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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?
No source that unironically refers to the situation in Gaza as a genocide deserves to be taken seriously
(so that throws Pasha's entire contribution in the bin)ETA: I didn't realise at first @Pasha was talking about a hypothetical future scenario, so despite disagreements we clearly have I should acknowledge I misread his original comments .It was eminently achievable. Stop insisting on sending aid that Hamas will hoard. A starving population will turn on it's leaders pretty quick. Allow Israel to bomb Hamas targets even if that means more of their meat-shields die etc. Too many people who matter in the west however didn't want Hamas to be eliminated.
As for what all this means for the future, from my limited understanding of Israeli domestic politics it sounds like the two-state-solution is well and truly dead. Which may well be a good thing for Israel's security, as an independent Palestine would most likely mean having another another lebanon on their border (only less functional and more Jihadist). Best chance now for peace is for Trump to succeed in getting Egypt to resettle all the Palestinians, which unfortunately probably won't happen.
Sorry for discrediting myself by describing killing a couple hundred thousand people out of a population of 2 million as genocide.
Eager to hear more of your genocide-free strategy of starving them instead and bombing those “meat shields”. Oh and the final option forcefully cleansing the land of them.
Making up numbers in order to describe something as a genocide is indeed discrediting.Feel free to look at any war in history fought against a nation like Gaza that has declared total war on you (and insists it will never stop). To consider it unsporting - whoops, I meant genocidal - of a nation to not want to send thousands of trucks of supplies to its enemy demonstrates a lack of understanding of how war works or a very particular grudge against Israel.
If you bother to follow the actual thread, you will see that my comment was written on October 11t 2023 and describes a future hypothetical based on the statements of Israeli politicians at the time. That hypothetical turned out to be more correct than not.
Stop masturbating with words. If you want to mass murder people have the courage to actually say so.
Pointing out words have meanings and that the ones you used don't match reality is not "masturbating" with words (curious expression).Mass murder? That type of language is more masturbatory than anything I've said, and seems like an example of the non-central fallacy as it relates to Hamas members. For the avoidance of doubt, I think the murder of Hamas members is a noble goal (unless they surrender), despite the unfortunate reality of collateral civilian deaths. If you have an issue with that, then your issue might be with the nature of war itself.
“You mass murder, I pursue the goal of destroying the enemy despite collateral civilian deaths” must be the most perfect Russell conjugation I’ve ever seen. You’re both describing the same thing, it’s just a question of the spin you’re putting on it.
We're not. The difference between an intended and an unintended negative outcome, like harm to a civilian, is something reasonably young children can already intuit. There's a reason most people judge someone who accidentally runs another person over less harshly than someone who actively seeks pedestrians to drive into.
Maybe you think there's some conversion factor i.e. a single deliberately caused death is as bad as 2/5/10 unintended ones, but I'd be very surprised if you think it's 1:1.
Put it this way: if you run over a gaggle of schoolchildren because you’re late for an important meeting and braking would slow you down, you didn’t set out to kill them, you merely accepted it as the price for something more important.
In practice, how much badness people put on such death varies wildly depending on their sympathies with the overall goal. Gaza, nuking Japan, bombing Dresden all have their sympathisers and their critics but they were deliberate killings.
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What about the standard implicit definition of “it’s mass murder if you kill them after they surrender, otherwise it’s combat”?
Bit different, as it implies they're all combatants. We're talking about 'napalm the forest' / 'kill them all, God will know his own' situations where it's unclear who is a combatant and who is a civilian in the wrong place, and the civilians are being kept between you and the combatants, and the line is blurry in the first place.
I have greater than 0 sympathy for those who have to make such choices, such as in my comment on George Macdonald Fraser but the gung-ho attitude of 'can't be helped, just kill them' attitude you see in certain quarters does put me off.
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