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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37378 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Reviewing Predictions on the Israel-Gaza War

The Institute for the Study of War opines that

The Israeli campaign into the Gaza Strip was a military success but has fallen short thus far of setting conditions to replace Hamas as a governing entity. The Israeli government enumerated three objectives at the beginning of the war: destroy Hamas’ military, return the hostages, and destroy Hamas’ government.[1] These objectives—though expansive—were achievable through a combination of military and political action. The Israeli campaign succeeded in destroying Hamas’ military and securing a ceasefire that would release the hostages. The campaign has also isolated Hamas in the Gaza Strip, though Israel and its partners will need to ensure that Hamas remains contained. But neither Israel nor the United States has tried seriously to achieve a political end state that would build upon this military success and permanently replace Hamas as a governing entity in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s failure to achieve this final war aim means that the strip will remain without an alternative governance structure and security broker, and Hamas remnants will inevitably try to fill that role again, especially as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withdraw. Hamas will use this space to reassert its political authority and reconstitute its forces—unless the United States and Israel take further steps to prevent those things from occurring.

The Middle East Monitor meanwhile summarizes Israeli opinion:

Unlike previous military campaigns in Gaza – on a much smaller scale compared to the current genocidal war – there is no significant strand of Israeli society claiming victory. The familiar rhetoric of “mowing the lawn”, which Israel often uses to describe its wars, is notably absent. Instead, there is a semi-consensus within Israel that the ceasefire deal was unequivocally bad, even disastrous for the country. The word “bad” carries broad implications. For Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, it represents a “complete surrender”. For the equally extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, it is a “dangerous deal” that compromises Israel’s “national security”. Israeli President Isaac Herzog refrained from offering political specifics but addressed the deal in equally strong terms: “Let there be no illusions. This deal – when signed, approved and implemented – will bring with it deeply painful, challenging and harrowing moments.”

In Haaretz we get headlines like: "Total Victory in Gaza? Dismantling Hamas? The Hostage Deal Is Exposing Netanyahu's Lies” and "The Gaza Cease-fire and Hostage Deal Is the Same One From Eight Months Ago. Why Did Netanyahu Accept It Now? Ailing hostages rotting in tunnels for 15 months and over 120 Israeli soldiers killed since Benjamin Netanyahu declined a previous cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas are the least of the Israeli prime ministers' concerns. He wanted to be pressured just ahead of Trump's inauguration”

I can’t track it down online and I’ve since recycled the paper, but at the signing of the ceasefire, I read a WSJ op-ed in which the writer bemoaned that the hostage exchange, as lopsided as it was, constituted a defeat for Israel, and provided an obvious structure for future defeats. There’s been a consistent drumbeat of sentiment among committed Zionists and self-described foreign policy realists that the ceasefire constitutes an Israeli defeat. And inasmuch as one takes Netanyahu seriously earlier in the war, it does seem a defeat of a kind. Israeli hawks have said from the beginning that they were fighting to destroy Hamas root and branch and obtain lasting peace and security for Israel. That this was not another “mowing the grass” operation, that their intent was to totally and permanently alter the relationship between Israel and Gaza such that there would never be another attack originating from Gaza against Israel.

Now, at the end of the war, the grass is well and truly mowed, but permanent changes seem unlikely to materialize. Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity, while the doomerism seems overwrought it’s tough to see how Israel emerged from this more secure in its long term future. In the short term, perhaps even for a decade or so, Hezbollah is neutered, Hamas is pulling itself off the mat, Iran has been punched in the nose, Baathist Syria is gone; the grass is mowed, there is no immediate threat of attack. But in the longer term, it is hard to see what strategic objective Israel achieved. While a great many Palestinians were killed, amid cries of GENOCIDE from the usual suspects, I’m not even sure there are fewer Palestinians now than there were on 10/6/23. The attitude of those left behind in Palestine towards Israel requires little guesswork. Support for Israel is in decline among younger American voters, they may not be able to count on unconditional US support in the future (I’m not sure Zionism is a position likely to shift with age in the way that positions of issues like Taxes and Racial Equality have historically shifted with age). Israel still has no actual operational plan of what an acceptable government of Gaza would look like, a group that they would endorse as an alternative to Hamas rule in the enclave, or even an outline or an idea of what such a group might be. Many Israeli officials and soldiers face risk of prosecution abroad on war crimes charges, which I imagine will not come to pass in any significant quantity, but it means something that thousands of Israelis will be unable to travel to much of Europe. Israel is unlikely to see a revival of the Abraham Accords peace process with the Gulf States under a second Trump admin, though we can all hope that the Dealmaker in Chief can pull a rabbit out of the turban and get this done.

Looking back, this leaked intelligence paper from Israel detailing plans for removing the population of Gaza to camps in the Sinai before occupying Gaza, was remarkably prescient. The authors predict that the violence required to occupy a populated Gaza would be too great, unsustainable for the Israeli forces politically, and result in the Israeli forces ultimately exiting Gaza without achieving their goals. This has now occurred. While Trump is now making noises about removing Gazan civilians, it is not clear how this would be achieved physically.

@Pasha had an excellent comment near the beginning of the war presaging the situation facing Israel now:

To delve deeper into the uncomfortable topic of the looming genocide, I also increasingly get the feeling that contrary to the expectations of some whose view of geopolitics is eerily similar to RTS mechanics, the genocidal military power IDF is displaying right now is ultimately going to harm Israel a lot more than it helps. I think it mainly has to do with political/military leadership trying to cover their ass and muffle their enormous failures with the sound of bombs. If IDF really goes through with their plan which seems likely to cost civilian lives in the hundreds of thousands, I don't think the nation of Israel will ever recover from this. It is a country that is already losing two of its most powerful weapon: Endlessly idealistic and intelligent Ashkenazi founders who knew to out-think and out-work their opponents at very turn, and most importantly to not lose the sight of their goal even when they had to take very nasty decisions at times: to create a people. Not to destroy one. These people are not only losing out in demography but also they are losing the soul of the nation. Their spirit will not survive a Gazan genocide [AND] Zionist influence in the Western world. Through a combination of dedication, money, human quality, well-crafted propaganda, historical guilt and Cold War positioning, Zionists has always had a very unique power position in Western institutions, especially the US ones. This is quickly disappearing. Western Jews are assimilating into the PMC deracinated blob at a breathtaking pace. They are losing the set of assumptions that motivated them to identify with their kin in Israel, and they are losing the power that comes from ethnic favoritism. A Gazan genocide is very likely going to be the final nail in the coffin here.

I fully agree that the situation with Gaza is entirely unsustainable. But if Israelis go through with what they are plotting right now, they will slowly but surely find out that they are 7 million souls surviving in an ocean of half a billion through miracles, and they are pissing in the miracle potion.

It seems clear that predictions at the outset that “eliminating” Hamas/Islamism as a force in Gaza was not an achievable goal. I’m curious to see if this is an example people reach for in the future. Given the failure to consider predictions based on the 9/11 experience before this war, I doubt it.

What other predictions did you find particularly prescient or wrongheaded?

Pasha sounds like an ideologue with too many opinions and too few facts. First of all there is no genocide in Gaza , the fact that this delusion has continued for this long is astonishing. The numbers hamas pumps out are completely tampered with and problematic in many many ways. Israel is a nuclear power , and even if it wasn't , it still has shown the capability to take arab coalitions 1 versus many. The dramatic tone in his words reminds me of a jihadi hoping for victory over the jewish enemy. It's over buddy , you tried many times , it ain't happening. The two things we have learned from this war is , firstly , the complete inability of the western civilian , and by extension politician, to understand what war actually is and secondly the strength of propaganda which has managed to convince westerners that Israel is commiting something even close to a genocide and killing kids on purpose. Absolute nonsense. None of these things will matter much in the future since it this exact weakness in the western constitution that will make war more and more common until the Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan or the russians attempt to grab a chunk of something they deem russian (or both ) and all hell breaks loose.

It is a genocide. First off 80% of the population of Gaza are there because they or their ancestors were forced into Gaza and have been locked in Gaza ever since.

Israel has denied them food, bombed them at an astounding rate and murdered tens of thousands of people. Judaism is a religion which holidays are celebrations of Bronze age genocides of neighbouring tribes and that rhetoric has been used liberally during the war. While Israeli soldiers have been committing war crimes on an industrial scale they haven't been shy about referencing their historic genoicides.

Israel has shown that it is incapable of of taking an area the size of a city against an enemy with no logistics. The war started with Israeli soldiers crying in a bathroom of a well fortified position while getting smoked by men in sandals, and ended with Israelis being unable to fight. Israel has ended up deeply divided and is in a permanent state of crisis. Israels situation today is similar to the situation of French Algeria in the 50s or Vietnam in the 60s. They have a population that hates them and the cost of containing it is too great. Israel isn't a sustainable state and the Arabs know that they can outlast them as long as they sustain the pressure.

the complete inability of the western civilian , and by extension politician, to understand what war actually is

Europeans have fought battles on battle fields for thousands of years with a strong aversion to harming civilians, punishing prisoners and acting in a non-chivalrous manor. The cowardly and brutal fighting style has once again reminded Europeans why the jewish mindset is fundamentally incompatible with the western mindset and how the Semitic/MENA culture simply is not anything we want to deal with. Israel's popularity has plummeted in the west, especially among younger people who consume their news through social media, which is less controlled by the ADL. The same Jewish institutions who attack westerners for the slightest ethnocentrism have the chutzpah to try to justify bombing the Christians in the middle east so they can build summer homes on the west bank.

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Europeans have fought battles on battle fields for thousands of years with a strong aversion to harming civilians, punishing prisoners and acting in a non-chivalrous manor.

Since densely populated urban centres have become commonplace, how many Europeans have comported themselves in such a manner in wartime? There was plenty of deliberate bombing of exclusively civilian targets on the part of the Allies in the second world war, for example (Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki). Likewise the deliberate bombing of villages by Americans in the Vietnam war. Evidently this "cowardly and brutal" fighting style is not unique to Jews.

And that's not even addressing the obvious point, that civilian collateral damage is literally unavoidable when engaged in a conflict with a belligerent which employs guerrilla warfare tactics and uses civilians as human shields, fully anticipating - even hoping - that they will get caught in the crossfire.

Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki

None of these cities were purely civilian targets, particularly if you think military industry is fair game. Hiroshima was a Japanese army headquarters, and at Nagasaki the bomb detonated between an arsenal and an arms factory, while the Doolittle raid hit an aircraft carrier and various industrial targets (and also civilian buildings, but AFAIK the Raiders were not instructed to target e.g. schools). The Dresden bombing was planned to hit German industrial centers and a railroad yard - there were apparently some ancillary military assets there (such as barracks) but the real target was the military industrial center that was believed to be there.

Now, that being said, I tend to agree with your overall point - there's certainly a case to be made that these bombing raids were not proportionate and therefore not justified under the laws of war. But there were certainly military or at a minimum industrial targets relevant to the war effort at all four of those locations.

None of these cities were purely civilian targets, particularly if you think military industry is fair game.

This is also true for Gaza.

Yes, I agree – Gaza, as a whole, is not a purely civilian target. This, at least in my estimation, does not mean that carpet bombing it is necessarily a proportionate response – particularly given that modern precision-guided weaponry and the lack of Gazan air defenses means that Israel faces a different calculus than the Allies did during World War Two (and even then, from what I know, I think you could reasonably argue at least some of the Allied bombing strikes weren't justified).

Note that I am not saying the Israelis have been carpet-bombing Gaza – I do not believe that to be a correct description of their actions. Just pointing out there's a material difference at play.

(and even then, from what I know, I think you could reasonably argue at least some of the Allied bombing strikes weren't justified)

This is the piece of the puzzle that I think you are missing. The bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and dozens of other strategic air raid targets are totally unjustifiable by modern standards. They fail the tests of both proportionality and distinction. Were we to be using the standards of the allies in WWII (which were still higher than the standards of the Axis) then Israel turning the Gaza strip to rubble with carpet bombing or nukes would be, if not justifiable, at least comfortably within the window of normality.

Dresden, perhaps. With Hiroshima and Nagasaki it depends on if you take into account that they won the damned war. Critics like to not count that part. If you balance Hiroshima and Nagasaki against continued conventional warfare to a conclusion, they look a lot more proportional.

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Yes, I think you are correct. But on the other hand, modern standards for warfare are much higher due to precision weapons. As you suggest, from what I understand Allied tactics in the Second World War were not unusual when contrasted with the Axis tactics.

Mind you, this isn't necessarily a moral justification for the actions - I just think it's important to understand that our standards are and should be higher because we can be more discriminating.

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