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It's not technically culture war, but Hamas has just attacked Israel en-masse, overwhelming the Iron Dome with 5000 rockets and even sending raiding parties into Israel. It looks like Haman and/or Shabak haven't done their job at all, and Israel has been caught with its pants down.
For the culture war angle, I think the biggest question is of retribution. On one hand, Israeli public will now demand a reaction that makes the ongoing Hamas attack pale in comparison. On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?
I have myself hitchhiked and volunteered extensively around Israeli territories around Gaza and also inside the West Bank. I know plenty of people who were in serious harms way today and also will likely be even more in the coming months. Both Jews who will be called up to the army and also Arabs who will have to endure Israeli operations which, while not totally indiscriminate, do not care that much about civilian casualties in all honesty. I am mentioning this so I can be forgiven for being a bit ranty and incoherent. I have been feeling very disturbed the whole day and doom scrolling increasingly grim videos.
Israeli military and zionists in general have an obvious incentive to always portrait Mossad and IDF as omnipotent forces who are aware and capable of everything. Israel's enemies also have such an incentive because they keep catastrophically failing to beat Israel and they need to explain this situation somehow without acknowledging their own absolute incompetence.
However in reality we are talking about a country of 6 million people, surrounded by hundreds of millions of hostile Arabs and constantly engaged in the very time/resource constraining task of subjugating a local Arab population about their own Jewish population. Israeli Jews have some very exploitable weaknesses such as an incredibly polarized society comprised of groups who can't even agree why the country exists, high dependance on their diaspora's (diminishing) influence over Western states, absolutely no strategic depth in case of a real invasion and averseness to casualties/POWs from the conscript army (literal 18 year old boys and girls). Most importantly, Israel only has to fail once at defending itself and it will no longer exist. Arabs have the luxury of constant new attempts (as long as they keep up the population pyramid).
I am going to dismiss the more conspiracy-minded explanations of how Israeli security apparatus could allow such a thing to happen. We are talking about a small country, ran by a very small group of people who have missed even worse signs of incoming attack in the past and also had been involved in a bitter internal conflict for most of the year. So if you expect Israel to turn on God mode and destroy its enemies, perhaps take into account that the same people couldn't prevent this from happening in the first place. They are clearly not that omnipotent. Hamas has likely captured a very high number of prisoners. Many of them are female and even children. In the past the pressure on the Israeli government has been immense in such situations. We might see some very nasty breakdowns in Israeli population and politics if Hamas starts exchanging the prisoners' lives and bodies for IDF's behavior.
Also, Israel hasn't really been that successful in the recent memory at actually occupying aggressive militant controlled areas (Lebanon and Gaza, in the West Bank they have mutual interests with the PA elites so pacification is easier). A ground incursion into Gaza will be an extremely bloody affair for both sides. It has a high chance of serious failure.
Another factor Netanyahu will have to consider is his goal of rapprochement between Israel and a bunch of more despotic and American aligned Arab countries. A bloody ground war and occupation would kill such goals for many years to come. Even the most insulated Arab leaders have to somewhat consider the fact that their populations absolutely HATE Israel and Jews in general. Even in the best invasion scenarios, for IDF there will be endless atrocious videos of Arab civilians massacred.
If the escalation continues, I think the Israeli politics will change beyond recognition in the near future. For some decades now the OG-European-Labour-Zionist-Secular elite of the country totally lost its grasp on democratic majorities but have been holding on to power through risky political shenanigans. Their preferred approach to the Arab problem has clearly failed. While they were in no way bastions of humanism towards Arabs, these people still represented much more Western instincts about what is acceptable to do against your enemy. At least they were careful that when they felt atrocities were necessary, they worked well on the Western PR. Things might get much uglier very fast in the near term.
Rant out.
Thank you for your very interesting and informative post, it's a shame that we're yet again in a position with not a lot of information and little idea about how things are going to play out over the short term. We don't even know if the situation is going to escalate or dampen down, it's simply too early to say at this point. What I am concerned with is the potential to have another 'Austrian Duke' style issue whereby one side feels compelled to act in a harsh way and the other side is compelled to respond. Information is a critical component, that's the difference between a 'Tigray' style Ethiopian ethnic cleansing and the Ukrainian resistance. The difference between the two is that Ukraine got their message out whilst the Tigray were under radio silence and the world simply didn't pay attention to what might have been going on. It's going to be extremely difficult to be a moderate in Isreal if the early reports of massive casualties are true as modern social media has the power to create incredibly evocative content that can be shared wildly quickly amongst people with little in the way of infrastructure to restrict or censor it.
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/10/7/israel-palestine-escalation-live-news-barrage-of-rockets-fired-from-gaza
I can't imagine Israel demanding anything less than a complete destruction and removal of Hamas from the Gaza strip. The issue with this isn't with justification for doing so, but how far they will go in the attempt. Whilst Israel may be short on manpower they can certainly make up for it with munitions. I've been following the Ukrainian war and it has really shown off the power of drones as both tools of surveillance and recon as well as acting as weapons themselves. For every suicide bomber they have to deal with, Israel has hundreds to tens of thousands of suicide drones to send back the opposite way. As the casualties mount up on the Palestinian side it will increase pressure on other Arab countries and potentially China a justification to intervene into this matter and up the escalation ladder we go. It's still too early to tell, but I have a strong feeling this is going to turn into a 'shit-show' pretty darn quickly.
I have long feared the use of drones as a tool of genocide. My mental image of it was of a person in Nairobi Kenya sitting behind a large high definition computer screen sipping diet coke whilst blowing up 'insurgents' in Afghanistan. The issue with the corresponding rise of artificial domain (wrong word?) intelligence is that you no longer need that person 'in the loop'. It combines the immediate deadliness of bullets and shrapnel with the emotional/moral distance of proxy methods such as hunger and displacement to achieve their ends. I hope I am right that this current potential conflict is a little too soon for talk of the worst outcomes of the adoption of drones/AI, but this still represents a complete shift in the balance of terror for States fighting insurgency/guerilla adversaries.
Suicide drones are useful when you face anti-air assets and cannot risk planes and pilots for precision strikes. Israeli jets have always had free rein over Gaza and they can annihilate anywhere at will at any time. The limiting factor has always been the extremely high civilian casualties caused by this approach since Hamas is totally embedded into the civilian population. Also Hamas will be using its prisoners as human shields for the foreseeable future. There are already photos of prisoners being put in the tunnels to discourage Israeli bunker busters. Drones will not change this equation.
The thing holding a genocide of Palestinians back isn't a lack of tools. It is (geo)politics. Intervention from the Arab states, West, Russia, Iran etc.
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