Israel's Mission Impossible

 

By David K. Shipler 

                In October 1953, two days after infiltrators from Jordan threw a grenade into an Israeli home and killed a mother and her two small children, Israeli Unit 101, led by Col. Ariel Sharon, took revenge in a deliberately disproportionate manner.

Crossing into Jordan, the Israeli commandos destroyed some 50 houses and killed 69 civilians in Qibya, a town 5 kilometers south of where the infiltrators’ tracks had led. Sharon claimed that he didn’t know any people were in the houses he blew up, but property damage was hardly the point. “The orders were utterly clear,” Sharon wrote in his autobiography. “Qibya was to be an example for everyone.”

                That was, and remains, Israel’s basic strategy of deterrence: hold the neighbors responsible for the misuse of their territory by hitting back exponentially.  

                The practice has worked, to an extent, as long as the neighbor has been in control. Jordan eventually patrolled its side of the border closely, and the frontier was fairly quiet for decades before the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1994. The same with Egypt for several years before its formal peace with Israel in 1979. And even without a treaty, Syria has kept its heavily fortified border mostly closed to attacks on Israelis until exchanges of fire recently, during the Gaza war.

                But where the state has been weak or virtually non-existent, as in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, only powerless civilians have a stake in preserving calm or stability. Non-state forces have prevailed—first the Palestine Liberation Organization, then Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza—and Israel’s strategy of fierce retaliation has little effect except to radicalize residents and fuel extremism.

                So it is in Gaza today. Israel’s military withdrawal in 2005 opened a vacuum for Hamas to govern, but its armed passion to obliterate the Jewish state provoked a partial Israeli and Egyptian blockade, deepening poverty and leaving the territory well short of autonomous statehood. Hamas used outside aid to construct tunnels and build an arsenal of weaponry, not to foster prosperous independence that it would want to preserve.

Looking back over the 75 years of Israel’s existence, it’s remarkable how little both sides understand about each other and the nature of their confrontation. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were a purely military struggle with a military solution, Israel would have won decades ago. In today’s fighting, its intense bombardment to “soften up” military targets for a ground assault would be right out of the handbook on conventional warfare. But this conflict is hardly conventional, and military means cannot be decisive.

                It can be argued, as Israeli officials are doing, that they are faced with an immediate necessity: to eliminate the armed capacity of Hamas to repeat the sadistic slaughters of October 7, more terrifying and traumatic than Israel has known in most of its history. Hence, the Israeli bombing campaign of carnage and pulverization, more catastrophic than Palestinians have known in most of their history. About 1200 people of all ages were killed in Israel October 7—some raped, mutilated, burned, and shredded with grenades in their “safe rooms.” Some 240 were taken into Gaza to be held hostage. At least 12,000 Palestinians have died in return, including thousands of children, according to Hamas officials, and swaths of residential neighborhoods have been mangled beyond recognition.

                The casualties know no politics, of course. There are plenty of Palestinians who dislike Hamas, and Israelis who died included those respectful of Palestinians’ aspirations. Vivian Silver, a leading peace activist killed October 7, was mourned by a mixed gathering of Jews and Arabs, arms around shoulders, who swayed and sang “We Shall Overcome.”

Israel’s approach in Gaza has severe tradeoffs. After a reporting trip there, the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius detailed Israel’s coming tactics against Hamas’s deep tunnel network, having been told that Israeli forces would use dogs, horizontal drilling and maybe even flooding from the Mediterranean. But Ignatius concluded that Israel’s initial “battlefield success was costly in the information war.” Pictures of wounded, weeping Palestinian children, frail premature infants starved of life-saving oxygen and incubator warmth, will be indelible stains on Israel’s reputation.

That might bolster the deterrent effect, countered a hawkish Israeli journalist, Haviv Rettig Gur of The Times of Israel. “Paradoxically, the very fact that so much world opinion has turned against Israel serves Israel’s purposes right now,” he said on a recent podcast. “One of the great ways that you defeat this kind of warfare is to show that you are actually implacable, to show that you are actually irremovable. In other words, Hamas brings to bear everything it’s got, and once it’s brought to bear everything it’s got and every ally has said everything they’re gonna say and done everything they’re gonna do, Israel is still hunting them down because they stole and massacred children.” It’s to Israel’s advantage, Gur continued, to demonstrate “that it’s not gonna bend to world opinion, that it’s not gonna bend to pressure from the West or from anyone, or from the Arab world, and once Hamas understands that, I think this war changes.”

Perhaps this war, but not this conflict. This conflict is a clash of nationalisms, overlapping claims to land, a miasma of hateful images, and a tangle of causes and effects. It should go without saying that no cause justifies these effects. No assault can legitimize the intimate atrocities by Hamas. No atrocity can validate the whirlwind of devastation unleashed by Israel.

Yet on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, the methodology is dictated by the misinterpretation of raw experience and the dehumanizing image of the other: That Jews understand only violent “resistance.” That Arabs understand only the language of force.

An Israeli taxi driver summed it up in 1988, during the Palestinians’ first intifada: “We should go to the Arabs with sticks in hand, and we should beat them on the heads; we should beat them and beat them and beat them, until they stop hating us.”