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Notes -
Reviewing Predictions on the Israel-Gaza War
The Institute for the Study of War opines that
The Middle East Monitor meanwhile summarizes Israeli opinion:
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:
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?
The only hope for Israel was in something eroding the twin forces of Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism that have defined Arab Muslim identity since the 1950s. The distinct problem for Israel was and is that the erosion of one is not enough. Both ethnotribal identity, socialist or not, and religious identity in the region are fully hostile to Israel, as increasingly is liberal modernity. There is no off-ramp except the vague hope that maybe eventually people are rich and secular enough that they stop caring. But plenty of rich and secular western Zoomers on college campuses seem to care very much indeed, so even that seems questionable.
Israel was just founded in a bad place. Its destruction is not inevitable, especially because AGI/ASI will upend global politics in such dramatic ways that we can’t really predict anything more than 20 years away. But the most viable location for it was probably in some of the depopulated formerly German parts of Eastern Europe, now no longer claimed by Germany since reunification and never really substantially Polish (pre-1945) either.
One can imagine a kind of smaller, Ashkenazi post-shtetl state in a corner of what is now Western Poland. I think that would probably have been fine. The Germans and Poles would both have claimed it, but the tension between them would have likely kept it independent. Still, the iron curtain, the broader aftermath of the war, and the insistence of the great majority of Zionists that it had to be Israel prevented it from ever being anywhere else.
In the end, I suspect the state of Israel will be another tragic story in the annals of Jewish history. It will be no great new beginning, but it will also be no final end, and its decline (destruction or not) will represent the end of the age of Ashkenazi Jewish overcontribution to modernity that began with the Haskalah.
I keep telling all my Israeli buddies that they should just Migrant Fleet around the world for 2 years. Bury Jerusalem in a giant gelatinous cube to preserve it, then fuck off on a 2 year booze cruise (after buying shares in Carnival Cruise of course). They can return to the holy land thoroughly depopulated after the Arabs have killed each other endlessly to claim the spoils, and its not like the land itself there was worth that much to begin with.
Rising temperatures and water shortages might do that work first. Israel is the only nation in the region with the type of HC to deal with these issues.
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