naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
NEW: The Biden administration has privately been pressing Israel in recent days to flush out what its strategy is for the day after it completes its stated goal of eradicating Hamas in the ongoing Gaza war, a US and an Israeli official tell [The Times of Israel]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his inner circle have indicated to their Biden counterparts that Israel has not yet come up with such a strategy and instead are more focused on the immediate goal of removing Hamas from power in Gaza, the US official says. (2/4)
But the US official cautions against this approach, saying that devoid a strategy for who will control the Strip if and when Hamas is removed, IDF is more likely to get bogged down in Gaza indefinitely, despite Israel insisting that it does not want to re-occupy the enclave (3/4)
[] National Unity chair Benny Gantz and fellow faction member Gadi Eisenkot demanded the creation of a Gaza exit strategy a upon their entry into the government and that they have tasked a committee with drawing one up. (4/4)
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize. There is very little information coming out of Gaza right now. Journalism seems to be dead, it's a black box in there, and whatever reports we get later are going to be urban myths.
I wonder what all this will amount to. I doubt this will achieve any credibility with the Arab world for saving Arab lives, even if it works to do just that. If it doesn't work, no one in Israel will remember Blinken's advice when they're trapped in the quagmire.
I have to wonder—are our official statements framing it as a lesson learned from Afghanistan, or is that just editors aware of the irony? Because “trust us; we’re experts on going balls deep in Islamic terrorists” has a certain credibility.
orthoxerox
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netstack 1yr ago
Afghanistan is a country the size of Texas. Gaza Strip is the size of New York City. Lessons learned from invading the former don't really apply to the latter.
Right, and Israel has a population comparable to NYC, while there are about a fifth as many Palestinians in the strip. Does that mean they have an edge over Afghanistan?
When the situation is so confused and entrenched, I think it’s better to err on the side of caution. Going in with an exit strategy is always a better idea than rawdogging it.
I've always gotten the impression that Israeli leaders are unusually frank in their statements rather than circumlocutory in the manner of the Chinese. So I picture that, in the room, Blinken is absolutely looking Netanyahu right in the eye and saying "We got the Goys to try this twice and it didn't work for them."
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize.
I think there are two possible US concerns that they’re discussing.
Attacking in the tunnels will be catastrophic for the IDF and casualty numbers will be extremely high. Maybe Blinken has some CIA or Pentagon messaging about the nature of the entrenchment in Gaza and how difficult that will be to break.
The US has direct intelligence (or Blinken wants to suggest, for the US’ own interests, that they do) that Hezbollah will invade if and when Israel enters Gaza.
Blinken's meeting with the Israelis also got interrupted by incoming rocket fire, which suggests some combination of a) Hamas' ability to restrain its own military forces is gone, b) its ability to get news is gone, or c) it really wants to make the US Secretary of State mark them as impossible to try diplomacy with, or some combination of the above.
The aftermath of that meeting's that Biden is going to Tel Aviv to meet Israelis Wednesday. I don't expect too much from his away game in general (or, tbf, from any President of the last forty years), but it's a pretty major investment to buy a couple days before a ground invasion. Hopefully it doesn't get a repeat of Blinken's jump to the bunkers or worse. Optimistically, there might be unique abilities to describe why this is obviously Hamas trying to bait an intervention that blows apart any chance of friendly relations with any Muslim country, and perhaps more importantly literally any political alternative to jumping into that trap, but the Biden administration has shared the Obama admin's bizarre Iran hard-on, so for all I know it's just going to devolve into something something Iran Nukes.
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize.
... there's also a more morbid bit no one really wants to say out loud, but that the US might have intelligence or 'intelligence' on, that's also one of the most serious time pressures.
It's quite possible a majority of the hostages are dead.
Just on a statistics thing, a lot of them were captured with serious injuries, some few probably resisted after capture and it didn't end well, there's a lot of really young babies and a few very vulnerable old or chronically ill people, Israel's been lobbing explosives one direction (Hamas says this has killed just shy of two dozen, for whatever you want to read that to actually mean) and Hamas hasn't exactly taught its fighters to treat prisoners with a ton of respect. Under the more pessimistic look at Hamas' unit discipline, it might not even know which of its troops (or unofficial combatant civilians) even took anyone to start with, and the sorta people who volunteer to go a-Viking in those circumstances tend toward the Bates side of the equation. On the more specific side, Hamas has been studiously resisting Red Cross access, there's only a handful of hostage videos, and comparing the current Hamas demands against the Shalit prisoner exchange is... not something that looks good.
Like, there's probably more than six living ones out of the claimed 199 right now? Maybe a quarter, maybe a third?
When there's a literal Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair with a Hamas gun pointed at her head, and Hamas demanding you send them thirty prisoners (one of which tortured children to death last week) to return her, sending troops into a meatgrinder tunnel is a hard choice made by hard men. A bad choice to make, of course; to borrow from a better writer than myself, maintaining the safety of a hostage during a rescue is the sort of unsolvable problem you want to make someone else's concern. But the survivors are mostly healthy-ish (before the beatings) dual-citizens or soldiers? The calculus changes a lot: there's a non-trivial chance that months or even years of negotiation might result in someone getting home alive, rather than getting parts of a body.
If a full scale invasion results in rescuing any significant percentage of hostages, I'll be shocked. As distinct from some kind of commando lightning strike rescue deal. Hostage deaths once discovered will simply goose the throttle on that meat grinder.
There is no amount of pain they can be inflicted to convince Hamas to return them.
Yes, to be very clear I don't expect the IDF has a good plan to rescue the hostages alive, or that such a good plan exists or is even possible. They just have a plan to release time pressure. Gush Etzion was 2014.
To be charitable, again we're talking a lot of babies or the elderly, a few chronically ill or recently-injured, and a lot of women. There's worse things than death, and years of negotiations give a lot of time for those worse things to happen and then death, followed by the disappearance of the bodies. To be less charitable, part of wartime leadership is not giving orders you know won't be followed.
There's no amount of pain that they can inflict that will get Hamas to return them, and there is no plausible ransom Hamas could demand that Israel will be willing to pay.
I mean is Israel particularly good at hostage rescue to begin with? I suspect not, that the US are the main power that is actually decent at solving that particular military problem, and this particular situation is probably too difficult even for us, let alone a force with looser rules of engagement(which Israel seems to have).
Again, I don't expect them to succeed, at least at the sort of scales required to avoid "Pyrrhic" from being the go-to term. I just don't see anyone pulling a rabbit out of a hat in Qatar.
I don't know how they justified such an absurd ratio in the Shalit prisoner exchange (more than 1000 for 1). Apparently 79% of Israelis were in favour of the exchange, so there must be more context that I've skimmed over. How could it not incentivize the further taking of Israeli prisoners? Heck, it was only 10 years ago. There's a not insignificant possibility that freed Hamas prisoners took part in the recent raids.
The Biden administration has privately been pressing Israel in recent days to flush out what its strategy is for the day after it completes its stated goal of eradicating Hamas in the ongoing Gaza war, a US and an Israeli official tell
This reminds me of the Afghanistan War, which I've long thought was big mistake, by which I don't just mean we shouldn't have tried to overthrow the Taliban and turn the country into a modern liberal democracy. I mean we shouldn't have invaded at all. The US have just accepted that the occasional terrorist attack of that magnitude is actually not that big a deal.
Hamas' attack was proportionally far worse, but still, even if they could remove Hamas, even if it didn't get replaced with something worse, and even if they didn't inspire more terrorism from other Arabs, it's hard to see how the amount of destruction is worth it. Why not just improve security so that it doesn't happen again? It sounds cliché but I think it's true: the reaction is what they wanted.
Generally, my impression, like many others', is that the Israelis seem far less genocidal towards the Palestinians than vice versa, but that has been much less true in the last week. Many Israelis, especially those in power, seem utterly unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinians generally.
They don't seem to have a plan and this war may turn out to be much difficult than Afghanistan. I think they're acting irrationally out of anger, just like Americans did immediately after the September 11th attacks. I'm surprised how little weight has been given to what I thought were the lessons of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
The risk is that if they do nothing and keep beefing up defenses, eventually Hamas comes up with something the defenses can’t stand and commits a colossal attack (bigger than last saturday’s) or even threatens Israel’s existence in some way.
Destroying Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was probably the right move for the US.
How, exactly, are they supposed to destroy Israel? This is not a very organized group and it really looked like the Saturday attack was basically everything they can muster.
Unless they get their hands on a nuke or something, I just don’t see it(and even then, they can’t build a reliable delivery mechanism, and Iran is probably not willing to give them one because they’re crazy).
Generally, my impression, like many others', is that the Israelis seem far less genocidal towards the Palestinians than vice versa, but that has been much less true in the last week. Many Israelis, especially those in power, seem utterly unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinians generally.
To the modal Israeli, the death of Palestinians is an acceptable cost. To the modal Palestinian, the death of Israelis is a cause for celebration.
Cynically, this is the Biden administration setting a trap for Netanyahu, such that if Netanyahu goes forward anyway despite US questions, the US will be able to leverage the 'we told you so' advantage to affect Israeli politics to get rid of Netanyahu once the rally-around-the-flag emotional unity passes. This won't help the situation per see, beyond maybe allowing a new leader change to stop furthering a terrible disaster.
Hopefully, the US sees the situation as a real risk for a moral event horizon and strategic cliff that Israel wouldn't be able to walk back from, and is trying to protect it from itself, and in the process save many Palestinians who would otherwise die.
Practically, the Americans are trying to work through the emotionally-driven reaction phase, and shape the Israeli action such that 'do something' doesn't mean 'do anything,' by pushing the Israelis to confront that many-an-anything can, in fact, be worse than no action at all. Whether this forestalls any action, or shapes it into a more productive action, the objective is to re-introduce long-term thinking back into what has been a major emotional shock reaction.
Since the Americans are uniquely positioned to engage the Israelis from a position of understanding the nature of the culture-shock, but also being able to acknowledge the costs of over-reaction and lack of foresight, here's hoping it works.
Netanyahu goes forward anyway despite US questions, the US will be able to leverage the 'we told you so' advantage to affect Israeli politics to get rid of Netanyahu once the rally-around-the-flag emotional unity passes.
Do you see the slighest chance Netanyahu survives this, politically? Safety has been the third rail in Israeli politics for its entire existence, this attack seems like a repudiation of the entire Likud philosophy for Gaza and the West Bank, and there's really not many spaces left to pull a rabbit out of a hat. The extent he's still in power is less a rally-around-the-flag unity and more just the procedural timeline.
The flip side is that there's not many of his domestic critics that claim any alternative to intervention, here. There's not really any vision for how to stop this from happening again without a ton of boots on the ground.
Sure, he could survive politicially. Everyone eventually falls from politics, but the key for political power actors remaining in place isn't their innate popularity, but the viability of alternatives. Even failed states continue to survive as long as no one else comes around to actually overthrow them. In Netanyahu's case, the question isn't 'was safety always delivered,' but whether 'was safety delivered more than the alternative,' which is still open for debate. Netanyahu can absolutely point at 'his' failure, and make the case that the alternative politicians would have had worse and more often. It's not like the attack has suddenly made the former left's 'let's make concessions for peace' more viable.
I knew this shit would happen. The IDF took too long to put boots on the ground, and now the "international community" wants them to back off from destroying the open-air terrorist base within walking distance of Israeli population centers. Why on Earth is, "Hamas gets to keep launching rockets, stockpiling munitions, and planning the next ground assault," even on the table? Any sane country would give Palestine an ultimatum. They can choose between:
Total and complete disarmament, or
Total and complete annihilation.
If you let them chose "3. Build your military headquarters under a hospital and use your own populace as hostages," of course they're going to pick that.
If the United States thinks that the Palestinian authorities have a legitimate claim to Israeli territory, then why are we supporting Israel at all? If the United States thinks that they don't, then why aren't we bombing them back to the stone age as part of the war on terror?
How exactly do you propose they do this? Would they ask holocaust survivors to tell them about best practices for death-camps and genocides of problematic ethnic groups? There are serious ethical problems associated with just genociding the Palestinians and murdering all their women, children and elderly in cold blood. International Law might not really mean anything, but if the Israelis just dash all the muslim children against the rocks they'd invite far worse problems for themselves. Holocaust 2: Electric Boogaloo is just not a viable option in the modern day, and even suggesting it is usually enough to make non-partisan observers recoil in disgust and horror.
Of course, this also explains why they can't make the offer of total and complete disarmament - the Palestinians pay attention to the Israelis when they present funny maps at the UN and what those maps would imply for them. There's no way you'd be able to convince them that total disarmament was actually a step towards reconciliation rather than just an attempt to make their extermination easier.
orthoxerox
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FirmWeird 1yr ago
How exactly do you propose they do this? Would they ask holocaust survivors to tell them about best practices for death-camps and genocides of problematic ethnic groups?
They have enough Haredim that can quote the required passages by heart:
But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:
Or, more generously:
Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
I do think they goofed by not invading Gaza immediately, as if they were in hot pursuit. Perhaps intelligence suggested that they were walking into a huge trap.
Alternatively, I'd expect Israel to have antibodies to psychological warfare but I wonder if the 100+ hostages Hamas took is more leverage than we realize.
If the United States thinks that they don't, then why aren't we bombing them back to the stone age as part of the war on terror?
Are we planning to kill every Palestinian? If not, the survivors are going to have not warm feelings for Israel. What state will they live under? How will Israel deal with them?
Insert joke remark about the US having an invasion plan for Canada. Like, sure, it probably existed. Some planners probably wanted to just have reps at moving through the process.
...but if you're Israel, kind of how do you not have a plan on the shelf for invading Gaza? Probably two or three plans with a few different spec'd out scenarios for your goals and other factors. Sure, none are going to exactly match your exact situation, and you'll need a little time to gather the requisite intel in one place (like, e.g., the disposition of other nations in the region) in order to make the necessary adjustments. But I've gotta think you've got an 80% good plan just sitting there, ready to go. Probably updated at least once a year, if not every six months.
I have no position on whether any of these things are good ideas or good plans... just that ISTM that they should have a ready-to-go plan, no less than China almost certainly has one for invading Taiwan whenever the time is right... or Taiwan has one for defending... or South Korea has one for... and so on and so forth. As you trickle out toward less and less likely scenarios, it's less likely to have one that's been updated recently. But Israel with Gaza?
You're missing the point. Obviously, Israel has existing plans on the shelf for invading Gaza. Just as I am sure they have existing plans on the shelf for invading the West Bank. And I am sure they have wargamed both many times.
The point is that step one of the plan is certainly calling up reserves, massing troops, pre-invasion aerial attacks to degrade Hamas capacity to defend itself, etc, etc. It isn't "chase Hamas into Gaza at a time dictated by Hamas, using only the troops that happen to be available at that time ," which was OP's proposal.
Fair enough. "Preparation" vs. "Planning", with a lot in one word. Sagan knows that even the US has been writhing a bit with its own planning bureaucracy to get it out of a mindset of, "First, we're going to take three months to call up troops and materiel, then we're going to take six months to ship it all to somewhere near theater (and magically not have to fight to get it there), then we'll like hang out and bomb 'em for a month before anything kicks off." Perhaps this will be an object lesson that helps a variety of countries get that out of their system in the same way that it seems to have kicked up their concern with sUAS into overdrive (even above what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh and the ongoing in Ukraine). If you don't have legit ass-kicking plans that can be put into significant motion on a short fuse, you might pay a significant price.
If the United States thinks that the Palestinian authorities have a legitimate claim to Israeli territory, then why are we supporting Israel at all? If the United States thinks that they don't, then why aren't we bombing them back to the stone age as part of the war on terror?
The_Nybbler
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FiveHourMarathon 1yr ago
Journalism seems to be dead
I recall quite a few claims that the wire services in Palestinian areas depend on stringers who are more or less propagandists for the terrorist group in charge.
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Notes -
Reports emerging that the USA is "pressuring" Israel to have a fully developed exit plan before invading Gaza to which Netanyahu presumably replied "Leeeeeroooooy Jeeeeenkiiiiiiins."
Meanwhile Blinken has reportedly been meeting with the Israelis for 8 hours.
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize. There is very little information coming out of Gaza right now. Journalism seems to be dead, it's a black box in there, and whatever reports we get later are going to be urban myths.
I wonder what all this will amount to. I doubt this will achieve any credibility with the Arab world for saving Arab lives, even if it works to do just that. If it doesn't work, no one in Israel will remember Blinken's advice when they're trapped in the quagmire.
I have to wonder—are our official statements framing it as a lesson learned from Afghanistan, or is that just editors aware of the irony? Because “trust us; we’re experts on going balls deep in Islamic terrorists” has a certain credibility.
Afghanistan is a country the size of Texas. Gaza Strip is the size of New York City. Lessons learned from invading the former don't really apply to the latter.
Right, and Israel has a population comparable to NYC, while there are about a fifth as many Palestinians in the strip. Does that mean they have an edge over Afghanistan?
When the situation is so confused and entrenched, I think it’s better to err on the side of caution. Going in with an exit strategy is always a better idea than rawdogging it.
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I've always gotten the impression that Israeli leaders are unusually frank in their statements rather than circumlocutory in the manner of the Chinese. So I picture that, in the room, Blinken is absolutely looking Netanyahu right in the eye and saying "We got the Goys to try this twice and it didn't work for them."
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I keep giggling at the idea of Netanyahu saying "Leeroy Jenkins". Thank you.
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I think there are two possible US concerns that they’re discussing.
Attacking in the tunnels will be catastrophic for the IDF and casualty numbers will be extremely high. Maybe Blinken has some CIA or Pentagon messaging about the nature of the entrenchment in Gaza and how difficult that will be to break.
The US has direct intelligence (or Blinken wants to suggest, for the US’ own interests, that they do) that Hezbollah will invade if and when Israel enters Gaza.
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Blinken's meeting with the Israelis also got interrupted by incoming rocket fire, which suggests some combination of a) Hamas' ability to restrain its own military forces is gone, b) its ability to get news is gone, or c) it really wants to make the US Secretary of State mark them as impossible to try diplomacy with, or some combination of the above.
The aftermath of that meeting's that Biden is going to Tel Aviv to meet Israelis Wednesday. I don't expect too much from his away game in general (or, tbf, from any President of the last forty years), but it's a pretty major investment to buy a couple days before a ground invasion. Hopefully it doesn't get a repeat of Blinken's jump to the bunkers or worse. Optimistically, there might be unique abilities to describe why this is obviously Hamas trying to bait an intervention that blows apart any chance of friendly relations with any Muslim country, and perhaps more importantly literally any political alternative to jumping into that trap, but the Biden administration has shared the Obama admin's bizarre Iran hard-on, so for all I know it's just going to devolve into something something Iran Nukes.
... there's also a more morbid bit no one really wants to say out loud, but that the US might have intelligence or 'intelligence' on, that's also one of the most serious time pressures.
It's quite possible a majority of the hostages are dead.
Just on a statistics thing, a lot of them were captured with serious injuries, some few probably resisted after capture and it didn't end well, there's a lot of really young babies and a few very vulnerable old or chronically ill people, Israel's been lobbing explosives one direction (Hamas says this has killed just shy of two dozen, for whatever you want to read that to actually mean) and Hamas hasn't exactly taught its fighters to treat prisoners with a ton of respect. Under the more pessimistic look at Hamas' unit discipline, it might not even know which of its troops (or unofficial combatant civilians) even took anyone to start with, and the sorta people who volunteer to go a-Viking in those circumstances tend toward the Bates side of the equation. On the more specific side, Hamas has been studiously resisting Red Cross access, there's only a handful of hostage videos, and comparing the current Hamas demands against the Shalit prisoner exchange is... not something that looks good.
Like, there's probably more than six living ones out of the claimed 199 right now? Maybe a quarter, maybe a third?
When there's a literal Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair with a Hamas gun pointed at her head, and Hamas demanding you send them thirty prisoners (one of which tortured children to death last week) to return her, sending troops into a meatgrinder tunnel is a hard choice made by hard men. A bad choice to make, of course; to borrow from a better writer than myself, maintaining the safety of a hostage during a rescue is the sort of unsolvable problem you want to make someone else's concern. But the survivors are mostly healthy-ish (before the beatings) dual-citizens or soldiers? The calculus changes a lot: there's a non-trivial chance that months or even years of negotiation might result in someone getting home alive, rather than getting parts of a body.
If a full scale invasion results in rescuing any significant percentage of hostages, I'll be shocked. As distinct from some kind of commando lightning strike rescue deal. Hostage deaths once discovered will simply goose the throttle on that meat grinder.
There is no amount of pain they can be inflicted to convince Hamas to return them.
Yes, to be very clear I don't expect the IDF has a good plan to rescue the hostages alive, or that such a good plan exists or is even possible. They just have a plan to release time pressure. Gush Etzion was 2014.
To be charitable, again we're talking a lot of babies or the elderly, a few chronically ill or recently-injured, and a lot of women. There's worse things than death, and years of negotiations give a lot of time for those worse things to happen and then death, followed by the disappearance of the bodies. To be less charitable, part of wartime leadership is not giving orders you know won't be followed.
There's no amount of pain that they can inflict that will get Hamas to return them, and there is no plausible ransom Hamas could demand that Israel will be willing to pay.
I mean is Israel particularly good at hostage rescue to begin with? I suspect not, that the US are the main power that is actually decent at solving that particular military problem, and this particular situation is probably too difficult even for us, let alone a force with looser rules of engagement(which Israel seems to have).
They're better at it than the Germans, as the morbid joke goes, but that's damning with faint praise and Hamas has put a lot of effort into making past hostages very hard to recover at all and especially recover alive. (Cfe Shalit's 400-meter claymore zone.
Again, I don't expect them to succeed, at least at the sort of scales required to avoid "Pyrrhic" from being the go-to term. I just don't see anyone pulling a rabbit out of a hat in Qatar.
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I don't know how they justified such an absurd ratio in the Shalit prisoner exchange (more than 1000 for 1). Apparently 79% of Israelis were in favour of the exchange, so there must be more context that I've skimmed over. How could it not incentivize the further taking of Israeli prisoners? Heck, it was only 10 years ago. There's a not insignificant possibility that freed Hamas prisoners took part in the recent raids.
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Chances of a lesson learned?
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This reminds me of the Afghanistan War, which I've long thought was big mistake, by which I don't just mean we shouldn't have tried to overthrow the Taliban and turn the country into a modern liberal democracy. I mean we shouldn't have invaded at all. The US have just accepted that the occasional terrorist attack of that magnitude is actually not that big a deal.
Hamas' attack was proportionally far worse, but still, even if they could remove Hamas, even if it didn't get replaced with something worse, and even if they didn't inspire more terrorism from other Arabs, it's hard to see how the amount of destruction is worth it. Why not just improve security so that it doesn't happen again? It sounds cliché but I think it's true: the reaction is what they wanted.
Generally, my impression, like many others', is that the Israelis seem far less genocidal towards the Palestinians than vice versa, but that has been much less true in the last week. Many Israelis, especially those in power, seem utterly unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinians generally.
They don't seem to have a plan and this war may turn out to be much difficult than Afghanistan. I think they're acting irrationally out of anger, just like Americans did immediately after the September 11th attacks. I'm surprised how little weight has been given to what I thought were the lessons of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
The risk is that if they do nothing and keep beefing up defenses, eventually Hamas comes up with something the defenses can’t stand and commits a colossal attack (bigger than last saturday’s) or even threatens Israel’s existence in some way.
Destroying Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was probably the right move for the US.
How, exactly, are they supposed to destroy Israel? This is not a very organized group and it really looked like the Saturday attack was basically everything they can muster.
Unless they get their hands on a nuke or something, I just don’t see it(and even then, they can’t build a reliable delivery mechanism, and Iran is probably not willing to give them one because they’re crazy).
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To the modal Israeli, the death of Palestinians is an acceptable cost. To the modal Palestinian, the death of Israelis is a cause for celebration.
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Cynically, hopefully, or practically?
Cynically, this is the Biden administration setting a trap for Netanyahu, such that if Netanyahu goes forward anyway despite US questions, the US will be able to leverage the 'we told you so' advantage to affect Israeli politics to get rid of Netanyahu once the rally-around-the-flag emotional unity passes. This won't help the situation per see, beyond maybe allowing a new leader change to stop furthering a terrible disaster.
Hopefully, the US sees the situation as a real risk for a moral event horizon and strategic cliff that Israel wouldn't be able to walk back from, and is trying to protect it from itself, and in the process save many Palestinians who would otherwise die.
Practically, the Americans are trying to work through the emotionally-driven reaction phase, and shape the Israeli action such that 'do something' doesn't mean 'do anything,' by pushing the Israelis to confront that many-an-anything can, in fact, be worse than no action at all. Whether this forestalls any action, or shapes it into a more productive action, the objective is to re-introduce long-term thinking back into what has been a major emotional shock reaction.
Since the Americans are uniquely positioned to engage the Israelis from a position of understanding the nature of the culture-shock, but also being able to acknowledge the costs of over-reaction and lack of foresight, here's hoping it works.
(I'm not very hopeful.)
Do you see the slighest chance Netanyahu survives this, politically? Safety has been the third rail in Israeli politics for its entire existence, this attack seems like a repudiation of the entire Likud philosophy for Gaza and the West Bank, and there's really not many spaces left to pull a rabbit out of a hat. The extent he's still in power is less a rally-around-the-flag unity and more just the procedural timeline.
The flip side is that there's not many of his domestic critics that claim any alternative to intervention, here. There's not really any vision for how to stop this from happening again without a ton of boots on the ground.
Sure, he could survive politicially. Everyone eventually falls from politics, but the key for political power actors remaining in place isn't their innate popularity, but the viability of alternatives. Even failed states continue to survive as long as no one else comes around to actually overthrow them. In Netanyahu's case, the question isn't 'was safety always delivered,' but whether 'was safety delivered more than the alternative,' which is still open for debate. Netanyahu can absolutely point at 'his' failure, and make the case that the alternative politicians would have had worse and more often. It's not like the attack has suddenly made the former left's 'let's make concessions for peace' more viable.
Wasn't Benny Gantz's pitch basically "I'll maintain the hardline vs Palestine but have less corruption"?
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I knew this shit would happen. The IDF took too long to put boots on the ground, and now the "international community" wants them to back off from destroying the open-air terrorist base within walking distance of Israeli population centers. Why on Earth is, "Hamas gets to keep launching rockets, stockpiling munitions, and planning the next ground assault," even on the table? Any sane country would give Palestine an ultimatum. They can choose between:
If you let them chose "3. Build your military headquarters under a hospital and use your own populace as hostages," of course they're going to pick that.
If the United States thinks that the Palestinian authorities have a legitimate claim to Israeli territory, then why are we supporting Israel at all? If the United States thinks that they don't, then why aren't we bombing them back to the stone age as part of the war on terror?
How exactly do you propose they do this? Would they ask holocaust survivors to tell them about best practices for death-camps and genocides of problematic ethnic groups? There are serious ethical problems associated with just genociding the Palestinians and murdering all their women, children and elderly in cold blood. International Law might not really mean anything, but if the Israelis just dash all the muslim children against the rocks they'd invite far worse problems for themselves. Holocaust 2: Electric Boogaloo is just not a viable option in the modern day, and even suggesting it is usually enough to make non-partisan observers recoil in disgust and horror.
Of course, this also explains why they can't make the offer of total and complete disarmament - the Palestinians pay attention to the Israelis when they present funny maps at the UN and what those maps would imply for them. There's no way you'd be able to convince them that total disarmament was actually a step towards reconciliation rather than just an attempt to make their extermination easier.
I think you mean Holocaust 2: The Jews strike back...
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They have enough Haredim that can quote the required passages by heart:
Or, more generously:
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I do think they goofed by not invading Gaza immediately, as if they were in hot pursuit. Perhaps intelligence suggested that they were walking into a huge trap.
Alternatively, I'd expect Israel to have antibodies to psychological warfare but I wonder if the 100+ hostages Hamas took is more leverage than we realize.
Are we planning to kill every Palestinian? If not, the survivors are going to have not warm feelings for Israel. What state will they live under? How will Israel deal with them?
It is my understanding that a successful invasion requires a great deal of preparation.
Insert joke remark about the US having an invasion plan for Canada. Like, sure, it probably existed. Some planners probably wanted to just have reps at moving through the process.
...but if you're Israel, kind of how do you not have a plan on the shelf for invading Gaza? Probably two or three plans with a few different spec'd out scenarios for your goals and other factors. Sure, none are going to exactly match your exact situation, and you'll need a little time to gather the requisite intel in one place (like, e.g., the disposition of other nations in the region) in order to make the necessary adjustments. But I've gotta think you've got an 80% good plan just sitting there, ready to go. Probably updated at least once a year, if not every six months.
I have no position on whether any of these things are good ideas or good plans... just that ISTM that they should have a ready-to-go plan, no less than China almost certainly has one for invading Taiwan whenever the time is right... or Taiwan has one for defending... or South Korea has one for... and so on and so forth. As you trickle out toward less and less likely scenarios, it's less likely to have one that's been updated recently. But Israel with Gaza?
There's a difference between having a plan and being ready to execute a plan with zero preparations or forewarning.
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You're missing the point. Obviously, Israel has existing plans on the shelf for invading Gaza. Just as I am sure they have existing plans on the shelf for invading the West Bank. And I am sure they have wargamed both many times.
The point is that step one of the plan is certainly calling up reserves, massing troops, pre-invasion aerial attacks to degrade Hamas capacity to defend itself, etc, etc. It isn't "chase Hamas into Gaza at a time dictated by Hamas, using only the troops that happen to be available at that time ," which was OP's proposal.
Fair enough. "Preparation" vs. "Planning", with a lot in one word. Sagan knows that even the US has been writhing a bit with its own planning bureaucracy to get it out of a mindset of, "First, we're going to take three months to call up troops and materiel, then we're going to take six months to ship it all to somewhere near theater (and magically not have to fight to get it there), then we'll like hang out and bomb 'em for a month before anything kicks off." Perhaps this will be an object lesson that helps a variety of countries get that out of their system in the same way that it seems to have kicked up their concern with sUAS into overdrive (even above what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh and the ongoing in Ukraine). If you don't have legit ass-kicking plans that can be put into significant motion on a short fuse, you might pay a significant price.
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This is a good quote. I'm gonna use it.
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I recall quite a few claims that the wire services in Palestinian areas depend on stringers who are more or less propagandists for the terrorist group in charge.
Gaza does not have robust freedom of speech or press. You'd just get your head bashed in for criticizing Hamas.
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