A Tale of Two Wars
It’s the best of times in Israel’s north and the worst of times in the south – relatively speaking. Israel’s sudden capitulation in Gaza contrasts starkly with the counterexample of Lebanon. Israel had a plan to defeat Hezbollah. The brilliant Operation Grim Beeper was soon followed by leadership decapitation, which presaged a determined ground incursion and aerial destruction of most of Hezbollah’s arsenal. Agreeing to a ceasefire that included a guaranteed-to-fail oversight mechanism but also a seemingly anodyne provision allowing both sides to defend their interests, Israel has avoided the truce trap by attacking every violation as a national threat. This has become the new normal and criticism is muted. Israel has beaten Hezbollah strategically and tactically and remains in control.
Israel also had a plan to defeat Hamas. It involved simultaneous invasions by land and sea in the north and the south, and recognized Rafah and Philadelphi as Hamas’s key strategic assets. Israel kept this plan shelved. Invading only from the north, it took the army so long to reach Rafah – even as it concentrated civilians there – that the city’s capture turned into a time-wasting contest of wills with US President Joe Biden. Fighting essentially paused in March, picked back up in May when Israel finally took Rafah, and has since been limited to desultory targeted raids in areas already stained with its soldiers’ blood. Successes have been transitory, and the just-signed ceasefire deal will make the few strategic accomplishments temporary as well.
Israel fought Hezbollah like the US after D-Day – overwhelmingly, decisively, and swiftly. Israel has been fighting Hamas like the US in Vietnam – with body counts and no clear victory strategy. Though far less potent than Hezbollah, Hamas is far from defeated.
What would strategic success look like in Gaza? A lot like Germany in 1945: pacification, occupation, and full military administration. The IDF General Staff warned that this would require five divisions and an annual bill of NIS 20 billion. While those figures are likely exaggerated, they must be weighed against the alternative of a resurgent Hamas.
The Biden administration opposed Israel’s invasion of both Lebanon and Gaza, but changed its tune in the former case when Israel was clearly winning. There was never any determined effort to win strategically in Gaza and success in Lebanon shows you can’t pin the blame on Biden. Obviously the presence of the hostages has drastically complicated the strategic picture, making Israel itself a hostage as it pulls its punches to minimize danger to them.
But the absence of a clear plan to win has now resulted in a terrible defeat. Hamas is vigorously regaining troop strength from Gaza youth and will promote new leaders from within and from the ranks of newly released murderers. Hamas is again the unquestioned vanguard leader, supported in its genocidal aims even by the Gazan civilian population that is arguably its chief victim.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s detractors, who would have preferred a more prompt surrender, have long accused him of prolonging the war to boost his poll numbers — which have indeed risen dramatically in the last year. But he’s finished. His supporters hate the deal and the deal’s supporters hate Netanyahu. Despite the straight line connecting the disastrous Shalit deal of 2011 with Hamas’s gleefully barbaric rampage on October 7, 2023, a majority of Israelis are content to repeat, at a louder decibel level, the established pattern of invading Gaza, breaking things, and ultimately capitulating. Like a muscle, when Hamas is damaged, it always grows back stronger.
It will take a visionary future leader to convince more of the Israeli public that this pattern risks the very existence of the state, and that a small militia with no air force in a tiny, geographically adjacent enclave constitutes both mortal threat and defeatable foe. Until then, the countdown to the next predictable atrocity will continue to tick.