Could The War In Gaza Be Fought More Humanely?
There are steps that Israel can and should take, but, ultimately, war is cruelty and you cannot refine it.
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A Better Way
I’m giving a presentation today on whether there is a way to wage the war in Gaza more humanely. Since I need to prepare—and I figured it would be of interest to many of you—I’m giving you an expanded version of my remarks.
I will use David Brooks's recent excellent column on this issue as a starting point because I think he asks the right questions.
There seems to be a broad consensus atop the Democratic Party about the war in Gaza, structured around two propositions. First, after the attacks of Oct. 7, Israel has the right to defend itself and defeat Hamas. Second, the way Israel is doing this is “over the top,” in President Biden’s words. The vast numbers of dead and starving children are gut wrenching, the devastation is overwhelming, and it’s hard not to see it all as indiscriminate.
If the current Israeli military approach is inhumane, what’s the alternative? Is there a better military strategy Israel can use to defeat Hamas without a civilian blood bath?
Before I get into this, I want to state at the outset that there are legitimate criticisms of the way Israel has waged its military campaign in Gaza.
As I wrote back in December, “The Israel Defense Forces has, compared to previous wars, almost certainly loosened its rules of engagement in Gaza.” Part of this almost certainly was a function of a broadened military operation that sought not to weaken Hamas but rather to eradicate it. We don’t know whether these changes in the rules of engagement were necessary, commensurate with the threat posed by Hamas, and fall within the boundaries of international law.
Through a combination of incompetence and malignant behavior, Israel has put obstacles in the way of food aid entering Gaza and worsened the humanitarian situation there. I’m not prepared to place all the blame on Israel. Still, there’s no question that elements within the Israeli government have tried to slow down humanitarian supplies flowing into Gaza out of the belief that it will put pressure on Hamas. This approach is not only morally depraved, but it’s also profoundly misguided because it’s pretty clear that Hamas not only doesn’t care about suffering in Gaza but sees benefits from making the situation worse. Still, Israel’s behavior when it comes to food aid in Gaza is not defensible.
I share Brooks’ view that “The key weakness of the Israeli strategy has always been that it is aimed at defeating Hamas militarily without addressing Palestinian grievances and without paying enough attention to the wider consequences.” Quite simply, the Israelis have acted like destroying Hamas is an end in itself and have shorn the military campaign from a larger political agenda. I have no sense that Israel has thought about what comes the day after the war ends — if it ever does — and has made no effort to reach out to the Palestinian Authority (PA) on the issue of post-Hamas governance in Gaza.
Moreover, by failing to think about the day after, Israel has angered its key ally, the United States, and alienated much of the world. Now, I’m in the camp that no matter what Israel did, they‘d be criticized because that’s just the way of the world. But they’ve undoubtedly made the situation worse, and it’s had a strategic impact. An Israeli government that talked about a two-state solution or extended an olive branch to the PA would have given itself a bit more leeway — in the court of public opinion and elsewhere — to aggressively pursue Hamas in Gaza. At the very least, it would have appeased the United States.
It also needs to be pointed out that contrary to the cries of genocide emanating from college quads, protest marches, and social media, Israel has also taken steps to protect civilians. As Brooks notes, Israel “has sent out millions of pamphlets, texts and recorded calls warning civilians of coming operations. It has conducted four-hour daily pauses to allow civilians to leave combat areas. It has dropped speakers that blast out instructions about when to leave and where to go.” These actions have arguably lengthened the war and put Israeli troops in more danger than if their commanders did not surrender the element of surprise. If Israel wanted to commit genocide in Gaza, it would be taking none of these steps.
Of course, at the same time, we can’t lose sight of the fact that an estimated 33,000 Palestinians have died since the war began — an exponentially higher number than Israelis killed on October 7.
Having Said That …
All these points, however, don’t fundamentally address the question of whether the war in Gaza could be waged more humanely. The answer, tragically, is no.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First, civilians die in war. It’s unavoidable. Modern wars aren’t fought on giant battlefields between massive armies with muskets and artillery or swords and shields — they are waged among civilians and often in cities. As a point of reference, no country in the world goes to greater lengths to protect civilian lives in wartime than the United States. Entire weapons systems have been devised with the express goal of limiting civilian deaths. And still, America killed tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere during the war on terrorism. As General William Sherman pungently stated in 1864 as he prepared to burn the Confederate city of Atlanta to the ground, “War is cruelty; you cannot refine it.”
Second, far more civilians die when wars are waged in a dense, urban environment like Gaza. Those numbers are even higher when one side simply doesn’t care how many civilians are killed — and it gets even worse when the side that doesn’t care is the defending army. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in Syria because of the callous indifference of the Assad regime — and later its benefactors in Moscow — to civilian death tolls. In Gaza, the situation is the opposite — civilians are dying in record numbers because their fellow Palestinians, Hamas, are unbothered by the bloodletting. If anything, they seek to profit from it.
Indeed, specific elements of the Gazan battlefield have made this conflict dramatically more deadly.
Hamas embeds its military infrastructure alongside and sometimes within the civilian infrastructure. That’s why we’ve seen Israel attack hospitals: it’s a location from which Hamas militants hide and a place where they took Israeli hostages captured on October 7.
Hamas has constructed a vast subterranean world of hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath Gaza. It would be hard enough to wage war against an enemy that is hiding among the civilian population — but Hamas fighters are also hidden underneath them. Attacking the tunnels means expending an enormous amount of firepower; destroying them means undermining (literally) the buildings built on the surface above them.
A key element of Hamas’s strategy is to put Palestinian civilians in harm’s way. I like how Posen describes this — it’s not “human shield,” it’s “human camouflage” or “human ammunition.” Another way to put it is that Hamas will keep throwing Palestinian civilians against Israeli bullets and bombs until they meet their political goals.
It’s been clear from day one of the war that Hamas’s strategy is to increase the death toll among Palestinian civilians because the more Palestinians suffer, the more pressure grows on Israel to stop its military campaign. We are seeing that play out today as Western pressure is applied on Israel to halt its planned offensive in Rafah because of the potential civilian death toll. It’s why Hamas has been playing hardball on a cease-fire agreement for the past several weeks: why should they make a deal with Israel to stop the war when they can rely on useful idiots in the West to do their bidding for them?
If this sounds cynical, consider all the ways that Hamas prepared the civilian population for the military response to October 7. They didn’t. No bomb shelters were built — underground tunnels are only for Hamas fighters. They didn’t stockpile food or gasoline — the latter was used to fire rockets into Israel, which went on for months after 10/7. And quite obviously, no evacuation plan was put in place.
Finally, and this is a crucial, often ignored point, there is nowhere for Palestinian civilians to go. In other conflicts, non-combatants could flee fighting by seeking refuge in neighboring countries. That is not an option in Gaza. Egypt has closed the border to refugee flows, and even if the border was open, it’s far from clear that many Palestinians would leave, fearful they might not be able to return.
So, while it’s fair to argue that Israel could be doing more to protect civilians in Gaza … we should be clear that no matter what steps Israel took, tens of thousands of people were going to die in this war.
We should also acknowledge that the Israeli offensive has been partially successful.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Raphael Cohen notes:
By its own estimates, Israel has destroyed three-quarters of Hamas’ battalions and killed two of five brigade commanders, 19 of 24 battalion commanders, more than 50 platoon leaders, and 12,000 of Hamas’ 30,000 foot soldiers. American intelligence estimates are lower, but not by much: Between 20 to 30 percent of Hamas’ fighters and 20 to 40 percent of its tunnels are estimated to have been destroyed as of mid-January
Lastly, and this is perhaps the crucial point: what was the alternative, particularly if we agree that Israel, as a sovereign nation, has a right to defend itself and respond to military attacks on its territory?
Talk of a political solution is essential, but Hamas has no interest in a political outcome to the conflict. Indeed, the success of any diplomatic arrangement or movement on a two-state solution relies on militarily defeating Hamas, which is highly unlikely to drop its rejectionist demands.
Militarily, a more targeted, pin-prick operation would likely not succeed. Hamas has a 30,000-man-strong fighting force (more than 3,000 alone were mobilized for the October 7 attack). Taking out the group’s leadership cadre is important but not enough. The rank-and-file needs to be killed or captured. Infrastructure needs to be destroyed, including the tunnel system — otherwise, Hamas or some offshoot could go back to plotting October 7-style attacks safe from Israel’s intelligence and military capabilities.
Finally, I wrote this back in December, and it remains relevant today, “While the casualties in Gaza are horrific and the deaths of innocents are tragic and there are steps that Israel could perhaps take to limit them, thousands will still die. Supporting Israel’s right to self-defense while seeking to distance oneself from the consequences of that support demonstrates a dangerous misunderstanding about the nature of war.”
War is not humane, and it never will be. Once Hamas fighters crossed the border into Israel and massacred more than 1,000 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages, there was one way this was going to play out — and we’re seeing it happen in Gaza. There is, unfortunately, no better path.
What’s Going On
I’m not Christian, and even I am offended by this.
I have a lot to say about Joe Lieberman, but Jon Lovett has done much of the heavy lifting in this rant.
Anshel Pfeiffer says Bibi Netanyahu is Israel’s worst Prime Minister ever. You’ll get no argument from me.
This David Frum essay about his daughter Miranda, who passed away earlier this year, is heartbreaking but essential reading.
The American academy is in serious trouble … this is a must-read from Theo Baker on the radical, anti-Semitic politics at Stanford.
Musical Interlude