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Notes -
There is a lot of talk right now about whether the Israel-Hamas ceasefire / hostage release deal is a good thing or not.
One thing I don't see brought up is that maybe the best thing for Israel to do would be to sign the deal, get the hostages back, and then immediately just ignore the deal and spend the next couple of years killing every Hamas member on the face of the planet.
I don't really see much downside. What would people do in the future as a result? Not trust Israel as a deal-maker? By and large, groups that would be in the position to sign a deal with Israel already either don't trust Israel or have no choice because Israel has overwhelming military force. Political entities generally do not sign peace agreements because they trust each other, they sign peace agreements because they view doing so as being better than the alternatives.
Another possible downside would be that in the future, groups would just kill Israelis instead of taking any hostages... but again, would this really be that bad for Israel? Would 10/7 have been much worse for Israel if Hamas had killed every single person that they ended up taking hostage immediately instead of taking them hostage? Well yes, for the few currently surviving hostages it would have been worse, but I figure that overall probably more Israeli lives would be saved by Israel making it clear that hostage taking is an ineffective approach than by Israel right now signing a deal that effectively signals that taking Israeli hostages has some degree of effectiveness.
Bibi needed an excuse to do a deal (which the IDF and Mossad and wider Israeli secular-ish establishment, including the banks and anyone remotely interested in the Israeli economy sorely wanted) over the heads of the Kahanists like Ben-Gvir and other extremist religious Zionists.
Witkoff (by all accounts a relatively zionist person himself) being “tough” provides Bibi with the excuse needed to throw up his hands and say “look, we have to do it, we don’t have a choice, it’s going to happen” and accept the deal that most of the Israeli establishment wanted anyway. It had to be Trump’s man because if it was Biden’s guy, the Kahanists would demand to wait until Trump’s guy was in in the hope that he would offer a better deal.
This concisely explains the situation. In the end this is the best deal, the IDF didn’t want to spend years mired in Gaza which would be terrible for morale, Hamas was always going to reform and - with Hezbollah severely weakened, a much stronger border and Iranian foreign policy in shambles - Hamas is less of a risk now anyway. Its full destruction was impossible without permanently destroying the ongoing lucrative reconciliation process with the Gulf Arabs, which can now slowly resume.
I don't really see why the IDF spending years in Gaza would be bad for morale. After 10/7, it's hard for me to imagine any Israeli soldier not being happy to spend a few months patrolling an occupied Gaza, especially given that now that Hamas' military strength is mostly broken, an Israeli soldier would be unlikely to die over there. But then, I'm neither an Israeli nor a soldier. I guess in practice, it would not be that great. For one thing, it probably does sap morale for most non-insane people to patrol an occupied population.
I'm surprised that the IDF and Mossad would want a peace deal. My mental model of both those groups is that they are controlled by hard-liners who want to destroy their opponents. But I don't know much about the inner politics of Israel and I'm pretty sure that you know much more about it than I do.
The situation with the Gulf states is one that I probably didn't spend too much time thinking about when I made my original post. I did think of them, but my initial thought was that pretty much no matter what Israel did short of an actual genocide, they would figure out how to spin it to their populations as being close enough to a draw that they would not face any major unrest, and even if they did face unrest as the result of such an outcome, they would not be seriously threatened. But when I think over it again, I can see how maybe an Israel that does a deal with Hamas that leaves Hamas effectively destroyed for the near future is better for the region's stability than Israel going all-out to destroy its enemies. After all, Israel has in the last year shown that it is not a country that you want to fuck with if you have the typical second/third world minor country type of corrupt, ineffective, and technologically/organizationally relatively primitive military.
IIRC the IDF is one of the few militaries that sits(very slightly) to the left of Israeli society as a whole, because everyone serves except the most hardline conservatives.
Wouldn’t that get balanced by the lack of conscription for Israeli Arabs?
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