Israel and Hamas at War (Special Edition: October 7, 2023)
“History may not repeat itself but it rhymes” is a quote often attributed to Mark Twain. Whether he in fact said it is beside the point. Today, history is rhyming in the Middle East, where fifty years after the October 1973 or Yom Kippur War, Israel again experienced an armed attack on a Jewish holiday.
In this case it was not by the armies and air forces of Egypt and Syria but the rockets and ground forces of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. Initial reports indicate that several hundred Israelis have been killed and on the order of one thousand injured.
There appear to be some striking parallels between then and now. Once again Israel appears to have been caught flat-footed. If so, many questions will be asked about how it was that one of the world’s most vaunted intelligence agencies so missed this coming. In October 1973 a good many signs were ignored by an over-confident Israel. The question is whether this was again the case or whether signs were missed entirely.
Expect questions too about Israeli defense preparedness or the lack of it, especially after so much had been spent over the years on building defenses against just this sort of attack. What went wrong, and to what extent was a lack of military preparation as much the problem as poor intelligence?
Why did Hamas strike now? There was no immediate or specific trigger. But there are any number of possibilities. Iran, Hamas’s biggest backer, may have wanted to torpedo the Israeli-Saudi normalization process along with plans for a U.S.-Saudi security pact and a Saudi civilian nuclear energy program made possible with U.S. help. Hamas, as it has in the past, may have wanted to enhance its standing by demonstrating that it alone can mount a meaningful Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.
Israel will obviously focus first on making sure all Hamas militants still in Israel have been killed or taken prisoner. And it is already mounting what will undoubtedly be a ferocious retaliatory attack on Gaza, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring the “enemy will pay an unprecedented price.”
But Israel’s hands will be tied in two and possibly three ways. First, unlike the case fifty years ago, there is no discrete military target set to retaliate against. Hamas is an unconventional foe. Hamas intentionally makes it hard and often impossible to distinguish between civilian and military targets inside Gaza. Conducting a ground invasion of Gaza would be difficult and enormously costly given how densely it is populated. Israel removed its army from Gaza in 2005; reoccupation is not a sustainable option. Israeli air strikes that lead to large-scale civilian deaths will soon create international pressure for it to stop.
Israeli hands are also tied by the fact a sizable number of its troops and citizens were abducted, including young people and the elderly. Israel now faces the reality that military action on its part could lead to reprisals against those being held hostage in Gaza by Hamas.
Then there is the concern that too harsh an Israeli military response against Palestinians in Gaza would make it difficult or impossible for the Saudis to move ahead and normalize relations with Israel, something Prime Minister Netanyahu desperately wants to buttress his political standing and to burnish his legacy.
At home, Israelis will rally around the flag in the short run. Democracy protests will be put on hold. Reserves who vowed not to serve this government will now serve.
This respite will likely prove temporary. At some point Israeli politics will return in full force. Any benefit the Netanyahu government will derive from the public outrage to the Hamas attacks will be short-lived. The government is also vulnerable to media and official investigations that could well highlight it ignored intelligence, its lack of preparedness, or both.
There is as well the question of whether Hezbollah, far better armed than Hamas, will launch attacks from Lebanon, essentially turning this into a two-front war. This is quite possible given Iran’s likely role in what has taken place. Even a three-front war cannot be ruled out if Palestinians in the West Bank mount sympathy protests or attacks.
Once the situation calms, there is the question of what comes next. In 1973, war became a prelude to peace. It led to disengagement accords between Israel and both Egypt and Syria, and over time, to formal peace between Israel and Egypt and a de facto one between Israel and Syria.
But that was only possible because Egypt and Syria had strong leaders who understood what they could and could not accomplish militarily. They came to advance limited territorial aims that Israel was largely prepared to meet.
It is not clear any of this applies to the current situation. Hamas controls Gaza but not the Palestinians in the West Bank. It is among other things a terrorist organization, one that holds political and territorial goals that any Israeli government would reject.
Meanwhile, Israel lacks a strategy for dealing with Gaza. Over the decades it has tried economic pressure, economic easing, enhanced defense, and attacks. None has succeeded and none is likely to. Restoring deterrence will prove difficult.
And then there is the additional reality that Israel also lacks a strategy for dealing with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Such a strategy must be premised on sidelining Hamas, something that only has a chance of being accomplished if Israel demonstrates that non-violent diplomatic efforts by Palestinians to reach an accommodation with Israel will lead to a far better political, economic, and territorial future for Palestinians than renewed violence.
The absence of any willingness by Israel to adopt such a political strategy all but ensures the outbreak of violence we are witnessing will not be the last. Israel may well be at war, as the prime minister says, but wars cannot be ended and won unless they are waged with political as well as military tools. The true friends of the Jewish state, above all the United States, should not just stand by it in the UN Security Council and help it meet the immediate security threat, which President Biden pledged to do. The United States should also work with Israel over time to develop a viable political option to promote an accommodation with the Palestinians as well.
Check out The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens.