The war in Israel is already lost

Animals. That’s what the Israeli Ministry of Defense labeled Hamas on Sunday, opening the way for yet another no win battle, one where the immediate outcome will be lots of death and destruction while in the long term, the consequence will be more conflict and more anger.

Terrorists. That’s what the White House labeled Hamas after the surprise assault and President Biden repeated today. It is partly a declaration that the United States sees the conflict as an extension of the global war on terror and not a war with Iran, but it is also part of the same dehumanization, that there is no grievance to be recognized and no understanding of the enemy. “A group whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews,” Biden said today.

“Evil,” “barbaric,” “atrocities” have followed the use of terrorist by the White House to describe Hamas. The words aren’t necessarily untrue, in what Hamas has done here, but they are also overused and pernicious because, well, what do you do with animals?

And Hamas? They are practically ignored as the dehumanized party, not even dignified with having a grievance or a position. To concern oneself with trying to understand why now and to what end is to be sympathetic with the so-called terrorist animals. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people, President Biden says. “Pure unadulterated evil,” he says, channeling George Bush.

“Hamas will understand that by attacking us, they’ve made a mistake of historic proportions,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “We will exact a price that will be remembered by them and Israel's other enemies for decades to come.” Exact a price. That’s all the Israeli government can promise, not eradication, not an end to the endless fighting. Israel undertook retaliatory bombing and it shut the border and promises a ground war, as if any of this is going to resolve anything. The right to defend. The right to retaliate. Hamas started it. All of the declarations might be true and anything else is drowned out and suppressed. But none of this suggests the true human element, which is two people hating each other.

“We remember the pain of being attacked by terrorists at home,” President Biden says. “If the U.S. were attacked in the way Israel was attacked this weekend,” Biden says, “our response would be swift decisive and overwhelming.” The rhetorical comparison with 9/11 has its consequences though, specifically that the likely outcome will be the same: Israel will exercise its superior military might and Hamas will suffer great loss. But Hamas will not be eradicated and even if it is, the organization will likely morph into some other entity as ISIS emerged from the rubble in Iraq (after all, more than 50 percent of the Palestinian population is under the age of 18. That’s the future that’s being forged by hatred today.)

Every national security catastrophe follows a certain pattern, and the Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent “Swords of Iron” is no exception. Israel bombed in response. Washington was quick to rush an aircraft carrier battle group closer to the area and it started moving munitions to Israel – the standard playbook for any crisis. In less than 72 hours, there’s been speculation that this could escalate to World War III or even to the use of nuclear weapons, that there was a massive intelligence failure, that Iran is behind it, that it’s all Netanyahu’s fault, and that the Biden White House let down its guard and appeased everyone, thus encouraging the attack. And of course there’s been the yelling of death to Hamas and death to Israel from the usual corners.

The Iran line of argument – that Iran directed the attack – fits with the current Washington boner with regard to Tehran and is the safe place for every deskbound strategist to stand. But in a world in which everyone has an agenda and an ulterior motive in how they see a conflict, pointing fingers at Iran as the responsible party merely serves to avoid having to fathom the human element in Israel and Gaza, specifically that Hamas didn’t need direction to do what it did. It’s just so much easier for the experts to point to Iran than it is to say they are powerless in the face of these ferocious emotions.

And for those arguing that Israel’s supposed intelligence failure is the result of overreliance on technical means of collection and a slighting of human sources (by the way, we still don’t really know the facts), that is just the evergreen statement in Chapter 1 of the same Washington playbook. First and most important, it isn’t true. Second, does everyone who can spell Israel on the Scrabble board have to say something?

Though everyone has an agenda, that doesn’t mean that those very same people don’t struggle to understand the conflict. That’s what I think about bureaucrats, soldiers, and spies as well. Complexity is so easily brushed aside by seeing the fighting through a lens that is already established and well understood to those doing the seeing. Hatred can be ignored in this process: They did that to us is the order of the day. On both sides. Because human emotions and actions are so complex to understand, particularly in situations where one is willing to give ones life, many just go to an easy place to explain, that this is just a repeat of history or that there’s some hidden hand operating behind this. But sometimes a duck is just a duck. The two sides hate each other. They did so before the current conflict and the current government and they will after it’s gone. Both sides. And they will now hate each other even more.

As the outrage continues about the Hamas attack on the music festival in the desert, about the taking of hostages, about decapitated mothers and babies, lost in the outrage will be the reason why attacks on unarmed civilians is wrong in the first place, for our screwy society where killing is okay and decapitation is not. Without getting into too many technicalities, simply put, there exists some rules even in war and they exist for a reason and it’s important to follow them.

Israel follows these rules. Up to a point. And that is not excusing Hamas in any way. Like all combatants states, Isarel follows the rules until “military necessity” occurs, which is in reality what the complex law itself allows and all modern militaries exploit in their justifications. In one of its first briefings on numbers of bombs dropped and buildings attacked in Gaza, the IDF said that it destroyed two mosques; buildings, the Israelis said, that were being used by Hamas as “operational infrastructure.” If what Israel says is true, under the law of armed conflict, their use for military purposes might make the mosques legitimate targets. Though Israel has to demonstrate timeliness and the balance of civilian harm in so doing. In other words, have your lawyer call my lawyer.

I go into this because law and adherence to some code of conduct is important, even in the face of war. The laws aren’t mere annoyances – respect for them is key to fighting in a way that leaves open the possibility of the restoration of peaceful relations, the very definition of just war. When the IDF said it bombed mosques, it wants to assert that it follows these rules – even when it comes to animals. But their benefit and cost balance is off, for the “cost” in the long term might not make the attack worth it. Talk about something too complex for our over simplified media age.

In the 2006 Israel-Hizballah war, Israel similarly destroyed high-rise buildings in Beirut and attacked many targets that one could argue were illegitimate. I argued in my book, Divining Victory: Airpower in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War that the broader context of what the bombing would cost was ignored in the balance, that Israel managed to destroy a lot of Hizballah buildings to tactical effect but that the long term outcome wouldn’t justify the action. And there we are: the Hizballah pot is boiling, threatening to overflow, as it now has.

The Gaza conflict is already shaping up to have the same outcome of every other Israeli fight with its neighbors – that it will spawn more conflict. “You all know these traumas never go away,” President Biden said today, referring solely to Israel.

And then he said the same-old same-old indicating that even the White House has no clue as to what to do to make things better, to increase Israeli and Palestinian security and to improve a people’s way of life (on both sides), indeed how to secure America’s own way of life and its own security. “There is no place for hate in America,” the president blathered today. “Not against Jews, not against Muslims, not against anybody. We reject, we reject. What we reject is terrorism. We condemn the indiscriminate evil just as we've always done. That's what America stands for,” he said. Please.

I don’t need to blame anyone or excuse anyone, but I feel that I need apologize in advance for not being pro-Israel or pro Palestinian, for not evoking the holocaust, for not spreading the catechism of counter-terrorism, for not calling Hamas animals, for not erecting my own great Satan, and for not supporting the blind American way. A human tragedy has occurred. Another one. And there’s another war besetting our supposed advanced civilized society, a war that will go nowhere. Another one.

When are we going to learn that “national security” and the voices of the same are ignorant and empty?