Israel Is Losing

 

TONY KARON AND DANIEL LEVY

Despite the violence it has unleashed on Palestinians,
Israel is failing to achieve its political goals.

It may sound daft to suggest that a
group of armed irregulars, numbering
in the low tens of thousands, besieged
and with little access to advanced weaponry,
is a match for one of the world’s
most powerful militaries, backed and armed by the
United States. And yet, an increasing number of
establishment strategic analysts are warning that Israel could lose
this war on Palestinians.

Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 neutralized Israeli military installations,
breaking open the gates of the world’s largest open-air prison
and leading to a gruesome rampage in which up to 1,200 Israelis, at least
845 of them civilians, were killed. The shocking ease with which Hamas
breached the fortified border around the Gaza Strip reminded many of
the 1968 Tet Offensive. There are vast differences, of course, between
a US expeditionary war in a distant land and Israel’s war to defend an
occupation at home, fought by a citizen army motivated by a sense of existential
peril. But the usefulness of the analogy lies in the political logic.
In 1968, the Vietnamese revolutionaries lost the battle and much
of the underground political and military infrastructure they had patiently
built over the years. Yet the Tet Offensive was a key moment in
their defeat of the United States—albeit at a massive cost in Vietnamese
lives. By simultaneously staging dramatic, high-profile attacks
on more than 100 targets across the country on a single day, lightly
armed Vietnamese guerrillas shattered the illusion of success that was
being peddled to the US public by Lyndon Johnson’s administration.
It signaled to Americans that the war for which
they were being asked to sacrifice tens of thousands
of their sons was unwinnable.

The North Vietnamese leadership measured
the impact of its actions by their political effects
rather than by conventional military measures,
such as men and materiel lost or territory gained.
Thus Henry Kissinger’s 1969 lament: “We fought
a military war; our opponents fought a political
one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents

aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process,
we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of
guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
The conventional army loses if it does not win.”
That logic has Jon Alterman of the not-exactly-dovish
Center for Strategic and International Studies
in Washington, D.C., arguing that Hamas could
achieve many of its objectives:

Hamas sees victory not in one year or five, but
from engaging with decades of struggle that
increase Palestinian solidarity and increase
Israel’s isolation. In this scenario, Hamas rallies
a besieged population in Gaza around it in
anger and helps collapse the Palestinian Authority
government by ensuring Palestinians
see it even more as a feckless adjunct to Israeli
military authority. Meanwhile, Arab states
move strongly away from normalization, the
Global South aligns strongly with the Palestinian
cause, Europe recoils at the Israeli army’s
excesses, and an American debate erupts
over Israel, destroying the bipartisan support
Israel has enjoyed here since the early 1970s.

Forget “intelligence failures”—Israel’s failure to
anticipate October 7 was a political failure to understand
the consequences of a violent system of oppression
that leading international and Israeli human
rights organizations have branded as apartheid. Israel
could kill 1,000 Hamas men a day and solve nothing,
because Israeli violence would replenish their ranks.
The grinding structural repression that Israel expected
Palestinians to suffer in silence meant that Israeli
security was always illusory.

The weeks since October 7
have affirmed that there can be
no return to the status quo ante.
This was likely Hamas’s goal
in staging its attack. And even
prior to this, many Israeli leaders
were openly calling for the
completion of the Nakba, the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Israel’s military will likely oust Hamas from governing
Gaza. But analysts like Tareq Baconi argue
that Hamas has sought to break out of the shackles
of governing a territory sectioned off from the rest
of Palestine on terms set by the occupying power.
Hamas’s gambit may have been to sacrifice the
municipal governance of Gaza in order to cement its
status as a national resistance organization. Hamas
is not trying to bury Fatah, the ruling party in the
West Bank: The various unity agreements between
them—particularly those led by the imprisoned
members of both factions—and the list of prisoners
it seeks to exchange for hostages demonstrate
that Hamas seeks a united front. Led by Fatah, the
Palestinian Authority (PA) is unable to protect Palestinians
from the increasing violence of Israeli settlements
and entrenched control in the West Bank,
let alone to meaningfully respond to the bloodshed
in Gaza. Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians,
arrested thousands more, and displaced entire villages
in the West Bank, all the while escalating its
state-sponsored settler attacks. In so doing, Israel
has further undermined Fatah’s PA-governance
strategy in the eyes of the West Bank population.
The blue-chip polling organization the Palestinian
Center for Policy and Survey Research finds that
support for Hamas has tripled in the West Bank
since October 7, and support for armed resistance
to end Israeli occupation there stands at 70 percent.

For years, settlers protected by the Israel Defense
Forces have attacked Palestinian villages with
the aim of forcing their residents to leave and tightening
Israel’s illegal grip on the occupied territory—
but the escalation of this violence since October 7 is
causing even Israel’s Western accomplices to blanch.
Israeli violence against Palestinians outside of Gaza
also amplifies the connections between Gaza, the
West Bank, East Jerusalem, and even inside Israel.
Ironically, the US insistence on the Palestinian
Authority’s being put in control of Gaza after Israel’s
current war of devastation—and its belated, feeble
warnings over settler violence—reinforces the
idea that the West Bank and Gaza are a single entity.
Israel’s 17-year policy of cleaving a pliant West
Bank run by a co-opted PA from a “terrorist-run
Gaza” has failed.

Just weeks before Hamas’s attack, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu was boasting that Israel had
successfully “managed” the conflict to the point
that Palestine no longer featured on his map of a
“new Middle East.” With the Abraham Accords and
other alliances, some Arab leaders were embracing
Israel. As presidents, both Donald Trump and Joe
Biden focused on the “normalization” of relations
with Arab regimes that were willing to leave the

Palestinians subject to Israeli apartheid. October 7 served up a brutal
reminder that this was untenable and that resistance constitutes a form
of veto power over the efforts of others to determine Palestinians’ fate.
Israel has no clear plan for Gaza after the war. Its stated goal of
eliminating Hamas is widely recognized as a fantasy. But the destruction
Israel has wrought suggests an intention—bluntly stated by a
number of officials—to make the territory uninhabitable for most of
the 2.2 million Palestinians who live there. The United States has ruled
that out, but no smart gambler would discount the possibility that the
Israeli government will seek forgiveness of rather than permission for
more mass-scale ethnic cleansing in line with Israel’s demographic
goals of reducing the Palestinian population from the river to the sea.
US officials have reached for the prayer books of yore, speak-

ing hopefully of putting 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, the head of
the PA, back in charge of Gaza, with the promise of some renewed
pursuit of the chimeric two-state solution. But the PA has no credibility
even in the West Bank, because of its acquiescence to Israel’s
ever-expanding occupation. Then there’s the reality that preventing
genuine Palestinian sovereignty in any part of historic Palestine has
long been a point of consensus among the Israeli leadership.

Even if Israel were to kill Hamas’s top leaders (as it has done previously),
the country’s war has bolstered the group’s standing across
the region. It requires no approval of Hamas’s actions on October 7 to
acknowledge the enduring appeal of a movement that seems capable
of making Israel pay a price for the violence it visits upon Palestinians
every day, every year, generation after generation.

What comes next is far from clear, but Hamas’s attack has forced a
reset of a political contest to which Israel appears unwilling to respond
beyond using military force against Palestinian civilians. And as things
stand, months into the vengeance, Israel can’t be said to be winning
the war where it matters most: in the political arena.

Tony Karon is the editorial lead of Al Jazeera’s AJ+. Daniel Levy is the presi-
dent of the US/Middle East Project and a former Israeli negotiator.

THE NATION