Israel Is Confusing War With Politics

Back on November 17 I devoted quite a bit of space to an article by an Israeli historian of the Holocaust, Omer Bartov—currently at Brown University. His article appeared in the NYT on November 10. Here is a direct link to the article, in which he addresses the question of whether Israel is engaging in genocide against Palestinians:

On to geopolitics. I picked up this one listening to John Mearsheimer. It turns out that an Israeli historian and authority on the Holocaust and genocide in general wrote an op-ed for the NYT a week or so ago. His name is Omer Bartov, and he’s a very big name in the field. Here’s a link to his article:

What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide

Yes, he’s talking about the war on Gaza. …'

My discussion, with extended quotes, is here.

Doug Macgregor—in an article that I’ll discuss further down—cites a new article by Bartov that appears at the Council for Global Cooperation:

The Hamas Attack and Israel’s War in Gaza

As an historian, Bartov devotes quite a bit of energy to examining various historical events that have been advanced as analogies to the Hamas raid into Israel of October 7. It’s pretty clear that he is concerned with an escalation of the current conflict into a full blown regional war—especially one involving Hezbollah. He is concerned that Israeli rhetoric, which he describes as “preparing the ground for what may well become mass killing, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, followed by annexation and settlement of the territory” could make such an escalation virtually inevitable. He is also clearly concerned over the plummeting support for Israel among Americans. However, toward the end of the article Bartov gets to the nub of the problem—the failure to recognize that this conflict is fundamentally political in nature and that there is no military solution that would not render Israel an international pariah:

As the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote almost two hundred years ago, war is the extension of politics by other means. War without clearly defined political goals will devolve into absolute war, which means a war of destruction and annihilation. In the case of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, a strict adherence by the IDF to the laws and customs of war as defined in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and subsequent protocols would have likely made military progress very difficult. That was not the chosen course, and available evidence indicates that the IDF is in serious breach of these agreements, of which Israel is a signatory. No wonder that it is encountering growing international censure and is rapidly losing support in the United States, a circumstance that is bound to be reflected eventually also in responses and actions by the American administration. The only way out of this conundrum is for Israel to clearly declare that it has a political end in mind: a peaceful resolution of the conflict with an appropriate and willing Palestinian leadership. Making such a statement would instantaneously transform the situation and open up the way for intermediate steps to be taken on the ground, the first of which would be a halt to the killing and a return of all surviving hostages.

On the US angle, the NYT is reporting that a group of Dem senators are calling for attaching conditions to aid to Israel, due to the “unacceptable level of civilian casualties.” For now they’re trying to thread the needle, but how long can that last?

Yet such a policy course by Israel appears highly unlikely now, especially under the current political leadership, which is just as extreme as it is incompetent. …

And he continues later:

The beginning of the end of this conflict and the return of politics may actually start with negotiations to free the hostages, as seems to be happening at the moment. The argument that linking military strategy to the hostages would only encourage Hamas and others to keep them, or even to take others, is false on a number of counts. First, it is clear that Hamas wants to exchange hostages for its own prisoners, many of whom are elderly and have been kept in Israeli jails for decades, while others are very young. Second, it is unthinkable that Israel will simply ignore the fate of the hostages, who include elderly and ill people, children and even babies; the delay in negotiations to this point demonstrates a certain callousness in the Israeli government that has characterized it in other spheres as well.

Statements made by some military figures and other observers, that the hostage issue should be addressed only at the end of the war, ... Even for this uniquely heartless and inept government, choosing such a policy can only be described as both inhuman and stupid. ...

…, the objective must be a peace settlement. There are equal numbers of Jews and Palestinians in the territory between the Jordan and the sea. Neither group is going away. They can either keep killing each other or find a way to live together. That must be the goal. All dreams of making the other side disappear or submit to being oppressed from one generation to another will only produce more violence and growing brutalization of both groups. The very assertion of a will to reach an agreement has the potential to transform the paradigm. ... 

For now, all we can do it to plead with our own governments to use this moment of deep crisis and horrifying bloodshed as a lever to compel Israel to end its policy of occupation and oppression of another people and to seek creative solutions for coexistence, be it in two states, one state, or federative structure, that will ensure human dignity, equality, and liberty for all.

Again, the entire article is well worth reading. But here’s a brief outtake from a video discussion between Danny Davis and Alex Robert (many readers will be familiar with his regular analysis of the military aspects of the Ukraine conflict). Here’s Alex’s succinct conclusion:

Israel needs a political solution to what they want to do. That's the reality. All I know is that Israel is always chasing a military solution with force—sheer force—to problems that are perhaps not military in nature.

Now, Doug Macgregor—who has been struggling a bit to articulate an overall position regarding Gaza—riffs off of Bartov’s article, using passages that I did not (above). His concerns are clearly similar to those of Bartov:

Israel’s War of Decision

Israel’s vengeance campaign could easily become a permanent condition of life in the Middle East.

The basic idea behind Macgregor’s article is that Israel’s “vengeance campaign” is sure to force Israel into a fortress strategy in which it will find itself isolated. It’s a no-win proposition, but one which the ideological nutjobs seem determined to follow. What Macgregor means by a “war of decision” is this:

The question for Israelis and the Americans that support them is whether the current war in Gaza is a purely reactive war without an attainable political objective beyond the stunning level of violence that is destroying Gaza and expelling its Arab population. More to the point, is Israel’s desired end state an “Arab-Free Israeli State from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean?”

If the answer is “yes,” then the Middle East is indeed on the path to a war of decision, a war that will govern Israel’s continued existence and the future extent of American strategic influence in the Near East and North Africa. This suggests that the regional Middle Eastern war that ensues will have little to do with morality and everything to do with power.

To survive a regional war of decision, Israel will have to transform its society into a heavily armed fortress, a nation in arms with the capacity to withstand a long, devastating siege. Israelis knew from Israel’s inception that a Jewish State in the Middle East could only be sustained through force of arms, but transformation into a fortress is new. It turns Israel into a battleship with very limited maneuver room. 

That’s the purely military option—sheer force applied to every obstacle—that Alex and Danny Davis discussed. What’s the alternative? Politics. War by other means, if you will:

If the answer to the fortress option is “no,” then Israelis must end the conflict through political or diplomatic means.

In making his argument Macgregor offers a fascinating example that confirms what Danny Davis maintains—that there is no military solution; that an attempt at a military solution will only make matters worse. Dig this, if you will:

From August 1 to October 1, 1944, the Poles fought a terrific but hopeless battle for control of Warsaw against German tanks, artillery, flame-throwers, and automatic weapons. Polish fighters killed an estimated 26,000 German and allied—mostly Ukrainian—troops, but more than 200,000 Polish men, women, and children lost their lives in the fighting. SS, police, and combat engineer formations eventually razed the city to the ground. Yet when the 60-day campaign ended on October 1, 1944, the German Officers reported that the columns of surviving Polish men and women streaming out of Warsaw defiantly sang patriotic songs. The lesson from the Second World War is clear: Killing one’s way out of a problem rarely succeeds.

I defy anyone to come up with a more extreme example than the Warsaw uprising (I encourage readers to follow that link). It’s an example of the indomitability of the human spirit:

Warsaw c. 1950, still witness to the massive World War II destruction of the city. Northwest view of the Krasiński Gardens and Świętojerska Street.

The Castle Square, located in Old Town, in 2018.

The uprising has come to define the Polish spirit. So, too, will the Palestinian struggle for recognition as human beings be defined by Gaza, 2023. Israel should not wish for that. The Polish experience in WW2 has had embittering consequences as well as ennobling ones, and no doubt the same will be true in Palestine.

Finally, I’ll embed the full half hour or so Youtube with Danny Davis and Alex Robert. It provides a thumbnail overview of the 2006 war in which the IDF had its ass handed to it by Hezbollah. The notion of doing a repeat against an exponentially more potent Hezbollah—embraced by some Israelis—is a measure of wackiness.