What Should Israel Do if Not This?
When the intellectually correct answer isn't politically possible.
I found the latest edition of the Ezra Klein Show, “If Not This, Then What Should Israel Do?” uncharacteristically frustrating. It, after all, attempts to answer a question that has been frequently adduced in the discussions of the war here. The answer, however, is fundamentally unsatisfying.
As usual, Klein is a thoughtful interviewer who’s well-prepared and nuanced. His guest, Vox‘s Zack Beauchamp, is thoughtful and came to the interview having done his homework. Further, they both come from similar perspectives as 30-something, elite school-educated journalists of the American center-left. Indeed, they worked together at Vox, which Klein co-founded, so presumably have some rapport. So, the conversation is thoughtful and interesting. Yet, it was not the least bit satisfying.
Partly, it’s a function of fast-moving events. The conversation was released sometime Tuesday, was actually held on October 26, and is based on Beauchamp’s October 20 piece “What Israel should do now.” So, to some degree, the question is moot: they ground invasion is well underway.
Klein and Beauchamp agree both that the atrocities committed by Hamas were outrageous and barbaric and that Israel’s actions thus far have led to unacceptable death and suffering among Palestinian civilians. Moreover, and quite fundamentally, they believe not only that Israel’s actions will not achieve their desired end state, but that they will only escalate the cycle of violence. Further, Beauchamp charges persuasively there is no plan behind Israel’s ground offensive. This is to say, neither the political nor the military leadership can articulate, even privately, how this destruction will lead to a Hamas-free future and a safe Israel.
With perhaps minor quibbles, I agree with all of that.
Beauchamp talked to all manner of experts in reporting the above-linked essay and specifically hones in on this:
Ezra Klein: But we actually know some things about terrorism broadly. Sometimes I think it is useful to abstract out of this conflict and think about others. And you talked to Audrey Kurth Cronin, who’s a military strategy expert and the author of the book “How Terrorism Ends,” which is probably the best study of how terrorism ends. What does her research say?
Zack Beauchamp: So one of Audrey’s main research questions was the extent to which what she calls repression — that’s just violence, basically, of various different forms — is effective at dealing with terrorism and addressing it. And what she found in the roughly 460 cases that she examined is that it’s not. It doesn’t typically work. And there are lots of reasons for that.
One of them is that the amount of violence that you need to do over a long period of time to repress a terrorist organization is, A, huge, and B, often quite indiscriminate. One thing I’ve learned from other studies of war and conflict is that a lot of civilian allegiance depends — and this is sort of very intuitive and surprising people don’t think about it more — it depends on their own self-interest.
If you are literally going to die because you don’t collaborate with X group, then you’ll collaborate with X group regardless of what your ideological or other allegiances incline you towards. There’s a great book on this by Stathis Kalyvas, who’s a Greek political scientist. It’s called “The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars.”
But what that means is to really get civilians to not want to cooperate with an insurgent or terrorist group, a lot of the time that entails threatening their lives in very, very, very large numbers, directly and intentionally. Committing war crimes, right? So a good example of this is the Sri Lankan military’s defeat of the Tamil Tigers. It took many years, was extremely bloody, and involved wide-scale repression of the Tamil population.
Israel will have a very hard time doing that. I know there’s a lot of critics of Israel right now accusing it of committing an incipient genocide. There’s not a lot of evidence that that’s happening, in part because the Israeli military is so strong that it could do so much more if what it really wanted to do was exterminate the Palestinian population or force them into a choice where it’s give up on Hamas or we kill you. They’re not being super discriminate, but they’re not being indiscriminate either. And this speaks to something that Audrey told me, which I think is really insightful. She said that Israel, as a democracy, is really ill-suited to do that kind of strategy.
Ezra Klein: The strategy of overwhelming repression.
Zack Beauchamp: That’s right. Because whatever you think about Israel or whatever you think about the politics, its treatment of the Palestinians, there’s a really essential self-conception of Israel as a democracy. It really matters. Even the parties on the extreme right claim to be standing up for Israeli democracy. And there’s a certain set of values associated with that that matter to the population. And so there’s a level of force, a pretty significant level of force they can countenance against Palestinians.
But the level of force required to engage in pure repression strategy is well beyond that. I mean, however bad you think this conflict is, a full scale repression strategy would be much, much, much, much worse. Much, much, much, much worse. And it just seems very hard to imagine the Israeli government doing that because it would cost them everything, both domestically and geopolitically. The U.S. — I mean, that’s the kind of thing that could force the U.S. to abandon Israel.
Instead, the experts Beauchamp talked to agree, some combination of counterterrorism and political strategies must be employed. He goes into what this means in some detail and I don’t have the time to excerpt all that here. But the bottom line is that it means, on one hand, a very slow process of killing individual terrorist leaders and others with hard-to-replace skillsets within Hamas and addressing the political grievances that enable Hamas to begin with.
And here’s the thing: I think this is probably right. I’m not hopeful that any strategy will solve what, for 75 years, has been an intractable problem. But, ultimately, unless Israel is willing to kill every Palestinian man, woman, and child—and they clearly* aren’t—then, ultimately, some political solution is the only conceivable solution.
The problem, of course, is that it’s simply unthinkable that Israel’s government—or any democratically elected government whose population has been attacked in such a brutal and horrifying fashion—would respond in that fashion, at least in the short term. As much as I think Netanyahu is a thug whose policies have set back the cause of peace for decades, there’s simply no way that even the most beneficent Israeli leader could persuade his people right now to respond to mass atrocities by turning the other cheek and seeking to build a bridge to the future with the Palestinian people.
Will that need to happen at some point? I would think so. Alas, history has given us little reason to think that it can work to resolve this particular conflict, given both the mutually exclusive demands for two peoples to have dominion over a single piece of real estate and the ability of militant factions to re-ignite violence through relatively small acts.
Like Beauchamp, I haven’t the slightest idea what the end state of this invasion will be. The most obvious way to achieve the ostensible end state is ethnic cleansing: simply forcing all Palestinians out of Gaza under threat of death. Yet, every indication is that this is not the plan.
At the same time, I don’t see how Netanyahu can do other than a massive response to the attacks. A reckoning is called for, even if there’s no obvious end game.
___________
*Beauchamp rightly points out, whatever one thinks of the actions they’ve taken thus far, they certainly have the capacity to have been exponentially more destructive than they have, which would seem to be an indicator that they actually care about human rights.
Commenters here have been very annoyed at me for pointing out the obvious: there is no good solution here in the real world, just an array of bad choices. The least bad and most politically feasible is what’s happening – massive retaliation with the aim of crippling Hamas. The yammering for a ceasefire is a demand to prioritize the people of Gaza today, over the lives of Israelis tomorrow when Hamas will attack again. That’s not realistic, and it objectively favors Hamas.
Bright people, people of good will, who have not studied history and are not read-in on the realities of foreign policy and the lousy choices FP often requires, have little ability to come to grips with this situation beyond asking, ‘won’t somebody think of the children?’
The fundamental problem is that those “political grievances” are the fact that the Palestinians hate the Jews. And they don’t hate the Jews because of this or that stupid, brutal, or immoral Israeli policy. Those things may fan the flames but the Palestinians hate the Jews because they are Jews.
The Palestinians could have had “a” Palestine decades ago. It wouldn’t have been everything they wanted, but a functioning nation-state with some level of sovereignty? That wouldn’t have been hard at all to make happen. The Palestinians just needed to honestly and completely give up on the dream of murdering every Jew in Israel. And whatever sovereignty was lacking to start could have been won by decades and generations of proving they could be trusted to not want to murder every Jew in Israel.
Whether it’s old fashioned Arab antisemitism or Western elites who demean and disparage Israel as a “settler-colonial ethno-state,” the problem remains the same. Hating the Jews. The refusal to acknowledge that is the root of every other problem.
@TheRyGuy: Voila the illustration of the dialogue of mutual bigotries.
This is what bothers me about @Michael Reynolds’ position — nothing Israel is doing will result in a safer Israel. If you kill someone’s family by bombing a refugee camp, or a safe route, or a hospital*, they’re ripe to become the next Hamas terrorist. Or post-Hamas terrorist, if enough leadership of Hamas is killed that there is a rebranding.
Killing terrorists is good. Killing a large number of people to get to that terrorist is counterproductive. Cutting off water, creating humanitarian crises, etc… counterproductive.
In three years we will be right where we are now, lamenting the slaughter of Jewish Israelis at a Petting Zoo or whatever it is then.
If Israel is going to do some performative bombing and killing that ultimately solves nothing other than a domestic need for revenge, then they can just say “done” at any time.
Instead, they are just bombing a civilian population and cutting off food, water and fuel for no reason. A civilian population that they have forced into an open-air prison for decades, creating the conditions that makes Hamas staying in power inevitable.
——
*: no, not that hospital, the other one. Light shelling perhaps, rather than bombing. Don’t matter to those left behind.
Good post on a frustrating topic James. There’s one sentence that I think speaks to the larger issue:
In many respects, this attack is both Netanyahu’s fault in both the short term (apparently ignoring Intel and focusing on protecting settlers) and the long term (abandoning the peace process and embracing a “mow the lawn” approach to managing Hamas while also enabling the Israeli right win to push forward illegal settlements and Palestinian displacement).
I have heard that when asked about stopping WWII Ghandi ultimately responded that “a true non-violent approach to stopping the war would have concentrated on preventing the conditions that led to the war in the first place” (that’s a paraphrase… and this could be an apocraphal quote).
I realize that people will react with, “that’s magical thinking,” and I agree with that critique. And I still think, to the points raised in the podcast, that answer creates a lot of space for thinking. Netanyahu’s setting the peace process back helped Hamas grow (as did the impossibly tight restrictions placed on Gaza). So did his hubris in thinking that all he had to do was “mow” Hamas occasionally to maintain the status quo.
They result was this historic attack that boxed his government into only one type of response.
What is scary is that this same government is also responsible for putting into place a long-term plan to work on this situation once they have fully broken Gaza. As many keep pointing out, there have been little to no hints that such a plan is being worked on or what it would entail.
Again, we saw how well that strategy worked for the US in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The problem with the counter-terrorism approach is Hamas is not just a terrorist group. It’s the governing authority in Gaza and has been for two decades. It’s the de facto government there. In that way, it is more like ISIS or the Taliban than Al Qaeda, for example. ISIS had a military force, took territory, and governed. So did the Taliban. We didn’t defeat ISIS and eject them from Mosul, Raqqa and much of Iraq and Syria via counter-terrorism and political action, although those played a role. Similarly, we initially defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan with military force.
Hamas uses the tactics of a terrorist group, but it also has a military force (some even wear uniforms), controls territory, and governs that territory. Counter-terrorism is insufficient when an opponent is a de facto government and not merely terrorists hiding in territory they don’t govern.
To the extent that Israel’s invasion does not have an obvious end-game for a post-Hamas Gaza, a counter-terrorism and political strategy has the same lack of an end-game, but also adds in the complication that counter-terrorism is not a sufficient tool for countering a group that is also a government. The counter-terrorism strategy will be just more “mowing the grass” as long as Hamas remains in charge in Gaza.
If you look at Afghanistan, for example, the Taliban was the governing authority that also used terrorist tactics and promoted terrorism by allying with AQ. They couldn’t be initially defeated with counter-terrorism alone – it required military force. And once they were no longer the governing authority, it became a battle of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency.
And for most of the two decades of our attempts to build a legitimate and alternative governing authority, the Taliban still had (or tried to have) governing structures in place – a complete shadow government that tried to impose its will on Afghanistan where it could. And I lost count of the number of shadow governors, deputy governors, and “middle management,” etc. that we killed along the way, while the primary leadership remained relatively safe in Pakistan.
And with Hamas, the primary leadership is relatively safe in Qatar – also a US ally.
So yeah, there are no easy answers, and no one really has an end game either. Hamas, considering how it’s doubled-down on everything it’s done and wishes to do, is as unreformable as ISIS. And that’s why I think they need to be destroyed such that they can no longer govern Gaza and steal all the resources sent there to build up for the next iteration of their war with Israel. What replaces Hamas is unknowable but it’s hard to see what could be worse.
And, in my view, the governing aspect is critical here. Israel is a democracy, which means that the chances for a change in Israeli policy is potentially available, especially since Netanyahu is probably a dead man walking politically. There is no such democratic check on Hamas, and there is absolutely zero opportunity for any kind of long-term peaceful settlement between Israel and Palestinians while Hamas is the de-facto government for a major portion of the Palestinian population.
And then there is Hezbollah, supported by Iran, which also can exercise a veto, and which also de facto governs territory and operates independently of the Lebanese government while also participating in that government. At least there, the complicated Lebanese political dynamics put some pressure on Hezbollah to not unilaterally drag the rest of Lebanon into another disastrous war.
@Matt Bernius:
The irony is that the counter-terrorism approach is more “mowing the grass,” just in a slightly more aggressive way.
And it seems pretty clear at this point that the “impossibly tight” restrictions were entirely justified and were not nearly as “prison-like” as many claim. The one time Israel let its guard down resulted in a massacre. Does anyone think Israel will make that same mistake twice?
Those complaining about the supposed “open-air prison” should understand that the previous restrictions will be increased to be like the DMZ between North and South Korea as long as Hamas remains the governing authority there. This is another reason that everyone should want Hamas in the dustbin of history.
And I’ll mention a more fundamental problem that doesn’t get discussed often enough. Palestinians have to take some responsibility for the lack of any credible leadership on their side that can deliver promises. Palestinians have been in a de facto civil war with highly factionalized politics since Arafat left the scene. Added to this is a lot of meddling by outsiders, including Arabs, Iran, the US, Israel, and others, to promote various factions. Iran, in particular, promotes and supports the more extreme factions like Hamas.
So, while I agree that Israel has cynically taken advantage of internal division within the Palestinian polity, the fact remains that Israel cannot deliver any compromises to Palestinians as long as Palestinians do not have the collective ability to have coherent and legitimate leadership that can negotiate and keep any promises and compromises they make. Right now, that doesn’t exist. It’s frankly not Israel’s job (or anyone else) to make sure this happens for Palestinians, just like it’s not the job of Democrats to fix all the internal divisions in the GoP. Palestinians need to have leadership that legitimately represents their interests – and without that, there can be no politics.
@Andy:
Agreed. This is why I keep asking about any reporting on Israel’s commitment to state-building in Gaza. Because as far as I can tell, they have three options in front of them:
1. Commit to helping rebuild a non-Hamas-run local government.
2. Decimate Hamas, then withdraw, leaving Gaza in rubble, and then face this same problem within a generation.
3. Commit to the government’s position for years and fully annex Gaza and make it part of Israel.
I don’t think 3 happens, only because I’m not sure if it’s politically possible for Israel to do that for all the reasons in the podcast.
Option 1 is the best option for a long-term peaceful solution–that said I don’t think that happens because of Netanyahu.
So I suspect the result of this war will look like 2 and that’s going to lead to a humanitarian disaster and ultimately just kick the can down the road.
A political solution is necessary.
The Camp David negotiations mainly failed because Israel – on account of the West Bank settlements – wasn’t willing to give the Palestinians control of a viable state. While they offered most of the West Bank + Gaza, the former was divided into four non-contiguous areas without freedom of movement for the Palestinians.
It also happens that all Israeli settlements are illegal according to international law.
Thus, I would say that Israel should offer a compromise based on full Palestinian control of the West Bank. And I see now reason why the international community should demand anything less.
Full control of the West Bank is still significantly less than what the Palestinians could rightfully claim based on international law. It doesn’t include, for instance, the right of return of all 4m Palestinian refugees to Israel, or full sovereignty, including the right to conclude alliances and have a full-fledged military.
Unfortunately, Israel has deliberately worsened the situation over the past twenty years by significantly expanding the illegal West Bank settlements. And I don’t see any Israeli government agreeing to removing 700,000 settlers.
Even though they are legally required to do so.
I think peace with the Palestinian Authority and most Palestinians can be had (which would naturally severely weaken Hamas), but successive Likud governments have chosen a different path.
And that’s on them.
The only thing that will significantly change the situation is when other regional actors stop cynically using the Palestinian cause to prop up their own domestic popularity. They will keep supplying weapons, money and PR to Hamas/Hezbollah and the rest of them as long as they figure it’s to their advantage to do so.
It’s depressing as hell because in effect the Palestinians are just pawns and Israel is in a truly impossible situation. Which Netanyahu and the settler movement make significantly worse, I think, but it’s not really possible to negotiate with terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Which is what makes Netanyahu and the Israeli far right’s deliberate handicapping of Fatah so infuriating. Fatah are no angels with a terrible history, but they have evolved beyond Hamas (why do you think Hamas executed them in Gaza?).
And thus the frustrating and depressing conclusion: real change won’t happen without tremendous behind the scenes efforts with Iran and the rest of the Islamic world, which probably also involves somehow cooling off the Sunni/Shia conflict that has been raging for more than 1400 years. Good luck with that.
If only Israel had been created in Alabama or something (joke!) back in 1948. Or maybe Wyoming-I’m not sure that state really exists anyway.
The settlers have paramilitary groups that come in and set up illegal outposts and confiscate Palestinian land, burn the occasional olive group while the police stand by and watch (or worse yet protect the settlers while they do it). Some of the settlers are terrorists, pure and simple. They don’t have to kill (although they sometimes do) since they have the protection of the government. The current Israeli government can never negotiate with any Palestinians in good faith, their actions in the West Bank make good faith impossible.
Israel is minting today tomorrow’s terrorists who will have at their disposal even more lethal ways to kill their adversaries. Israel must find a way out of this conundrum, first by stopping attacks that have large civilian casualties (how is this even controversial boggles the mind). Second, they have to offer a livable future in the enclave (again semi-random bombing is counter productive). Third, they cannot allow the establishment of a governing unit that is equal anathema to Jews and Palestinians (e.g., Hamas). IMO, Bibi’s greatest moral failure was his alliance with Hamas.
@drj: I think peace with the Palestinian Authority and most Palestinians can be had (which would naturally severely weaken Hamas), but successive Likud governments have chosen a different path.
Netanyahu has one goal that is paramount, and it has nothing to do with peace. It is to stay out of jail, and stay in power. IMO he sees peace as negative, he was fine with the occasional Hamas terrorist incident. What he didn’t count on was what happened, something that the people couldn’t live with. A government that had even a remote interest in peace would not spend billions every year to fund settlement expansion. Any US aid in normal times (eg. annual military aid) should be contingent on no settlement expansion.
@Michael Reynolds: No, we’re disappointed at your decision to cast one bad solution as a right, necessary, and proper choice.
But first class moving of the goal posts. You kept a straight face. Jerry Falwell couldn’t have done better.
I feel the question is the wrong one. Here’s the right one: Why is the US taking sides in a battle where two entities are controlled by fanatics willing to kill each other to take land? From an article today in the NYT:
What was the Israeli goverment response? Send more guns to the settlers because of potential of retaliation.
The people who control the the Palestians are barbarians who kill innocents in an attempt to take land. The people who control the Israelis are barbaians who kill innocents in an attempt to take land. Both sides kill moderates in their midst specifically to cut off the possibility of compromise.
Who should we side with? Those who are searching for compromise and eventually peace. Our official policy of pretending that the Israeli government still has non-extremists in positions of power has merely given the settlers and racists more credibility and power.
@Andy:
If the Israeli Jews are paying a price for that division among the Palestinians, then maybe they should rethink that policy of cynically exploiting, encouraging and taking advantage of those divisions.
The status quo for Israel has has been low levels of terrorism, with the chance of a spectacular plan working (a chance that with enough time was an inevitability).
Maybe, despite it not being “their job” it might improve their own safety and security to prod things in the right direction.
The matter of how to prod and how much is another question, but the status quo of “mowing the lawn” before October 7th wasn’t it, and the current bombing campaign isn’t it either. We’ve seen them play out over and over.
If the Israeli government are going to do something bound to fail, at least do something new that we aren’t sure how it will fail, and will kill fewer civilians.
A dysfunctional Republican Party is better than a functional Republican Party at the moment, given where the bulk of the Republican Party is. One assumes Israel would prefer a divided, incompetent, unable to negotiate Palestinian people, rather than one unified behind Hamas.
I do think that Democrats trying to select the most insane opponent by running ads in the Republican primaries is not always a great idea. (The most visibly insane among the equally insane… sure)
A better question is why would Israel ever give the Palestinians a real state (not the muddled, utter fakery of 2000)? Liberal Israelis might despise the sociopaths who killed Rabin and are now, essentially, in power, but a full withdrawal from the West Bank? No army checkpoints, no settlements, no balkanized legalese designed to sell peace to far-off American pundits? And then an actual means to connect the Palestinians who have been pushed into Gaza?
Nah. It wasn’t happening before 10/7. It wasn’t happening in the place where Hamas happened not to be. And I don’t think there’s any so-called democracy in the west which would do this, any more than there’s one that would consider the lives of people collaterally killed off by buttons and plans as equal to those who have been killed by terrorists.
@Just Another Ex-Republican: We have a spare Dakota!
@Michael Reynolds:
A ceasefire is useless if one of the parties involved is not sincere. Hamas isn’t sincere. They will use any ceasefire to gather themselves in preparation for their next attacks.
@Matt Bernius:
Is it possible that the “long-term plan” is to keep Gaza fully broken so that the only route for Gazan Palestinians to live is to become refugees? Is it possible that the long-term plan in the West Bank is for settlers to encroach so thoroughly as to displace the Palestinians completely? Call it the Live Like a Refugee Program if you wish.
And yeah, I know that would be a stupid and self-defeating plan. Does Bibi? Color me skeptical.
I’m glad these ideas are finally being bandied about publicly.
And this is, in fact, how ISIS was defeated. The political strategy was not tangential, it was essential to isolating ISIS from the general population and ultimately, to cutting off its legs — as was minimizing the kinds of collateral deaths that helped create ISIS to begin with.
Per Robert A. Pape, professor of political science and director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, who was studying Hamas long before Oct 7:
And we should listen to the people who’s life work is studying terrorism. The Obama admistration did, with considerable success against ISIS.
@Andy: I can see a potential problem with turning the Gaza Strip into a DMZ like the one between North and South Korea. The DMZ has only ~25o people living in one fairly heavily patrolled and militarily supervised area. Gaza has many more living in many more areas.
Although it might be possible that the strip would be more easily managed given that it’s only about half the size of the DMZ. 🙁
@drj:
So they were offered a deal with a poison pill in it? In some places, that would be called “a pig in a poke,” but I guess that would be inappropriate in this case.
Nevertheless, it won’t invalidate the seemingly oft asserted claim that “The Palestinians were offered an opportunity and threw it on the floor and wizzed all over it! If they’re suffering now, it’s their own damn fault!”
@TheRyGuy:
The mistake made on Iraq was viewing the actions of a small, lucky band of nutcases a collective act of all Arab Muslims. To reduce the grievances of the Palestinians to anti-semitism is ignorant and silly.
@MarkedMan: I think it goes back to the Roosevelt era doctrine: [paraphrased] “he may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.“
@Gustopher:
Domestic tranquility and the common defense are a democratic people’s first job. But if Israelis and Palestinians like their status quo, I love it.
What Israel has been doing — which includes ignoring the advisement of their #1 ally — does not appear to be working. But if they prefer policies that are making Israel less safe and secure, let them have at it and fight themselves to the death, I guess?
Again, I don’t think all who claim to care about Israel are actually interested in Israel’s security. Many are more interested in victimhood, chauvanustic chest-beating, and posturing. Because if you care about someone, you do not encourage them to keep pursuing already-failed strategies. Or lack of strategy.
It would seem Israel should attempt to leverage its superior economic, diplomatic, and militaristic position in support of policies that might make Israelis safer.
If instead interested parties prefer endless insecurity and bloodshed because all Palestinians hate Jews (not true), there’s no potential Palestinian politicians Israel can work with towards peace (not true), and ‘it’s not our job’ (to make yourselves safer? okay)…
…then what are the rest of us to do but wish them godspeed and good luck.
But, no, neither Palestinians nor Israelis are entitled to Americans’ unequivocal and unquestioning support of suicidal behaviors.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I don’t see the self-defeating in it. Chase them all out and the problem goes away. Might take 50-100 years to complete, but what’s to stop it?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I think Israel’s offer was sincere. It just was neither fair nor reasonable. Especially since implementation of the deal by any other party than Labor (Likud in particular) would have resulted in a nightmare for the Palestinians.
Israel’s foreign minister at the time, Shlomo Ben-Ami, later said that “if I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well.”
@dazedandconfused:
It took Americans a long time to get serious about about our counterterrorism policy, instead of using “They hate us because of our freedom!!11!!” as an excuse to pursue counterproductive methods that were creating more terrorists.
@Michael Reynolds: “Commenters here have been very annoyed at me for pointing out the obvious: there is no good solution here in the real world, just an array of bad choices. ”
It is astonishing to me that no matter how many times the truth has been pointed out to you, you choose to continue dining out on this ugly, self-aggrandizing untruth.
No one is mad at you for pointing out there is no good solution. Everyone, no matter where they come down on the subject, knows and agrees that there is no good solution.
What keeps commenters annoyed at you is that you keep stating that you know there is no good solution because you are the only one brave enough to tell the truth, while everyone else who says there is no good solution is blinded by woke ideology and is a naive simp.
Can you finally understand? Or, I’m sure more accurately, are you finally done trolling so that you can admit you’ve understood this all along?
Everybody here, including you, knows that there is no good solution to this crisis. Many people are scrabbling through the wreckage hoping to find one of the least bad solutions, but that’s hardly the same thing as not understanding there is no good solution.
It’s not your point of view that’s annoying people. It’s your smug, condescending arrogance.
Hope that clears this up for you!
That, I think, is the key. Of course Israel will invade Gaza and do what they can to destroy Hamas. But then what? Surely they can come up with some better goal than a return to the status quo ante.
@Andy: “Palestinians need to have leadership that legitimately represents their interests – and without that, there can be no politics.”
So what’s the solution? Keep bombing and killing until some new leadership emerges from the rubble? Can you explain how you see that happening?
Hamas is not the “de facto” government in Gaza. It is the “free and fair”(See Jimmy Carter’s election report) elected government of Gaza. The reason that no new elections have been called since 2007 is because the PLO which controls the presidency does believes Hamas would expand their representation and come to control the government of even the West Bank.
So, if Israel does wipe out Hamas in Gaza expect the claims by Western university professors and there useful idiot students to be that Israel has thwarted the will of the people.
@Gustopher:
At first glance I thought you were proposing an airborne invasion of somewhere. (Inside joke for WWII history buffs.) And I claim credit for the ‘give the Jewish refugees Alabama” joke. OK, half joke.
@JKB: “So, if Israel does wipe out Hamas in Gaza expect the claims by Western university professors and there useful idiot students to be that Israel has thwarted the will of the people.”
It’s comforting to know that whatever the subject, you can always be counted on to make any conversation dumber.
@gVOR10: FWIW, there was actually some consideration of resettling Jews in Alaska. Michael Chabon wrote a great noir detective novel set in an alternative history and the settlement remained until the present day, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union“
@gVOR10:
I can’t fault them overmuch for not having a public grand plan. They don’t have a clear idea of how occupation will go so it would be politically unwise to commit themselves to a policy which might turn out to be undoable or not worth the price. It’s plausible a policy of containment, which is completely off the table at this moment, might become politically viable at some point.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
WTF are you talking about? What goal posts did I move?
I’ve said the same things basically since Day One: That there was no good answer. That it is American naiveté to expect otherwise. That this was a tragedy. That Israel had no choice but to hit back. That they would likely have to write off the hostages. And that I wish people would stop using terms like genocide or indiscriminate, because they are factually wrong.
I also pushed back on the Gaza hospital incident – I was right. And I pushed back on the idea that evacuating the north of Gaza was some sort of intolerable atrocity when it was quite obviously the best that could be made of a bad situation. Right about that, too. And I said calling for a ceasefire was objectively pro-Hamas. Also correct.
No goal-shifting, no leaping to wrong conclusions, all that’s happened is that it’s taken some people three weeks to get here.
@Michael Reynolds: “The yammering for a ceasefire is a demand to prioritize the people of Gaza today, over the lives of Israelis tomorrow when Hamas will attack again.”
Have you REALLY thought about this? Like, really really really?
We should DEFINITELY kill innocent people today because guilty people who we put into the same bucket as them MIGHT kill innocent people tomorrow?
Further, did you think that that is the mindset of Hamas? “We have to strike the Israeli citizenry now so that maybe they’ll respond in a way that makes our lives better.”
If that mindset is an acceptable one for Israel, it is an acceptable one for everyone.
And, frankly, it is unacceptable for ANYONE given even the least bit of consideration, which you seem to have no applied.
@Michael Reynolds: Good to know that in a global situation that everyone in the world believes has no winners, you’ve been able to find one — yourself.
Maybe in the face of ongoing tragedy, making it all about how brilliant you are (and how naive and foolish everyone else is) begins to sound a little off-key.
You’re a writer. What kind of character would look at thousands of dead and wounded and repeatedly use it as a tool for self-aggrandizement?
And if you don’t think this is what you’re doing — if it’s not what you intend to be doing — then you might want to read back over some of your posts and figure out what you’re doing wrong to make people think so.
@JKB:
As usual, your “gotcha” history is incomplete enough to make your essential claim (that the current Hamas government is democratically elected) false on its face.
Yes, there was an election in 2006 that was considered to be “free and fair.” What you fail to note was that the election was for only *4 years of service.* Their electoral mandate ended in 2010. So this is no longer a democratically elected government.
The same thing would be true of the US if a democratically elected Federal Government decided to suspend elections.
Fact do matter.
Going further, the specific government elected in 2006 stopped serving in 2012, when the second Hamas government came to power. That government was eventually replaced by the Unity Palestinian Government.
Hamas eventually left the Unity Government. And while they’ve had dalliances with Fatah, they’ve repeatedly blocked elections. This isn’t all on Abbas and Fatah, as you suggest. Hammas is clearly also concerned about losing its now authoritarian control of Gaza.
And since you are so interested in links, if we look at more recent analyses of Gaza’s government, from organizations like Freedom House, we see quotes like this one:
That link to Freedom House does a good job of tracing the history of elections in Gaza in case you’re interested in adding a bit more nuance to your analysis.
@TheRyGuy:
Thank goodness the leaders of the black church did not sit around waiting for Americans to stop hating blacks before executing political, civic, and rhetorical strategies designed to empower allies, secure our rights, and reduce bloody white supremacist terror against our communities.
We’re still having “conversations about race” and Americans are still racist af. Ain’t nobody got time to wait around for that problem to be acknowledged or solved to do what needs to be done re: pressing our political agenda around justice, safety, and prosperity. We’d be waiting till the end of time.
Andy- I think you simplify the elimination of ISIS. There was a very large political component. We pretty effectively got the tribes and others to side with us against ISIS, even paying them, some of whom had fought against us. We were helped by ISIS being so brutal, but still the effect was to lessen the ability of ISIS to hide amongst the population. People like Bing West made the case that all of this was aided because after our early misadventures we more highly prioritized civilian lives and honoring their culture. I think he said something like “the decency of the common American grunt” helped win them over.
So it’s not just wanting to kill the terrorists. In almost every fight against terrorists people want to do that. It’s also being able and willing to do it.
Steve
@Michael Reynolds: I should have said misdirection, thinking about it, by assigning that nonsense that people are annoyed about you proclaiming that there’s no solution when that point is only minor in your overall schtick. My apologies. Jerry Falwell still can’t hold a candle to you.
And kudos to wr for finding an even better expression of why we’re disappointed (at least I’m disappointed, maybe others are annoyed, who knows?).
@Kazzy: Your position appears to be based on the falsehood that Israel is indiscriminately attacking Palestinians generally and not Hamas specifically. In reality, over the past decades, Israel has limited civilian casualties in Gaza (1:1 ratio of combatants to civilians) far more than the “typical” war has post-WWII (1:4 ratio) despite Hamas deliberately imbedding in with civilians in an urban area, intentionally using them as human shields.
That many Palestinian civilians are collateral damage is indeed horrific and agonizing and profoundly sad. But it isn’t a war crime. Nor is it avoidable.
No country can or should tolerate its citizens being tortured and slaughtered. Nor can they not pursue the perpetrators when there is explicit statements that the intent is to continue to attack in the future. Accordingly, Israel cannot and will not agree to a unilateral cease fire. And that is before taking into account the cultural memories of pogroms and the Shoah.
@SKI:
This is a false contradiction.
According to the Law of Armed Conflict, indiscriminate attacks are attacks which “are expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”
In other words, attacks that specifically target Hamas can still be indiscriminate if the military advantage that can be realistically anticipated is too small in relation to the anticipated damage to civilian life or infrastructure.
It should be noted that UN agencies and experts have repeatedly stated that certain Israeli attacks can almost certainly* be classified as indiscriminate (and thus a war crime) – not because Hamas wasn’t targeted, but because the resulting damage was excessive in relation to the military advantage that could be realistically expected.
Another explanation (from two weeks ago):
* Since we don’t know what Israel was targeting in each such strike, we cannot be know for certain that an individual strike was, in fact, indiscriminate. But at the same time, we do know that it is not realistic that all strikes that caused widespread civilian damage were aiming for military targets of sufficient value to warrant the incidental loss of civilian life.
It’s like cops killing black men. Every individual case could very well be a justified shooting. But if it happens as often as it does, we can realistically know that something isn’t right.
Again, the people best placed (besides the IDF) to know what is going on, such as UN agencies, etc., believe that Israel is launching indiscriminate attacks.
Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, is scheduled to speak tomorrow. I expect that his speech will be maximally martial, but we’ll have to wait to if they will take any meaningful action. The border between Israel and Lebanon has been a venue for low grade back and forth shooting for decades. It is not clear what escalations of the war on that border are planned. It is interesting that the Arab world is not providing much consequential assistance to Gaza.
@Andy:
Shit flows into prisons all the time. It’s a better analogy than you might think.
I generally think reservation might be closer, but the Native Americans are allowed off the reservation, so maybe not.
And the Germans ruined the phrase “concentration camp” — it was never a good word, to be honest — so those are the common analogies.
@wr:
You’re very emotional. I’m not. You want to use this mess to emote, to bleed publicly, to rend garments and pour ashes on your head. Very Hollywood. Cool. I have no objection. I understand the urge. But my urge when presented with a bad situation is to try and understand it. I try to find a solution. In this case, I did not find a solution, and, failing to find a solution I asked if anyone else had found one. And what did I get from the cognoscenti here? Feels. Emotion. Drama. And because I’m not interested in virtue signaling and choose instead to remain analytical, I get abuse from you, including a bullshit accusation where you blamed me for a comment @Eddie made.
Self-aggrandizement? What do you think your emoting is? You’re virtue signaling for all you’re worth, a lot of people here are. Now, three weeks in, we’re approaching a more realistic, grim understanding of things, which is pretty much where I started. Three weeks of breast-beating and where are we? Right where I said we’d end up. And of what value was all your emoting? The same value as my bloodless analysis: fuck all. Because we’re just watching from the sidelines.
@Michael Reynolds: If we’re picking on Mr. Reynolds here, I’ll take a different approach – my only quibble is that you seem to be so pro-Israel that you deny the conditions that put Hamas in the position where they felt justified/motivated to attack in the horrific way they did.
My ask would be that you recognize that both sides are behaving in a simply awful way, and nobody is justified or right or honorable in this whole mess.
Hamas didn’t dig their tunnel system out of a desire for fresh topsoil with which to garden. They felt a genuine threat over a long period of time, and responded by anticipating that they might need such a system to deal with an invasion of a continually hostile neighbor.
And, of course, Israel was attacked – unfairly and indiscriminately – and they have every right to attack back in the same way.
But in doing so, both sides have lost any sort of moral high ground, as much as they try to spin it differently.
@Michael Reynolds: Well, now you get to attribute me with other people’s posts. I haven’t been “emoting” over the attacks — although why you feel that is an inappropriate response is something you might want to talk over with a therapist. (“Doctor, what is wrong with all these people who see the mass slaughter of children and feel bad about it?”)
And not only have I not been “emoting,” I have not been shrieking hysterically and calling everyone who disagrees with me antisemitic. Which sounds kind of emotional to me, but what do I know?
Seriously, Michael, if you want to have a conversation about something rather than just pound your chest and scream that you’re better than everyone else, you might want to drop sentences that start with “I’m the only one who…” That’s talking like Donald Trump.
“TimesOfIsrael”
@Michael Reynolds:
No one is upset that you are pointing out there is no good answer. As noted above, we all know that. Many us as frustrated that you note the lack of a good answer and then act like you have found the right one anyway.
@Michael Reynolds:
FWIW, you do not come across as unemotional on this (or really any) discussion.
@Steven L. Taylor: “Wo the gods the giftee gee us, to see ourselves as ithers see us.”
@Michael Reynolds:
I have stopped reading your posts on this subject because you write like such an asshole. It’s hard to believe you’re a successful writer when you come off so smug and arrogant.
@steve:
Of course there was. The point is that there was a very large military component. The idea that Hamas can be defeated only with politics and counter-terrorism is what I’m arguing against.
@wr:
That’s what war is. And yes, Israel has now Isolated the northern part of Gaza and is beginning to work to kill Hamas fighters in tunnels and destroy the tunnel network, which will be done primarily on the ground.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I meant there will be a DMZ between Israel and Gaza, not that Gaza would become a DMZ.
@Gustopher:
It’s an analogy that’s specifically designed to make Israel look bad and make Gaza and Hamas look like victims. The measures Israel has taken since Hamas took over were in response to multiple Hamas attacks across the border. 10/7 was only the worst in a long line of them. The whole “prison” analogy ignores the very real and legitimate security concerns of sharing a border with a government that is also a genocidal death cult.
And, the border between Gaza and Israel was much more open than between North and South Korea. South Korea isn’t sending food, water, and electricity to the North, nor are they allowing tens of thousands of North Koreans to have jobs in South Korea. Yet, for some reason, no one seriously claims that South Korea and the US are imposing prison-like conditions on the North. Because everyone understands that North Korea is the bad actor here, and understands the history of it’s threats to South Korea, and of infiltrating agents and murdering people. South Korea has taken reasonable measures to protect its population from that threat, a concept that is no different for Israel.
@Andy: I can’t see how a DMZ between Israel and Gaza would work–or even where it would go and where the land for it would come from, but it is an interesting idea. It’s too bad neither of the principals in the conflict would agree to forming one–but that’s true of a lot of proposals there.
@Andy: “And yes, Israel has now Isolated the northern part of Gaza and is beginning to work to kill Hamas fighters in tunnels and destroy the tunnel network, which will be done primarily on the ground.”
Okay, thanks for that deep explanation. Not sure it answers my question about a new generation of leadership rising up as the bombs are falling, but I’m sure the underpants gnomes will come into it some way.
@gVOR10: I’ve been on the Jewish State of Spare Dakota bandwagon for decades.
I think we can get the army corps of engineers to move the wailing wall and some topsoil (how much is needed to be the “land” god granted them?). My worry is the various Native American reservations, though, as Israel doesn’t seem to play well with its neighbors.
@Gustopher: Is Mexico close enough?
I mean it’s quasi “Catholic”, but there are other settlements around claiming to be new Israeli lands.
@just nutha:
What I mean is that it will be an entirely closed and armed border.
@wr:
Ok, here is the long explanation: The future is hard to predict. Anyone who claims their preferred course of action will ensure some future enduring condition is kidding themselves.
Israel’s goal is to destroy Hamas. Whether or not that goal can be achieved, or the extent to which it can be achieved, is very much uncertain. This is one fundamental aspect of war. Thus, what will happen next is not knowable at this point. So your question is not answerable, but you might be right!
On the other hand, where is the new generation of AQ leadership? Where is the new generation of ISIS leadership? The Taliban is back, is the new generation of leadership there as invested in promoting attacks on the US as the old generation? We were told through much of the last two decades plus that our actions in the ME would do nothing but create more terrorists. So far that doesn’t look to be the case, but things could obviously change. It’s no different with Hamas in terms of the uncertainty of what the future holds.
Another example. At three weeks into WWII, we really had no idea what would happen long term or what the long-term implications were. The political goal of “unconditional surrender” came the following January, and over the course of the following years of fighting, there was a lot of internal debate about whether that goal could be achieved and what the best available methods for achieving it were. After all, in the entire history of Japan, no Japanese government had ever surrendered – and during the years of WWII, no Japanese unit had ever surrendered. How does one force an unconditional surrender of an enemy that doesn’t surrender? Only in hindsight do the pieces fall into place, but at the time, no one really knew for sure.
It’s like that with any conflict. War is inherently a dangerous and uncertain endeavor, the consequences of which are extremely difficult to predict.
“What I mean is that it will be an entirely closed and armed border.”
So, not as much de-militarized as (probably) asymmetrically militarized. I’m not seeing how that would be a solution, but I’ve grown fatigued with the topic, so thank you for the answer; I have no follow up question.