's possible that Israel could win a counterinsurgency campaign in Gaza, and in Palestine more generally. One way would be to identify Palestinians who want a peaceful settlement, who also have some legitimacy (or potential legitimacy) among the Palestinian population. Israel could install these people in power and provide initial security to establish a government. They'd have to wage a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign - not just against Hamas, but every other faction that prefers armed conflict and rejects a peaceful coexistence with Israel. This is certainly nation-building, although I'm not sure it would have to be "emergency". I expect the armed conflict would take years to resolve. It would involve using economic power to support the new government - Hamas already uses the economic power that comes from control of aid money to maintain its power. It would mean organizing, equipping, training, and supporting a Palestinian security force that could and would cooperate with Israel. It would mean propping up a Palestinian government whose sole virtue might be that they were willing to stop fighting Israel.
I'm not saying such a solution is within reach. Certainly, the existing Palestinian factions would resist it. They would have support from Iran, and possibly Turkey. Perhaps Egypt and Jordan would openly help Israel. Who knows what the Saudis would do?
If a counterinsurgency campaign can be won, the question becomes "Can a nation-building campaign work?" The inspiring answer would be "Just look at Germany and Japan." But these were societies that had institutions and cohesion, the previous regimes had been discredited by years of losing war, and the populations wanted peace, prosperity, and good governance. Nation-building has been less successful in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and others. Whatever solution Israel tries for, they can't expect a satisfactory solution to emerge without being imposed militarily, and they certainly can't count on military manpower from outside.
Israelis are quite realistic. When they say they want to defeat Hamas, they do not mean they can track down every single member of Hamas, detain, or kill them. What they mean is they want to destroy Hamas as an effective governing and military force. Regarding insurgency, they aim to reduce it to a manageable low level. What exactly "low level and manageable" means is obviously debatable. If, after day one, Hamas is able to carry out one bombing every single day, then it is obviously not a low-level manageable insurgency. If Hamas is able to carry out one bombing once a year, I guess it is.
I keep reading things like, "By 1968, the Viet Cong had been defeated." I feel fairly sure that is wishful thinking. As an analogy, I suggest the Taliban. They were supposedly defeated within a few years after the US armed forces went in in the early 2000s. Indeed, they weren't very visible. But they were always there, and in less than 20 years had defeated the US.
How much have you read about the Vietnam war? I based my statement on 2 books:
From the American perspective "Unheralded Victory" by Mark Woodruff
From the Vietnamese perspective "A Vietcong Memoir" by Truong Nhu Tang
Tang's account is particularly explicit: After the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong were militarily insignificant. The military victory was entirely by the North Vietnamese Army.
I agree that the Taliban were never decisively defeated.
I have not read either book. I suppose I'm reacting because I usually see statements like "The Viet Cong was defeated in 1968" in support of an argument that the war was won, if only we could somehow entice the North Vietnamese to stop meddling. There would then be a stable South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia would not fall to Communists, and there would be peace in Asia. That's just silly.
I think of the Viet Cong kind of like a forest fire. You can douse all the flames, but if there are some burning embers and enough dry vegetation, it will blaze back up eventually.
"The Viet Cong was defeated" is a very different statement from "The war was won." My topic was insurgency, and the insurgency was the Viet Cong. When the Viet Cong was defeated, the war became exclusively a conventional war, fought by the North Vietnamese Army.
Woodruff's claim is that the conventional war was also won, in the sense that the RVN government controlled essentially all of its territory, had a functioning government and was able to defeat a conventional attack from North Vietnam in 1973, with essentially no US ground forces involvement (but significant US air power). He claimed that continued US assistance, with equipment to replace losses and direct air support when South Vietnam was threatened, would have allowed South Vietnam to remain free. This is dubious, but not completely ridiculous. It also assumes the willingness of the US to provide significant military support indefinitely.
If others claim that South Vietnam would have been stable and independent if only North Vietnam would stop fighting (I'm not sure who you're referring to, exactly), that claim might be "true" in some sense, but it's kind of like saying South Vietnam would have been good for oil production, if it had oil. It was clear from the beginning that Ho Chi Minh and his successors would not stop fighting until Vietnam was unified under their control. The only way they would have stopped would have been if the US, or South Vietnam, invaded and controlled their territory, hunted down and imprisoned surviving communist officials, and installed a new regime. The US never intended to do that, and I doubt any South Vietnamese leader ever considered the possibility.
I couldn't agree more with your first sentence. But I'm not sure it's important.
1) Defeated for now and defeated forever are two different things.
2) I think it is impossible to separate the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese government. Saying "the Viet Cong were defeated and the North Vietnamese Army won the war" is like saying "the army was defeated and the navy won the war." The army still gets to march in the victory parade and be part of the victorious government.
As you say, "It was clear from the beginning that Ho Chi Minh and his successors would not stop fighting until Vietnam was unified under their control." And that's exactly what happened.
If you want to understand the Viet Cong, I heartily recommend Truong's book. He was a non-communist who was named the Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government declared by the Viet Cong. In public, the Viet Cong claimed their objective was to overthrow the Republic of Vietnam government, which they considered an illegitimate creation of the French, and replace it with a free government, separate from the North, including both communists and non-communists. They lost a lot of their strength beginning in 1967, and had essentially no military strength after 1968. They also had little or no popular support in the population by that time, although the Provisional Government held together in hiding in the jungle, hoping for a role in a new government if the North won. They probably got some encouragement in this hope from the North Vietnamese, but there was no hope of re-establishing the Viet Cong as a political or military force.
Yes it's an incredibly clunky form of government but the troubles - the insurgency - did end. Besides some muted rumblings the peace is holding strong.
What it required might feel unthinkable right now but if I look 100 years into the future Israel has two options: the eradication of all traces of Hamas (would anyone support the British in an similar situation with the IRA?), or to integrate those people into a unified state.
If the region stays in the state it's been in the past 40 years what does the area look like in 2124? What occured in those 100 years? Who would be willing to bet on 100 years of peace with this status quo? I'd place that bet in Northern Ireland.
Like a couple other comments that point to Japan and Germany post-WW2 as "nation building successes" this ignores that those countries had centuries of development of various social institutions that most of us recognize as normal for a moden nation state. As an example, Germany actually had a more widespread voter franchise before WWI than Great Britain even if its parliament had less power. The Allies weren't starting from near scratch, and nether were the Irish. Though there was a sectarian element to the Irish Troubles it didn't have the 'all or nothing ' character of Muslim antipathy to Judaism.
The primary source of Israel's Palestinian problem is their usefulness to other bad actors (including various American politicians) as a means to disrupt Israel. Take away that outside support and the problem largely goes away.
Germany and Japan are excluded because the qualifier wasn't nation building which can work, but nation building IN RESPONSE to a guerilla war / movement; Japan nor Germany had those in a meaningful way.
Two examples though that did kind of work, or at least, didn't fail completely, were Kosovo (by putting the terrorists in power) and the Philippines where Spain had a nasty insurrection going.
This of course fails to meet anyone's hopes for an end state but does allow Netanyahu to reamain PM, keep the war cabinet in place and therefore escape his various court cases and the electoral consequences for being the person who enabled Hamass and Oct 7 in the first place
This is not exclusively a question to be decided based on what Israel, or Netanyahu in particular, wants. This is mostly a question about what goals are achievable, what is the best that can be achieved within the imposed constraints.
No it's true. But it's relative to the baseline, so you need to grade a nation's political unification level on its own curve. On the Israeli-normalized political scale, this is 90th percentile.
I can't help but contrast demands on Israel with demands on Ukraine.
Blinken recently stated that Ukraine will not hold elections until it reclaims all of its territory, which more or less means it won't hold elections again ever. It is not only not required to negotiate, but actively discouraged.
Regarding point 3 from Gantz, Netanyahu has mentioned similar ideas in several interviews: cooperation between Arab states and Americans, along with a temporary security presence of the IDF during the transition period.
There seems to be, if not a consensus, then at least an understanding among a significant portion of the Israeli political class that something like this should happen. However, when reading Israeli media and analyses from different Israeli analysts, many avoid calling it nation-building. This is because a) they do not believe in a Palestinian state, and b) for purely pragmatic reasons, it is better to focus on practical governance tasks – such as building infrastructure in Gaza, fixing potholes, registering births, and issuing construction permits. A lot of governance consists of mundane, technocratic, non-ideological tasks, and Israelis prefer to focus on these. Starting with nation-building introduces controversial issues that create significant divisions within Israeli society and even larger gaps between Israelis and Palestinians, which could derail the entire process.
As for Gantz, he is a typical opposition politician (even if he is technically part of the government). This means he is not making decisions or facing trade-offs. He is in a position to make promises to all constituencies, even if those promises contradict each other. He can go around saying what listeners want to hear.
I am not Israeli, but I have professionally covered European-style parliamentary coalition politics for a couple of decades. In this sense, Israeli politics is much more like politics in Europe. Americans, with their more winner-takes-all system, sometimes struggle to understand parliamentary politics in Israel. Israeli politicians, who have grown up in a parliamentary coalition system, often have "plans" that should be taken as broad directional guidelines rather than literal proposals because they know that in reality, there will be compromises, trade-offs, and no plan survives reality.
1 Israel and others may not have known how extensively the tunnels were built but it was known that it was happening. Allowing it was a mistake.
1a Given the size of Gaza I have a hard time believing an eventual surrender or fleeing of Hamas leadership can't be accomplished and mostly maintained (not saying it would be perfect).
2 I don't think Gaza or West Bank is comparable to Vietnam, Iraq, and certainly not Afghanistan. The size seems small enough to make a huge difference. That said, Israel, and almost as certainly US, could not successfully co-govern Gaza but I'm far less certain it is ungovernable. What if a team of western leaning Palestinians were working with support from UAE or Qatar? I'm not saying it would work but is it certain it wouldn't? How much disruptive power would Hamas have if they didn't lead the government?
Agree with all of this. Regarding Point 2, if I understand Netanyahu correctly, identification and installation of moderate, peace-inclined Palestinians is not possible yet. Few would voluntarily stick their necks out while Hamas still wields power in Gaza.
Absolutely. I was thinking my 1a had to happen before any kind of stability, much less becoming a well-functioning economy.
I'm not at all sure it could be accomplished. For decades, marijuana was illegal everywhere in the United States, and lots of people were arrested and lots of police time and effort used to try to stamp it out. But many, many millions of people sold it, bought it, and smoked it.
Great post. I appreciate how you don't just fall into either camp. You demonstrate how all options are misguided. Unfortunate situation we find ourselves in...
Except one of those options it an alternative HAS to be pursued. Throwing up out hands and saying nothing works is not a better option.
I think Israelis had two options in regards to Gaza after October 7th- drive all the Palestinians onto the sea/Egypt, or mine the border with Gaza up to a depth of 500-1000 meters, close all foot, road, and air traffic over the land border cut off all the water and electrical power coming via Israel, shoot down anything that attempts to fly over that border and sink any boat that tries to come from Gaza's coastal areas towards Israel's.
I think it obvious that neither of those are likely to be Netanyahu's plans and certainly aren't the plans of his political opponents in Israel and the United States. So, I suspect that Netanyahu will wrap up the conflict by July, allow the Gazans back into northern Gaza, and we will repeat this cycle again in about 20 years after Gaza is rebuilt and Hamas II takes over and starts lobbing rockets and drones over the border while looking to repeat October 7th when the Israelis have once again grown soft enough to let it occur.
“Hamas II takes over and starts lobbing rockets and drones over the border"
??? Last I heard it hadn't stopped. Has it?
I don't see an outcome that avoids involving Hamas. The IDF won't be able to eliminate them completely because they have infiltrated Gaza so thoroughly. Either Hamas will be part of a negotiated "Day After" or they won't. If the former, they will repeat 2007 when they murdered their political opponents and took over Gaza completely. If the latter, they will mount a guerrilla insurgency and render Gaza impossible to govern peacefully or fruitfully, like Afghanistan or Iraq. No good outcome.
Well there is a solution. It's not one that anyone outside Israel is willing to accept because it involves the deaths of a very large number of Gazans. I.e. everyone in Hamass, the UNWRA and the Gaza government and anyone who is seen carrying a weapon of any sort.
No one has tried the kill a large percentage of the population as a warning to the rest since WW2 (and then that was mostly Stalin). Fundamentally until Gazans accept that Hamass has lost and that supporting Hamass is a personal death sentence they have no incentive to get rid of Hamass.
I "liked" this. Not because I like what it's saying but because it may actually be true. If nothing else, maybe it will shock some people out of their shallow, unrealistic "the only reason bad things happen is because some bad people keep the arc of history from bending toward justice" thinking.
(When you read "bad people", did you think Hamas? Netanyahu? Someone else?)
That is not true. HAMAS members have good reasons to not be HAMAS members now. This is one of the reasons that HAMAS (in the English language they are Islamic Resistance Movement or IRM) relies heavily on their interpretations of their holy book, celebration of martyrdom, and the like. They do not actually have strong, practical reasons to keep fighting on behalf of a goal of defeating Israel, there are much better alternatives, such as building a new country that works productively with Israel and the other countries of the region. Notwithstanding their anti-Israel propaganda and their ability to recruit adherents, there are also many Arabs and Muslims who see through ,and reject, HAMAS.
I think there is an assumption these people are too few and too weak but I hope you are right. IDK. Either way, it might be the best path forward
Well the Gazans who reject Hamass should start collaborating with the IDF
Israeli Arabs are not blocking rush hour traffic, they are not disrupting and vandalizing universities, they are not engaging in a cancel culture targeting zionists, they are not calling for a “globalized intifada”, a “free Palestine״ from the “river to the sea” to be achieved “by any means”. That is happening in the U.S. and Europe. Do the people in Europe and U.S. doing all of that shit ever wonder why Israeli Arabs are not?
Arabs are exempt from the military draft (Druze males and Circassians are drafted, they do not consider themselves to be Arab). More than 1,000 Israeli Arabs nevertheless volunteered to serve in the IDF as conscripts or reservists in 2020.
Difficult given how easily Hamas can currently kill them and their families.
It doesn't work, they just hunker down and become crypto-hamas until it blows over even if decades like the crypto-jews of the Spanish Inquisition.
If you really want to solve the problem Israel just needs to remove all barriers on the Egyptian border and simply start an overt 100% kill slash burn movement from the northern edge of Gaza south one step at a time. Palestinians can simply flee into Egypt or die effectively recreating the Romans which created the Jew diaspora.
The alternative to this is a surrender of hostages by Hamas. Not sure Hamas has to actually surrender. In either case, I'm not saying it is likely but it is worth noting it is not impossible.
At this point I think it's more like Hamass provides the bodies. Sadly I'm fairly sure that by now all the hostages are dead. But yes, if Hamass did that things would change.
Definitely possible.
This about trying to diminish the spoiler role of Hamas. If Hamas governs then their control over Gaza empowers them act as the spoiler, whereas if Hamas operates underground in a diminished capacity, then they will have less success being a spoiler. This matters because Arab countries will be more willing to reconcile with Israel if they anticipate their attempts to do so will not be defeated by Hamas.
If I were the Israeli government Id ignore international opinion and wage war upon Hamas until they surrender unconditionally. My plan for the rest of Gaza would be something akin to Bukele’s methods for dealing with gangs in El Salvador. Anyone who identifies as a threat is imprisoned. Over time, begin releasing those who, after interviews and demonstrated willingness to live peacefully, merit that trust. Otherwise, they stay interned like any captured soldiers of a beligerant nation.
I think the PA controls the West Bank quite well given the circumstances.
it's complicated. because the Netanyahu governments have strategically harmed the PA in so many ways!
they always did it in non obvious ways. removing funding for "justifiable reasons". building settlements "why should the PA care" etc.
after all the damage done to it by Israeli right wingers, the PA still holds, barely with security support.
saying that the PA cannot efficiently control Gaza in security terms, if Israel actually helps it instead of sabotage it all the time, seems a reasonable claim
Right, everything is always Israel's fault.
absolutely not.
but Netanyahu has done a lot to weaken the PA.
are Abbas + the Palestinian public saints?
no!
but Israel has done so many things in the West Bank in bad faith. that saying "why can't the PA control Palestinian Terror 100% Vs the current 95%" is disingenuous
Mr Abbas said Adolf Hitler ordered the mass murder of Jews because of their "social role" as moneylenders, rather than out of animosity to Judaism. He claims people who identify as being Jews who lived in Europe in the nineteenth century are instead non-Semitic descendants of an ancient Turkish people known as the Khazars who converted to Judaism en masse. He claims there is no evidence that there was ever an ancient jewish temple in Jerusalem and accuses Israeli Jews and their supporters of promoting false historical narratives of having a past presence in what is now, comparing such claims to Nazi propaganda. The foreign ministry of the PA that Abbas controls asserts that Israeli helicopters bombed Israeli civilians on October 7 during the Supernova music festival. The PA statement casts doubts on Israeli accounts of the atrocities. Abbas and the PA he leads are far from being an archetype of diplomats on a mission to promote peace and coexistence. On the contrary, they regularly incite again peace and coexistence and instead promote antagonism, hostility, and hate. This a centrally relevant fact.
Abbas views about the Holocaust aren't relevant to whether he can effectively manage the West bank/ Gaza.
The only question is how effective he is and whether he supports terrorism.
Abbas has opposed and thought Palestinian terrorism reliably since came to power. ~19 years.
Israeli extremists demand that Abbas will be an employee if the Israeli government doing whatever asked. this is a ridiculous expectation/demand
Yes and no. There are degrees of relevance and politicians need some elbow room to appeal to their audience. Yet what people choose to say in public is also one of things people do, and what he says here reveals he is not preparing his side to live in peace with the other side. What he says is sometimes off of the charts in a consistently biased and revealing direction. We expect religious people to adhere to an ideology that undermines their willingness to face all of the facts, but insofar as Abbas represents the more secular perspective he is nevertheless still an ideologue who selectively favors far-fetched tall tales that he misrepresents as facts.
To be fair Hitler didn't execute Jews over Judaism, apostate and atheist Jews got killed too. Also the Khazar thing is openly being talked about more and more since the fall of the iron curtain and there is possible teeth to it, it's not a closed book anymore with DNA testing. All Jews trace back to a single ancestral mother (Sarah) and yet we are starting to find many European Jews without a trace of semitic DNA in them.
Not that Abbas cares nor am I defending him but some of those points are legitimate.
There is now a fair amount of genetic work done on where different groups of Jews came from. The Khazar thing hasn't panned out. Razib Khan is the go to here. You might start with:
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/ashkenazi-jewish-genetics-a-match
and the two essays linked there. More recent is "More than kin, less than kind: Jews and Palestinians as Canaanite cousins"
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/more-than-kin-less-than-kind-jews
Peter: Two Jewish scholars writing long after the Khazars’ nationhood had expired said that their governing elite converted. The available historical documentation traces a flow of Jews escaping religious persecution from the Byzantine Empire to the Khazars’ famously tolerant domains. It is likely that some Turkic Khazars’ converted to Judaism. But it does not follow that that Ashkenazi Jews - whose ancestors led the Zionist drive to establish the Jewish state - are not also descendants of the ancient Hebrew tribes, and therefore have no historical claim to the land where Jewish people previously resided, as Muhammad Abbas claims, just like it does not follow that because a small minority of Jews were money lenders (laws restricted the occupations Jews could engage in), that Hitler killed the Jews “only because they dealt with usury and money,” as Muhammad Abbas claimed. There is no legitimacy at all to those claims. No doubt Jews sometimes interbred with non-Jews, people converted both to and from Judaism, and every civilization from the past is not going to be reestablished, but that is not what Abbas claims. The problem of incitement by the PA and Muhammad Abbas is genuine. The European Parliament recently criticized the incitement in school textbooks utilized n Palestinian schools.
I am afraid you are completely misreading the situation. The only reason the Palestinian Authority survives in the West Bank is because Netanyahu sends the Israeli army to destroy Hamas and prevent it from threatening the Authority. Don't confuse mainstream media clichés with the reality on the ground.
There are recordings of Netanyahu saying that he enabled Hamas to a degree so as to continue to weaken the PA. This, and the redeployment of Gazan guard forces to the West Bank, is going to sink him when an election happens. So he has a significant personal desire to make sure one doesn't. Not having a coherent "day after" policy is amazingly helpful to him in this regard
I suspect things are a bit different. First, I don't think one can say that the PA "controls the West Bank". Unlike Gaza (beginning in 2005), Israel has always maintained a robust presence in the West Bank which is probably the reason less trouble has emanated from that region. Second, my understanding is the PA has very little political support among Arabs and would fall to Hamas if elections were held (the PA avoids this by not holding elections). Third, and probably most important, I do not believe the PA has ever clearly accepted the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Hamas and the PA differ primarily in their justifications (religious vs. secular), not their goals. Consequently, if Hamas were destroyed and the PA became the unchallenged, dominant ruling power in Gaza, it takes little imagination to see where things would go from there.
1. the PA has most of the local control. Israel has higher level general military control from the outside.
most of the time Israel tries to avoid entering PA territories unless strictly necessary. and they provide details for the PA to handle in many cases.
2. PA had majority support until maybe a decade ago. even in the famed "Hamas won" elections, PA candidates won most votes. they were just too split and lost in the seat count.
much of what caused the PA to lose popular support (besides it's own weaknesses and a certain hardcore Hamas support) is Israel undermining the PA at every juncture. basically making the PA looking like a weak puppet if Netanyahu right wing governments. this was very damaging
3. PA recognised Israel since the Oslo Accords in 1993.
the Israeli extremists are trying to play high school word games to make the PA looking like it doesn't accept Israel existence.
"Will you say after me xxx 'Jewish state' blah blah blah"
no. the PA isn't Netanyahu puppet to repeat whatever wording Netanyahu tries to pull their legs with.
I do not know what Israeli "word games" you are referring to. Just look at the words of the PA itself. In its 2003 Constitution, it describes the Palestinian Arabs' "clear national rights, the foremost of which are the right of return . . . ." This "right of return" has been reiterated by the PA many times.
According to UNWRA, the Palestinian "refugees" and their descendants now supposedly number 5.9 million. Insistence on a "right of return" is obviously inconsistent with the premise of a two-state solution, one being for Jews and one being for Arabs. Consequently, Israeli skepticism of the PA cannot be said to be without grounds.
I wish you weren't right but the fact that PA has not agreed to a division of land at least twice adds credence to what you say.
Are the ultra-Orthodox Jews with the draft exemption the same “conservative” Israelis who seem to be the biggest proponents of the war?
I’ve always been confused on this point. What are their politics? Are they the Israeli equivalent of the Amish - non-political, religiously peaceful, easily identifiable (as opposed to a “conscientious objector”?)
The ultra-Orthodox are disengaged from the rest of Israel. Politically, they seem to care most about issues related to religious observance and their religious schools. My understanding is that they are not particularly hawkish or dovish. The hawks come from the Jews of Middle Eastern descent, called Mizrahi ("from the East"). They make up about half the population, and once they started voting in large numbers the Israeli left became a minority. Of course, the unrelenting hostility from militants on the Palestinian side did much to drive the rest of Israelis to the right on foreign policy.
Thanks for the response!
So are they a distinct sect, like the Amish, or is it more of a coalition of highly religious Israelis - more of a broad philosophy?
Im trying to understand why this issue seems to have such high valence in Israel. Why is it one of six demands by Gantz? The Amish represents such a distinct, small, and highly respected population in the US that giving them such extreme self-governance is pretty simple and not broadly impactful. But if the group is more amorphous - if it becomes a haven of draft dodgers - I guess I see the concern.
I am not an expert on Israeli society, but my impression is that there are deep emotional divisions between a large secular population and a sizable Orthodox population. The seculars fear that the Orthodox will create a theocracy. The huge demonstrations against "judicial reform" that were roiling Israel before October 7 were largely driven by the fear that without a very strong Supreme Court the theocracy scenario would play out. At least, that is my analysis, which others may disagree with.
I tried to explain some of this unique situation here in the context of the judicial reform:
https://tamritz.substack.com/p/use-ultra-orthodox-theology-to-save
Imagine if the Amish were a much large % of society and growing. They don't have a foreign policy, but they support "conservative" candidates by temperament and as a result your state makes abortion illegal or something. Such a policy doesn't even have to be a particular goal of the Amish, only that they are a visible minority that drives electoral outcomes you don't like.
The actual Amish in America have very low voter turnout, but they are also exempt from a lot of what normal American citizens are. They aren't liable for the draft, they are allowed to homeschool their kids, and they don't pay for or receive social security, medicare, or medicaid. The deal essentially is that the Amish leave politics alone if politics leaves them alone.
If you break that deal and make politics affect them, then they will likely get more involved in politics. Imagine for instance if leftists decided that Amish homeschooling should be illegal because it harms the children (lots of governments make homeschooling illegal).
Likewise the Amish are a majority in the many rural counties they live in hence if they ever had to go political they could, and have historical. You don't win an elected office in Amish country campaigning against the Amish.
One wonders how “day-after planning” fits into Israel’s broader geopolitical strategy, in particular its future relationship with the US and whether it would be feasible to pivot to a non-aligned posture given the presence of significant pro-Hamas elements in the US and its remaining allies. And at this point the US’s military aid to Lebanon appears as to be little more than funding for Hezbollah as a US proxy for keeping Israel from achieving more influence in the region.
In this regard, it is an uncertain world: resilient arms supply chains and relations with other nations in the region would seem to be important factors in how far Israel is willing to allow the US to dictate its policies. Israelis no doubt realize that Obama’s MOU providing defined annual levels of military support expires in 2028. Renewal is by no means certain and the US will likely demand significant concessions. US aid was about 15 of Israeli defense spending over the period of the MOU up until October 7. And, perhaps as important, that figure includes $500 million worth of Iron Dome missiles from Raytheon annually. Finding an alternate supplier or substitute seems like it ought be a factor in determining Israel’s negotiating posture and ability to walk away from whatever deal the Obama-Biden foreign policy establishment puts on the table.
Israeli weapons exports to India are an important part of the Israeli economy.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/israels-military-exports-top-buyer-india-unaffected-by-gaza-war-2024-02-23/ One wonders whether a BRICS that is flexible enough to have both Iran and Saudi Arabia as members, is flexible enough to accommodate Israel as well. Israeli-Indian relations may well increase in strategic importance and with India having its own problems in the Punjab and elsewhere, may well be a more sympathetic potential ally in the future. An increasingly belligerent and powerful Turkey appears to have increased its NATO and EU influence rendering Europe less relevant to Israel’s needs.
The worst thing the Israelis could do to themselves is to cower before the United States. When the US chose to invade Gaza by building the pier, it placed the pier’s security in Israel’s hands. Since the US is withholding promised weapons, Israel ought be be demanding something in return. Israel could, for example place tariffs on aid deliveries as a price for providing security to the allegedly humanitarian aid flowing to Hamas.
Reparations ought to be the foundation of any day-after plan. Just as the Germans suffered reparations as part of settling with the Allies to end WWII, so must the Gazans. WWII reparations were largely not in the form of cash payments. Rather, part took the form of dismantling Germany’s industrial capital and relocating it to the Allies. Since Gaza has negligible industrial machinery, land might be substituted. Perhaps allotted to the families of the October 7 terror victims. But a significant portion took the form of forced labor. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II ) Forced labor would be very helpful in giving the Gazans something to do to keep them out of trouble and perhaps earn their keep. As well as building some basic social capital and new organizations oriented towards a productive future rather than wallowing in recriminations. Israel might retain supervision of such a plan but insist on cooperation from international organizations in carrying out the day-to-day operations. The Jordanians and Egyptians don’t want anything to do with the Gazans, they might see a benefit from a forcefully reorganized and reconstituted Gazan governance infrastructure as a tolerable outcome for accepting labor reparations in day-after plans.
Being an old coot, I can't help thinking of WW11 where we faced two pathogenic belief systems of the Nazis and Japanese, both of which had beliefs similar to Hamas that survival depended upon the elimination or complete domination of all "others". Tolerance and "live and let live" were not part of their beliefs. The benefits of specialization and trade were ignored and the benefits of organized terror and theft were central in their thinking.
This changed with unconditional surrender and total victory. It forced the Germans and Japanese to look at the option of economic success through positive sum "specialization and trade" which demands that you don't dominate and kill your trading partner.
Hamas and its religious/legal system are addicted to a negative sum game of theft and oppression learned from the middle aged barbarians and like all types of addicts, it has to hit bottom before recovery is possible. It took killing ten of millions of Japanese and Germans to change their minds, but their thinking was changed.
Since Israel is already convicted of "genocide" by so-called "international opinion", perhaps they should get the benefits. Note that we killed a 100,000 Japanese in Tokyo in one night using < 5% of the munitions already used by Israel in there highly targeted attacks. Biden wants them to use dumb bombs, like we did in WW11, and they could also easily kill 100,000 Palestinians in one night.
You are misremembering the Japan/Germany story, the real thing that made that work was Soviet Union, i.e. everyone at every level from the Emperor to the street sweeper could see they had two options knew the Soviet alternative was worse. It has nothing to do with the amount dead.
If you live in Gaza, you don't have any other option, no one is going to free you from Israel nor is someone worse then Israel going to take over.
Peter: If you look at the numbers, being a Palestinian living in Israel, which makes up about 20% of Israeli citizens, is a lot better life with more opportunities that living in Gaza under the UNRWA welfare state as a parasite on the world. Your children can be actually educated including medicine and scientists instead of being trained to become a martyr.
The Germans did give up their Nazi belief system in both East and West Germany which negates your argument that the Soviet Union was a factor rather than the strong emotional factor of absolutely loosing the war with an unconditional surrender after millions were killed.
Right but what you don't have is your freedom. Many people, including those in Gaza, would rather die free than live as a slave.
There was no option in Germany to retain your Nazi beliefs, you would be jailed or shot depending which side the border you were on nor were you required to give up being German.
On the other hand in Gaza you have nothing to give up but your life or ethnic identity. You think Japan would have went over well has we required them to identify as Chinese and adopt Chinese culture and customs as a condition of surrendering?
Is the ethnic identity of Gaza citizens just to kill the Jews as stated in the Hamas charter and all their statements indicating total intolerance and the impossibility of taking advantage of "specialization and trade" with Israel to improve the lives of the Gaza citizens?
The overwhelming number of dead in Gaza as well as those harmed aren't members of Hamas, they are simply Palestinians. Hence once again their choice is to give up be Palestinian and become Arab-Israeli at 20% you mentioned did or die.
Relative to other city wars, the IDF has the lowest ratio of civilians to Hamas fighters of any combat at any time in history. The numbers demonstrate the fact that Israelis are fighting a very civilized war and not adopting the rules of barbaric rape and murder of civilian set by Hamas on 10/7. They only have to give up their barbaric beliefs and join the world of civilization and progress. Is giving up being a martyr such a big deal? Even getting your family paid for becoming a martyr, that belief is a bit hard on the believer. These are irrational beliefs not based in observable reality but in mythical magic.
Note the numbers from Hamas are known to be propaganda not valid numbers and even the BBC, NYT, and UN have recognized the numbers as nonsense BS. For example, you have about 80 people/day dying of "old age" (at 80+ I watch it happen to all my friends) in a population of 2.3 million. That is just life except in Hamas nonsense statistics. Like today when they claimed 90 were killed, they have 80 dead geezers like me plus 10 probably fighters and they can still claim more females than males (old people have higher female % than young people) and if the fighters are under 18 they can add in children.
I fear this analysis may be right. But I think it would help to unpack the idea of “nation-building”. In several of the relevant literatures nations are distinguished from states. And “state-building” may be what is relevant here. The development of a single national identity (“nation-building”) was a possible goal for Iraq or, at some time, Yugoslavia. Obviously many will not want to use the term “state-building” for Gaza as that would imply support for some kind of two-state solution. So perhaps the term needed would be “government-building”, the development of the multiple institutions that are needed to govern the populated polity of Gaza. It seems that the US/Allies “government-building” experiments in post-war Japan and Germany were successes. And that may be because existing governing institutions were not destroyed and individuals in the agencies were not all fired — see Bremmer’s Iraq for object lessons here. So might it be possible to preserve many government agencies in Gaza, even if the employees were Hamas affiliated, and merely to restrict high-level Hamas officials? If so, perhaps that form of “government-building” is what ought to be tried. It’s possible that Egypt might even lend a hand here, despite its hatred of Hamas. (These brief remarks may be opaque.)
I'm not sure that Insurgency is the right model for any part of the Israel-Palestine conflict, of which Israel-Hamas is a part.
It might be useful to clearly define "insurgency". I think it's generally taken to mean armed conflict by some part of a local population against existing authorities. So, Northern Ireland was an insurgency, because it was some residents of Northern Ireland fighting to force the UK to give up Northern Ireland. The Korean War was not an insurgency, because it had no South Koreans fighting to topple the ROK government. Vietnam was partly insurgency (the Viet Cong fighting to topple the RVN government) and partly conventional war (North Vietnam Army fighting RVN army).
There have been successful counterinsurgency campaigns. As Rory Armstrong says, Northern Ireland is one. Malaya after World War II is another. Greece after World War II is another. Contra Arnold, I'd say Vietnam is a fourth. By 1968, the Viet Cong had been defeated; from that point on, the war was carried on only by the North Vietnamese Army. This didn't result in victory for the RVN, but the counterinsurgency part of the conflict was won.
It's possible that Israel could win a counterinsurgency campaign in Gaza, and in Palestine more generally. One way would be to identify Palestinians who want a peaceful settlement, who also have some legitimacy (or potential legitimacy) among the Palestinian population. Israel could install these people in power and provide initial security to establish a government. They'd have to wage a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign - not just against Hamas, but every other faction that prefers armed conflict and rejects a peaceful coexistence with Israel. This is certainly nation-building, although I'm not sure it would have to be "emergency". I expect the armed conflict would take years to resolve. It would involve using economic power to support the new government - Hamas already uses the economic power that comes from control of aid money to maintain its power. It would mean organizing, equipping, training, and supporting a Palestinian security force that could and would cooperate with Israel. It would mean propping up a Palestinian government whose sole virtue might be that they were willing to stop fighting Israel.
I'm not saying such a solution is within reach. Certainly, the existing Palestinian factions would resist it. They would have support from Iran, and possibly Turkey. Perhaps Egypt and Jordan would openly help Israel. Who knows what the Saudis would do?
If a counterinsurgency campaign can be won, the question becomes "Can a nation-building campaign work?" The inspiring answer would be "Just look at Germany and Japan." But these were societies that had institutions and cohesion, the previous regimes had been discredited by years of losing war, and the populations wanted peace, prosperity, and good governance. Nation-building has been less successful in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and others. Whatever solution Israel tries for, they can't expect a satisfactory solution to emerge without being imposed militarily, and they certainly can't count on military manpower from outside.
Israelis are quite realistic. When they say they want to defeat Hamas, they do not mean they can track down every single member of Hamas, detain, or kill them. What they mean is they want to destroy Hamas as an effective governing and military force. Regarding insurgency, they aim to reduce it to a manageable low level. What exactly "low level and manageable" means is obviously debatable. If, after day one, Hamas is able to carry out one bombing every single day, then it is obviously not a low-level manageable insurgency. If Hamas is able to carry out one bombing once a year, I guess it is.
I keep reading things like, "By 1968, the Viet Cong had been defeated." I feel fairly sure that is wishful thinking. As an analogy, I suggest the Taliban. They were supposedly defeated within a few years after the US armed forces went in in the early 2000s. Indeed, they weren't very visible. But they were always there, and in less than 20 years had defeated the US.
How much have you read about the Vietnam war? I based my statement on 2 books:
From the American perspective "Unheralded Victory" by Mark Woodruff
From the Vietnamese perspective "A Vietcong Memoir" by Truong Nhu Tang
Tang's account is particularly explicit: After the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong were militarily insignificant. The military victory was entirely by the North Vietnamese Army.
I agree that the Taliban were never decisively defeated.
I have not read either book. I suppose I'm reacting because I usually see statements like "The Viet Cong was defeated in 1968" in support of an argument that the war was won, if only we could somehow entice the North Vietnamese to stop meddling. There would then be a stable South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia would not fall to Communists, and there would be peace in Asia. That's just silly.
I think of the Viet Cong kind of like a forest fire. You can douse all the flames, but if there are some burning embers and enough dry vegetation, it will blaze back up eventually.
"The Viet Cong was defeated" is a very different statement from "The war was won." My topic was insurgency, and the insurgency was the Viet Cong. When the Viet Cong was defeated, the war became exclusively a conventional war, fought by the North Vietnamese Army.
Woodruff's claim is that the conventional war was also won, in the sense that the RVN government controlled essentially all of its territory, had a functioning government and was able to defeat a conventional attack from North Vietnam in 1973, with essentially no US ground forces involvement (but significant US air power). He claimed that continued US assistance, with equipment to replace losses and direct air support when South Vietnam was threatened, would have allowed South Vietnam to remain free. This is dubious, but not completely ridiculous. It also assumes the willingness of the US to provide significant military support indefinitely.
If others claim that South Vietnam would have been stable and independent if only North Vietnam would stop fighting (I'm not sure who you're referring to, exactly), that claim might be "true" in some sense, but it's kind of like saying South Vietnam would have been good for oil production, if it had oil. It was clear from the beginning that Ho Chi Minh and his successors would not stop fighting until Vietnam was unified under their control. The only way they would have stopped would have been if the US, or South Vietnam, invaded and controlled their territory, hunted down and imprisoned surviving communist officials, and installed a new regime. The US never intended to do that, and I doubt any South Vietnamese leader ever considered the possibility.
I couldn't agree more with your first sentence. But I'm not sure it's important.
1) Defeated for now and defeated forever are two different things.
2) I think it is impossible to separate the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese government. Saying "the Viet Cong were defeated and the North Vietnamese Army won the war" is like saying "the army was defeated and the navy won the war." The army still gets to march in the victory parade and be part of the victorious government.
As you say, "It was clear from the beginning that Ho Chi Minh and his successors would not stop fighting until Vietnam was unified under their control." And that's exactly what happened.
If you want to understand the Viet Cong, I heartily recommend Truong's book. He was a non-communist who was named the Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government declared by the Viet Cong. In public, the Viet Cong claimed their objective was to overthrow the Republic of Vietnam government, which they considered an illegitimate creation of the French, and replace it with a free government, separate from the North, including both communists and non-communists. They lost a lot of their strength beginning in 1967, and had essentially no military strength after 1968. They also had little or no popular support in the population by that time, although the Provisional Government held together in hiding in the jungle, hoping for a role in a new government if the North won. They probably got some encouragement in this hope from the North Vietnamese, but there was no hope of re-establishing the Viet Cong as a political or military force.
Where did nation building work? Northern Ireland.
Yes it's an incredibly clunky form of government but the troubles - the insurgency - did end. Besides some muted rumblings the peace is holding strong.
What it required might feel unthinkable right now but if I look 100 years into the future Israel has two options: the eradication of all traces of Hamas (would anyone support the British in an similar situation with the IRA?), or to integrate those people into a unified state.
If the region stays in the state it's been in the past 40 years what does the area look like in 2124? What occured in those 100 years? Who would be willing to bet on 100 years of peace with this status quo? I'd place that bet in Northern Ireland.
Like a couple other comments that point to Japan and Germany post-WW2 as "nation building successes" this ignores that those countries had centuries of development of various social institutions that most of us recognize as normal for a moden nation state. As an example, Germany actually had a more widespread voter franchise before WWI than Great Britain even if its parliament had less power. The Allies weren't starting from near scratch, and nether were the Irish. Though there was a sectarian element to the Irish Troubles it didn't have the 'all or nothing ' character of Muslim antipathy to Judaism.
The primary source of Israel's Palestinian problem is their usefulness to other bad actors (including various American politicians) as a means to disrupt Israel. Take away that outside support and the problem largely goes away.
Germany and Japan are excluded because the qualifier wasn't nation building which can work, but nation building IN RESPONSE to a guerilla war / movement; Japan nor Germany had those in a meaningful way.
Two examples though that did kind of work, or at least, didn't fail completely, were Kosovo (by putting the terrorists in power) and the Philippines where Spain had a nasty insurrection going.
I'd argue Palestine is closer to being N Ireland than to Afghanistan. Think Qatar or UAE as a desired outcome.
The UK Spectator suggests that Netanyahu wants to make the "day after" quite a lot like the "day before" only with a much weaker Hamas.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/bibis-plan-for-a-post-war-gaza/
This of course fails to meet anyone's hopes for an end state but does allow Netanyahu to reamain PM, keep the war cabinet in place and therefore escape his various court cases and the electoral consequences for being the person who enabled Hamass and Oct 7 in the first place
This is not exclusively a question to be decided based on what Israel, or Netanyahu in particular, wants. This is mostly a question about what goals are achievable, what is the best that can be achieved within the imposed constraints.
Some people believe that groups unify under an external threat. Those who have lived it know better.
No it's true. But it's relative to the baseline, so you need to grade a nation's political unification level on its own curve. On the Israeli-normalized political scale, this is 90th percentile.