Israel Activists: Change the Frame, Win the Debate
Israel’s critics have mastered the art of locking the Jewish state into no-win situations through one simple tactic – by taking control over framing the terms of debate. Pro-Israel activists need to raise their game by changing the frame.
Almost immediately after Israel began taking action in Gaza in response to Hamas’ October 7th invasion, the buzz phrase humanitarian ceasefire started to circulate on social media platforms and through news outlets around the world.
Normally, the term ceasefire implies a reciprocal cessation of hostilities between two warring sides. But in the context of Israel’s actions in Gaza, Israel’s critics began to stress the humanitarian aspects of a ceasefire so as to signal that Israel’s strategic defensive aims in Gaza were no longer practical nor legitimate.
Israel, according to this frame, was killing too many civilians in a disproportionate response that was shading into genocide.
Seen from this perspective, Israel’s critics (and not just the usual bad faith actors who glom on to any excuse to attack the Jewish State) have understood Israel’s actions in Gaza to be strictly a consequence of a long-standing, simmering Israel-Palestinian political dispute that could only be resolved diplomatically between two parties.
Many of Israel’s critics have chosen to frame Israel’s current situation in Gaza as a strictly compartmentalized political problem involving just these two parties, while consciously downplaying the interconnected (and collusive) strategic threats posed to the Jewish State by Iran and Hezbollah.
Israelis, however, find it impossible to conceive of the threat posed by Hamas in Gaza as being anything but unrelated to the concurrent threat posed by Hezbollah on their northern border (over and above the nuclear threat posed by Iran from further afield).
What we are dealing with, then, are two fundamentally different frames. One’s attitude toward Israel can essentially be predicted by the kind of frame (or lens) that one applies in viewing Israel’s current situation.
Israel’s good faith critics (among whom are many liberal American Jews who generally consider themselves to be supportive of the Jewish State) tend to cast aspersions on Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a consequence of adopting a comparatively narrow frame that does not at all consider this notion of a wider and collusive “axis of resistance,” in which Hamas plays its role as a very crucial pawn in a game of regional chess moves directed against Israel.
In this narrow political framing, neither Iran nor Hezbollah are seen as having any agency at all in igniting the current crisis, and hence, no role to play in resolving it. At worst, they are seen as opportunistic pests, trying to take advantage on the sidelines of a long-simmering land dispute conflict between Jews and Palestinians that has stretched back 75 years.
In this narrow two-party frame, all roads of resolution (especially after October 7th) are to be understood as leading to a two-state solution – yet another narrowly designed frame that rests on the underlying premise that Palestinians can never feel free and happy unless they are able to collectively exercise their rights in a sovereign nation state (preferably as a member of the UN).
Under the two-state solution frame, the Palestinians have an unconditional right to a sovereign nation state down the line, while Israel has the obligation to cede it to them.
So long as Israel refrains from doing so, it cannot claim to be both a Jewish and democratic state – yet another narrowly designed formulation among Israel’s liberal critics who understand this to mean that Israel must sacrifice itself on the altar of political science the moment Palestinians constitute a majority in the lands controlled by Israel between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea (which can be traversed in roughly two hours by car).
There is, though, one small condition for Palestinians built into the peculiarly designed two-state solution frame: So long as the Palestinian people can spawn at least one large faction (generally understood to be the lineal descendants of the PLO) willing to express – but just once, in a moment of time – a kind of vague, begrudged willingness to “recognize” Israel in return for being ceded a state, the onus then shifts to Israel to make preparations for ceding it to them..
In the meantime, the Palestinians are free (expected, even) to incite their children in violent hatred against all Israeli Jews until such time as they achieve their rights as a free people according to the dictates of political science.
The political opinions of otherwise highly intelligent people can be surprisingly easy to parse once you have a solid handle on the underlying frames they choose to adopt, most often revealed by the buzz phrases and terms they seed throughout their casual discussions of current affairs.
A person who adopts the frame of a two-state solution is unlikely to contemplate the contingency that a sovereign Palestinian state could possibly break bad; that it might open itself up as a Trojan horse to be used by regional bad actors to destabilize and destroy the Jewish state next door.
Since solutions, by definition, can only break good (at least to those who append it to their chosen buzz phrase), the two-state solution is expected to come with a good ending for both Jews and Palestinians.
And because the desired solution is also wedded to the expectation of a nation state, one cannot contemplate other solutions that might end with something less than a narrowly construed vision of a sovereign state – say, something along the lines of an autonomous authority.
The thing, then, about frames is that they have a tendency to exclude essential possibilities even as they narrow one’s perceptions of possible realities.
Whatever one feels about the character of Donald Trump, his election in 2016 had brought with him the opportunity to re-frame the terms of Israel’s relationship with its Sunni Arab regional neighbors. Where his predecessors had insisted that Israel’s road to Mecca must first run through Ramallah, Trump (or, more accurately, the son-in-law who advised him) keyed into the insight that the two-state solution frame was an intractable barrier making it practically impossible for Israel to coordinate its common interests with regional neighbors who likewise feared the destabilizing influence of Iran and its Shiite proxies.
The result was the Abraham Accords, designed according to a much broader frame which envisioned a coordinated regional solution that might build good will between Israel and its regional neighbors over time, encouraging the Jewish State’s neighbors to take a broader, more constructive view of Israel’s overall place in the region, without holding such relations perpetually hostage to Israel’s responses to Palestinian incitement.
Proponents of the new frame envisioned regional cooperative projects to create better economic opportunities for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, while encouraging them to put aside their zero-sum political aspirations and anti-Israel incitement activities in the meantime – to mellow out, work on building a better life for themselves, and let the political chips work themselves out organically over time, without perpetually forcing everyone into a narrow and unworkable two-state solution framework. .
At least, that was the hopeful ideal built into this new frame.
At root, the Abraham Accords were a regional response to the Iranian threat, intended to be a vehicle for restraining Iran’s designs to enflame and destabilize the region. Iran certainly understood that to be the case, and made moves to reinstate the Palestinian cause as the intractable wedge it has historically played in keeping Israel perpetually isolated and at odds with its neighbors.
Leading up to October 7th, the Biden administration had an opportunity to build on the regional possibilities for peace that were opened up by the new frame of the Abraham Accords.
Instead, it made policy decisions intended to chip away at it, to reorient and prod Israel’s accord partners back to the narrow two-state solution frame, restoring it as the unbreachable barrier keeping Israel from normalizing its relations with its neighbors,
In the meantime, the Biden administration also made efforts to loosen restrictive sanctions on Iran, releasing to it billions of dollars that had been previously frozen under Trump, furnishing Iran with additional resources to feed its destabilizing regional proxy forces.
By the time Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, the world saw two parallel realities through two entirely different frames. In the frame adopted by Israel’s progressive critics, the Hamas invasion was seen as the festering symptom of an “occupied” people reacting to years of being “locked in” to an open-air prison.
In the frame adopted by virtually all Israelis – left and right – as of October 7th, the veil had lifted, and Israelis fully understood that an entire enclave in Gaza had given its dreams, opportunities, and resources over to a nihilistic death cult that only looked to zero-sum solutions and apocalyptic outcomes, in cooperation with a Shiite “axis of resistance” that invested time and resources of its own for no practical reason other than to physically destroy another nation state.
Widen the frame a bit further, and one might notice that Iran itself has been employed as a proxy in the larger geo-political designs of both Russia and China, with each providing political and strategic cover for Iran to progressively tighten the strategic noose around Israel, seen by these powers as America’s proxy in the region.
There were two major phases to Israel’s response to Hamas’ invasion on October 7th. In the first phase, Israelis had to deal with the strategic threat of a feared simultaneous multi-front rocket barrage from Gaza and Lebanon (not to mention Iraq, Syria, and Yemen), with limited resources at hand to only tackle this problem in stages – first, to neutralize the rocket threat in Gaza, while keeping the northern front from escalating.
Israel’s citizens on the ground intuitively understood this, but the nation’s leaders also intuitively understood that the best way to deter Hezbollah from blowing up the northern front was for the IDF to publicly telegraph a message of strength, not strategic vulnerability.
In this sensitive first phase, Iran and Hezbollah were continually probing the situation, to test Israel’s initial response and resolve so as to calibrate how much they could strategically squeeze Israel in a controlled escalation working to their advantage. It certainly helped Israel that a US strike force carrier group had been immediately dispatched to the coast of Lebanon, to signal to the “axis of resistance” that they should perhaps factor in an American response in their escalation calculus.
If one were to formulate a simple buzz phrase to embody such strategic concerns in those crucial weeks preceding Israel’s ground war invasion of Gaza, a good choice might have been the Multi-Front Rocket Threat – as in, “Israel needs to move quickly and ferociously in Gaza in order to neutralize and to deter the multi-front rocket threat its citizens face.”
But in those weeks when the world was presented with images of Gaza buildings being repeatedly pulverized from the air, Israel’s leaders and opinion-makers were stressing a very different public message: “We have a right to defend ourselves, to respond to this massacre, and to free our hostages.”
It’s understandable why Israel’s military planners would not want to turn an immediately pressing strategic vulnerability into a public information message to explain its actions. On October 7th, Israel suffered an unprecedented loss of deterrence in the eyes of its enemies.
Iran had been goading Israel with the message that it understood Israelis to have lost both the resolve and – more worryingly – the ability to neutralize the apocalyptic multi-front proxy threats that Iran had invested years in assembling on Israel’s borders.
Iran has never made any secret of the fact that it understood Israel’s fatal vulnerability to be its very narrow dimensions – with the Jewish State spanning just nine miles wide at its heavily populated center – making the nation perpetually vulnerable to a multi-front rocket barrage that could easily overwhelm its comparatively limited (and expensive) supply of defensive Iron Dome missiles.
Back in 2014, when Hamas had unleashed a rocket barrage on the Israeli heartland, Israel had employed the Iron Dome system as a strategic defensive tool to buy the nation time and opportunity to avoid an escalation and to spare its citizens an otherwise costly sustained ground invasion of Gaza.
In a very real sense, the deployment of the Iron Dome in previous scuffles between the IDF and Hamas had ultimately saved countless Israeli and Palestinian lives before a ceasefire had eventually settled into place. So long as the Jewish State faced no pressing threat thanks to Iron Dome, the IDF could afford to hold back the full force of its firepower in its response to Hamas’ rocket salvos.
In those prior encounters with Hamas, Hezbollah was neither in a position nor inclined to open up a strategic rocket threat on the northern front, as it had been in the process of recovery and rebuilding from the losses it had sustained in the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
However, by 2023, Israel was presented with a very different strategic scenario in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7th invasion. Within the first twenty-four hours, Hezbollah was theoretically positioned to overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome system with a mix of precision and non-precision missiles, taking out Israel’s water desalination plants and offshore gas rigs, while battering its civil command and air bases with missile attacks throughout the country.
In such an event, the resulting chaos caused by a surprise missile swarm of such magnitude might have posed a foreseeable threat in disrupting Israel’s call-up of its citizen army reserves, leaving the country vulnerable to a surprise land invasion by Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force from the north, with its fighters streaming in to attack and massacre thousands of Israelis in towns and villages throughout the Galilee and beyond, in numbers potentially dwarfing the 1,200 deaths that Israel had actually sustained on October 7th.
As an essential component of the multi-front attack strategy, Hamas was expected to support Hezbollah, but only after Iran gave the signal, and only after Hezbollah pulled the trigger.
The resulting catastrophe for Israel might have been orders of magnitude greater than what Israel had actually suffered on October 7th. What is certain is that Hezbollah had repeatedly drilled for this very scenario in the months leading up to Hamas’ invasion.
We know this because on May 21, 2023, Hezbollah had invited local and foreign media to view its drills, to very visibly demonstrate its ability, if not readiness, to operationalize this strategy to invade Israel from the north in the course of besieging it with missiles from multiple fronts. Around this time, Hezbollah was moving its fighters closer to Israel’s borders, in some instances, crossing into disputed Israeli territory and setting up tents in order to probe IDF responses.
Fifty years previously, Egypt had acted in a similar fashion in the months leading up to its surprise invasion on Yom Kippur in 1973, repeatedly testing Israel’s responses – and lulling the IDF – with a series of planned border provocations on the Suez that never seemed to escalate.
Though Israel’s military leaders were very much aware that Iran and Hezbollah were actively planning for this kind of multi-front scenario to go operational at some point in time, the big question remained whether the threat of this multi-front scenario was to be held in reserve as a deterrent against the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities or instead to be employed for a Yom Kippur War-style surprise attack aimed at destroying the Jewish State (seen, prior to October 7th, as the less likely of the two options).
Israel’s coalition government throughout the summer of 2023 had been tied down with weekly mass protests against its judicial reform policies, lacking at the time the political capital to mobilize the nation’s citizen reserves to pre-emptively neutralize any kind of Iranian/Hezbollah threat before it had an opportunity to erupt.
In the absence of pretext and provocation, democratic societies generally cannot be convinced to mobilize for war. On October 7th , Hamas provided the Israeli public with both the pretext and the provocation.
For reasons that future historians may continue to debate, a faction within Hamas appeared to have made the decision to pull the trigger ahead of Hezbollah, seemingly catching both Iran and its Shiite ally off guard (at least as to timing), enough for them to hesitate from fully joining the fray in those crucial first forty-eight hours, furnishing Israel with the pretext (and just enough time) to mobilize its reserves in a sufficiently large defensive deployment on its northern border.
By October 10th, Israel’s northern deployment was bolstered by the presence of the USS Gerald Ford off Lebanon’s coast – a crucial strategic saving gesture that the Biden administration would subsequently employ as its political capital, to be used for tying Israel’s hands in the months to follow.
And though Israel had managed in those opening days to secure itself from the threats to its initial mobilization and from the threat of a land invasion from the north, it nevertheless remained vulnerable to the serious strategic threat of a multi-front missile swarm so long as Hamas’ missile inventory and launchers in Gaza remained in place.
The problem for Israel during this first phase of the war in Gaza – prior to the ground invasion – was that it had no choice but to progressively deplete its Iron Dome rocket supply to defend against Hamas’ thousands of rocket salvos, no matter how imprecise the barrage.
During all this time, Iran and Hezbollah were waiting on the sidelines, keeping the bulk of their missile and drone reserves in check while continuing to monitor the progress, vulnerabilities, and expected scarcity of Israel’s Iron Dome missiles – in this way, preserving the option of unleashing the full brunt of Hezbollah’s missile swarm on an Israel left severely depleted of anti-missile defences.
In the face of such existential strategic threats in the first phase of the Gaza war, time would not be on Israel’s side. It would need to act decisively, ferociously, and fast in Gaza, to deplete Hamas’ missile inventory and launching infrastructure before Israel’s anti-missile defences were seen as being depleted, presenting a tempting window of opportunity for Iran and Hezbollah to consider whether to take the initiative of fully escalating against Israel while it remained most vulnerable to a missile swarm.
In this opening phase, neither Iran nor Hezbollah could be certain that Israel had either the resolve, much less the operational ability, to do what was needed to take out Hamas’ missile infrastructure, deeply embedded as it was within the civilian population.
Hezbollah made no secret in the weeks leading up to Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza that it expected Hamas to “bleed” the IDF of its best reserve forces and materiel if it were to be progressively bogged down in a drawn out and costly ground war in an insanely complex urban fighting environment that Hamas had long prepped for in just such a contingency.
In the meantime, Hezbollah would play a contributing role in diverting and drawing down Israel’s resources by forcing it to keep an active mobilization of civilian reserves deployed on the northern front, forcing 80,000 Israelis to evacuate Israel’s northern region, while tying up an untold number of reserves in a more or less permanent deployment on the northern border – over time, an unsustainable drain on Israel’s economy.
Such is the underlying narrative bound up in that simple phrase of the multi-front missile threat (which, in all instances, was accompanied by the threat of a multi-front surprise land invasion in the aftermath of the threat revealed by the October 7th attack) .
Unfortunately, a message of strategic vulnerability is not a message that either Israel’s generals or politicians can yet publicly stress, at least so long as Israel remains under the shadow of a continuing immediate strategic threat from both Hezbollah and Iran.
Instead, in the several months following October 7th, Israel’s political leadership had chosen to focus world attention more on the atrocities committed by Hamas, along with the fate of the nation’s abducted hostages.
Though this focus has quite reasonably strengthened the nation’s internal resolve and cohesion to respond to Hamas (and, by extension, to deal with Hezbollah thereafter), it has had a limited shelf life in explaining to the outside world why Israel had to employ its air assets so quickly and ferociously throughout Gaza in the opening weeks of the war.
Though it’s hard for Israelis and the Jewish State’s supporters to understand, many of Israel’s critics throughout the world simply do not perceive the threat coming from Hezbollah and Iran as having any kind of agency in determining the pace and scope of Israel’s actions and responses in Gaza.
For instance, in the most sensitive opening weeks of the war – when Israel remained most vulnerable to the consequences of a depleted Iron Dome inventory – the IDF planning staff made a fateful decision to hold off from sending an unprepared, rusty, and untrained reserve force immediately into the unprecedented urban death trap that Hamas had prepared for it within the crowded streets and warrens of Gaza.
Israel had already lost over 300 soldiers and officers in the space of that one catastrophic, chaotic day on October 7th. If a lesson was to be learned, it was that its civilian reserve force – the backbone of Israel’s fighting manpower – needed sufficient time to shake off the rust.
The nation certainly could not afford a drawn out war of attrition in the streets of Gaza while the risk remained that its reserve forces might be called on at any point to execute further complicated ground maneuvers across South Lebanon in the event of a full blown escalation with Hezbollah.
But in those early months of the war in Gaza, Hamas had been making incessant attempts at damaging Israel through daily missile salvos. With limited on-the-ground intelligence, the IDF had to make the best of an extremely complicated threat environment, leaning on the spine of its air force to take out missile launchers, storage facilities, and other identified offensive infrastructure, with the goal of progressively degrading Hamas’ operational abilities while at the same time shaping the environment for the planned ground incursion necessary to fully neutralize the continuing missile threat from Gaza.
The logistical aspects of conducting a war can be forbiddingly complex for any modern military force to manage, and even more so when struggling to defend against the kind of multi-layered existential threat to the home front that no western nation has faced since the Second World War (and, incidentally, a circumstance that the US has never encountered in its history).
Few, if any, nations in the midst of a war wish to publicize their difficulties in strategically marshalling scarce resources to deal with contending threats, particularly when faced with an enemy whose main strategy rests on deploying disposable proxy forces to deplete one’s very limited resources.
Though the need to restock equipment – and to replenish an exhausted manpower base – is ever-present, it’s a situational assessment that, for obvious reasons, cannot be shared with the public, much less telegraphed to an enemy looking for opportunities to probe operational weaknesses.
Seen from this perspective, the IDF’s pulverization of Gaza made no operational, much less moral, sense to anyone who didn’t factor the continuing immediate threats posed by Iran and Hezbollah into the overall threat equation that Israel faced in those early months of the Gaza war.
An aggravating factor in Israel’s situation is that it must take continual strategic risks in order to deal with multiple political pressures that can have grave consequences for the management of Israel’s security interests.
Even assuming that Israel had no moral regard at all for Palestinian civilian lives – as many progressive critics wish to be the case – Israel would nevertheless still feel compelled to manage its operations in Gaza with strict rules of engagement, for both legal and political reasons.
In the opening weeks of the war, the IDF’s rules of engagement were focused on taking out launch sites and missile operators, while minimizing civilian collateral deaths as much as practically possible.
Toward that end, Israel made considerable investments in infrastructure, while setting up operational departments to identify civilians and to deliver warnings to evacuate targeted buildings through a variety of means, whether by cell phone contact or the through the mass air-dropping of leaflets, much of which has been extensively documented.
The creation and operational use of an extensive apparatus dedicated to minimize civilian casualties is prima facie evidence against a policy of indiscriminate bombing, much less a policy of genocide.
Israel’s critics have parried, however, that such an apparatus is mostly a sham, if not a failure – as evidenced by Hamas claims that Israel has killed well over 30,000 Palestinians. Even taking such numbers at face value, the framing of those numbers very much determines how one is to morally relate to them.
As noted above, Israel had an existential, time-sensitive operational necessity to militarily degrade Hamas while Hezbollah and Iran had stood on the sidelines, weighing their next moves in line with their attritional strategy against the Jewish State.
As part of that attritional strategy, Hamas had made massive investments to entangle its war-making infrastructure with Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. On the ground, Hamas soldiers did not wear identifiable uniforms. At the same time, they stockpiled and positioned their at-hand military gear – guns, ammo, mines, RPGs – in civilian homes, kindergartens, and hospitals.
In this kind of urban war environment, a visibly unarmed civilian – dressed in civilian attire – could disappear into an apartment building and reappear minutes later with an anti-tank missile. Israel had to therefore craft its rules of engagement to adjust to this environment.
As of this writing, Israel claims to have killed an estimated 17,000 armed Hamas fighters. Though Israel’s critics dispute that figure (as they have a right to do), there exists compelling circumstantial evidence that Israel has largely destroyed Hamas as a massed, organized fighting force.
Moreover, Israel has absorbed a cost – both in blood and treasure – that is also consistent with rules of engagement that at least aspire to target armed Hamas fighters while minimizing civilian collateral casualties as much as practically possible.
If Israel’s aims were to indiscriminately kill civilians, it could have done so without depleting a limited, and far more expensive, stockpile of precision munitions. It could have easily done so with less precise and cheaper munitions. Moreover, it would make no strategic sense to expend so much munitions over several months to indiscriminately kill 40,000 civilians while leaving intact the bulk of Hamas’ fighting manpower.
As a point of contrast, in a single one night air raid on Tokyo on March 9, 1945, the United States killed 100,000 people – notably, with primitive munitions and with the loss of 96 aircrew, exposed as they were to anti-aircraft fire.
In Gaza, Israel had free reign over the skies. Had they chosen alternative rules of engagement, they could have easily killed 40,000 civilians in 24 hours, at much less cost in munitions, and at far less risk to soldier lives.
At some point, Israel’s critics would need to answer why Israel chose rules of engagement that are more consistent with targeted military operations that, as a matter of course take more time, require the expenditure of precision munitions, and put on-the-ground troops at risk.
As of this writing, Israel has lost close to 400 soldiers in Gaza whose deaths are directly attributable to Israel’s current rules of engagement – to dismantle Hamas as a fighting force while limiting collateral civilian casualties as much as practically possible.
In this respect, Israel’s operations in Rafah are an unprecedented accomplishment and a stunning vindication of its rules of engagement. Once Israel managed an orderly evacuation of civilians out of the war zone before going in on the ground in Rafah, it made it far easier for the IDF to target the armed elements who remained. As a result, civilian casualties in Rafah were kept to an absolute minimum.
Israel’s critics know this, which is why the chorus of “genocide” left out any specific reference to Rafah once it became clear that Israel was achieving its military objectives there with minimal collateral civilian deaths.
Instead, Israel’s critics have focused on a general, aggregate casualty figure, taking special care not to inquire into what proportion of that figure might comprise armed Hamas fighters.
In assessing war crimes – particularly crimes that are alleged to shade into genocide – civilian to military casualty ratios can provide a reliable metric as to what is happening on the ground. Civilian casualty ratios that fluctuate between 1:1 and, say, 1:10 are more indicative of operational effectiveness – or the lack thereof – in avoiding collateral civilian casualties than an intent to inflict as much civilian death as possible.
Even if the IDF was not as effective as claimed – say, that it killed as little as 10,000 armed Hamas fighters in the course of inflicting as much as 30,000 civilian casualties – it would speak more to the IDF’s competence as a fighting force, and nevertheless still beg the question as to what the IDF could have alternatively done to achieve its bona fide, time sensitive military objectives against Hamas in such a forbidding urban warfare environment, while minimizing civilian harm as much as possible.
Genocides, by contrast, are generally conducted without any consideration for managing civilian casualty ratios. The whole operational intent of a genocide is to destroy an unarmed population in whole or in part, with resources deployed solely to achieve that objective as efficiently as possible, both in time and in expense.
By that metric alone, Israel’s critics would have an extraordinarily difficult case to make for genocide in Gaza.
What, then, of the obvious scenes of destruction across Gaza? And, most crucially, what to make of scenes where entire buildings were taken down with 2,000 pound bombs, particularly in the first months of the war? .
These are perfectly valid questions for Israel’s critics to raise, a portion of whom do have valid moral and good faith concerns as to whether Israel may have acted more excessively than it needed to in Gaza.
In addressing such concerns, it is again crucial to highlight the time-sensitive threat that Hamas posed to Israel in those opening months. It’s not a small point.
In those opening months, the only practical way to progressively diminish the missile threat from Gaza – before depleting Israel’s limited Iron Dome supply – was to take out Hamas’ supply of missile launchers before they could be redeployed (and hidden) after a launch. This was at a time when Israel was not yet ready to deploy troops on the ground. In the meantime, those launchers needed to be taken out, even if fired from or by residential buildings, as they often were.
Without boots on the ground in those time-sensitive early months in the war, Israel did not have the operational luxury – much less the logistical ability – to manage a mass civilian evacuation from one region of the Strip to another at a time when no area of Gaza had yet been sanitized of the missile threat.
And so, it had to make do with air-dropped leafllet warnings and mass phone calls, with comparatively tighter windows for civilian evacuation from areas targeted as missile launch sites.
To criticize Israel’s initial bombing moves in Gaza without addressing the missile threat is to essentially rewrite history and to ignore Israel’s existential operational vulnerabilities in those months.
Under international law, any discussion of war crimes cannot credibly take place without undergoing a serious analysis of the threat assessments and operational day-to-day constraints that a military is operating under. It’s the kind of analysis that Israel’s more sanctimonious-inclined critics are uninterested in engaging.
In order to cast the IDF as culpable for war crimes, Israel’s international critics have, in fact, reframed the terms of reference for identifying the commission of a war crime.
For instance, in determining proportionality of response, international experts in the laws of war certainly do not conduct a comparative tally of each side’s civilian casualties, adjudicating that one side acts disproportionately when it inflicts far more civilian casualties than the other side manages to.
In actual fact, proportionality in attacking a target is weighed against the perceived operational necessity to attack it, even at the risk of inflicting civilian casualties.
In practice, however, the problem with judicially adjudicating operational necessity – in the midst of the kind of continuing war that Israel is conducting – is that few, if any, militaries in the IDF’s position would want to admit in a public forum (much less to its enemies) the kind of ongoing strategic vulnerabilities that it must factor in its on-the-ground tactical assessments.
In other words, an international court tribunal hearing, in the midst of a continuing defensive war, is not any kind of forum under which the IDF is able to put its best foot forward to justify its operational assessments, particularly when the enemy is looking on to evaluate those assessments in its continuing war planning.
All of which brings us to consider another peculiar frame that is often neglected: Why is nobody filing an ICJ claim against both Iran and Lebanon for what amounts to crimes against peace?
Why are there no draft resolutions put forward by Israel’s supposed friends in the UN Security Council (the US, Britain, France), holding Iran accountable for its plans to destroy and perpetually destabilize a member nation state? Israel, for its part, bears no animus against Iran other than to forestall it from planning its destruction.
Though Russia and China would certainly veto any such condemnatory resolution against Iran, there is no reason the US and the EU can’t display a united front in condemning the offensive actions of Iran against Israel, in the same manner that it has done with respect to Russia’s offensive actions against Ukraine.
For one thing, Israel faces a much more pressing and existential threat from Iran than Ukraine has ever faced from Russia. Why no massive surge of resources and political support to Israel, for no other reason than to disincentivize Iran from continuing its strategy for regional destabilization?
Seen from this frame, the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, and the EU have the agency to de-escalate the regional tensions by applying collective political and economic pressure on Iran, while reinforcing political and economic support for Israel.
What’s more, a strategy intended to de-escalate the regional threat to Israel would have directly operated to save Palestinian lives in Gaza, while sparing both Israelis and Lebanese the confrontational apocalyptic scenarios that Iran has long planned for.
A countering argument in all this is that Israel’s western friends have to deal with a large and (growing) number of citizens who simply don’t like Israel. Such citizens have no inclination or desire to push their governments to support Israel in this fashion.
In the end, it’s politics – a toxic kind of politics that relies on the perpetual misframing of both Israeli government policies and the moral essence of Israeli society.
Israel, its critics tell us, has a “far right” government. It practices “apartheid” and is currently engaging in “genocide”. It does so because its Jewish citizens have constituted themselves into a colonial “ethno-state”.
To maintain the persuasive thrust of what amounts to little more than repetitious bald characterization of an entire nation (a democratic one, no less), the proponents of this skewed vision must keep the accusatory frame as narrowly defined as possible.
No questions are asked as to why Israel treats Israeli Arabs so well within its borders, and yet acts differently in response to those Arabs living across the Green Line, in the West Bank and Gaza. Does there exist perhaps a nuanced context that can explain the situation better than the buzz word apartheid? – for certainly, Israel passes no laws to distinguish between the personal legal rights of its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. All can share the same buses, drink from the same water fountains, and attend the same universities.
Its supposedly “far right” government is presided over by a Prime Minister who has overseen the liberalization of Israeli society over the past two decades, and who has never been found to say anything remotely construed as right wing incitement against Arabs or Palestinians. Nor is he a dictatorial strongman who assassinates his political rivals or arrests them in the middle of the night (though he can be corrupted with expensive gifts of cigars and champagne).
Moreover, a daily perusal of Israel’s newspapers across the political spectrum – the Jerusalem Post, the Times of Israel, Haaretz, Arutz Sheva – shows no signs of a society afflicted by spasms of incitement, atavistic hatred, apartheid, or calls to genocide.
“Ah, “Israel’s critics will counter, “but the Israelis do clearly respond to those Palestinians who reside in the West Bank and Gaza in a much different manner.”
Indeed. And the reason for this differential treatment is not hard to see. For one, they are not citizens of Israel. Nor do they aspire to be. Though they claim to be occupied, the Oslo Accords were premised on setting up an autonomous authority for them in order to ameliorate the consequences of occupation, pending a mutually agreeable political resolution between the parties.
The major sticking point over the past three decades of the Palestinian Authority’s existence, however, has been that it has never relinquished its unrelenting culture of incitement against the Jewish State. To the contrary, this incitement permeates the PA’s institutions, with incentivizing payments made to any terrorist – deemed a “martyr” – who dies in the course of perpetrating any act of terror against an Israeli, whether a soldier or a civilian.
More to the point, we don’t need to rely on bald, sweeping one-word characterizations from progressives in order to define the Palestinians’ collective motives and national aspirations for their Jewish neighbours.
We can simply examine the Palestinians’ newspapers, school books, and political pronouncements in order to reveal the scope of unrelenting incitement against Israel’s Jews, accompanied by calls to martyrdom in killing them wherever and whenever possible.
Israel’s progressive critics, however, frame Palestinian incitement as a reasonably expected, if not justifiable, response to Israel’s occupation conduct.
Little thought, if any, is given to the notion that Israel’s military presence in the West Bank has been primarily guided by a policy of pre-emption, to take extensive measures toward ensuring that Palestinians cannot build the military infrastructure and means to destabilize the Jewish State through an attritional campaign of daily terror attacks on its civilians.
In 2005, Israel had taken a different tack in Gaza, forcibly evacuating all Jewish settlements from the enclave, while leaving intact for the Palestinians the settlements’ infrastructure of development (such as greenhouses) for them to build on their productivity.
In the absence of a daily and sustained Israeli military presence on the ground in Gaza, Hamas took control over the enclave the following year. What followed was a textbook case for what Israel might expect if the IDF were to end its on-the-ground policies of daily pre-emption in the West Bank: the gradual building up of a hostile military infrastructure on its doorstep, with a rocket arsenal and infiltration from a foreign hostile state (Iran).
According to this frame of pre-emption, Israel cannot gamble on ceasing its pre-emption activities while the bulk of Palestinian resources and institutions remain single-mindedly focused on, and invested in, building an apparatus of incitement and terror.
Astonishingly, Israel’s progressive critics – who claim to care about Palestinian well-being – seldom, if ever, consider putting this frame of pre-emption to a practical test, much less acknowledging that it might be the key to understanding Israeli policy and intent toward the Palestinians.
What if the Palestinians made tangible efforts to formally reform their institutions, away from a posture of incitement to terror, and more toward a posture of actively working with Israel to progressively better their daily lives?
In other words, what if the Palestinians were to risk dropping their institutionalization of incitement, with the aim that Israel might thereby loosen the scope and nature of its military presence among them?
Israel’s progressive critics are not interested in framing the situation in this manner, as it has the effect of relieving Israel of moral culpability, while at the same time, casting the Palestinians as responsible agents with viable, practical options for bettering their daily lives.
This raises the possibility that Israel’s progressive critics might be invested in the Palestinian issue more for its opportunities for moral sanctimony than for any bona fide concern with Palestinian well-being.
In a choice between weaponizing Palestinian grievance against the Israelis, or encouraging Palestinians to work productively with Israel to better their living situation, Israel’s critics generally tend to prefer the option that corners both parties into an unsolvable nihilistic dance of death with one another.
For one, it has the benefit of locking Israel into an impossible situation, while secondly, it provides Israel’s critics with multiple opportunities to morally castigate the Jewish State whenever it takes actions to extricate itself from this situation.
To Israel’s critics, then, an all-encompassing culture of Palestinian incitement against Israel is normal, to be expected. And Iran’s aspirations to plan for Israel’s physical obliteration is likewise deemed to be normal. What isn’t normal are Israel’s “disproportionate” actions in seeking to pre-empt any and all Palestinian and Iranian attempts to incite against and to kill Israeli citizens.
“Israel,” we are repeatedly told by its critics, “is a destabilizing influence in the region.” And yet it has a curious record of entering into – and keeping – peace agreements with former regional enemies who had previously pledged to destroy it, and yet who subsequently gifted Israel with nothing more than a hand shake and an offer to end the animus. Without exception, Israelis are generally game for such offers: Peace for peace.
With all the strategic threats that Iran currently pours down on Israel, it’s no secret that the Ayatollah would be welcomed with open arms in the Knesset, to be hugged by Netanyahu, maybe even Ben Gvir, if only he woke up one day and said, “What the hell. Enough is enough. Let’s be friends.”
Therein lies the simple solution toward charting a viable and practical path to peace. It starts with accurately framing Israeli society as it is, and not how its enemies perpetually misframe it to be.
If you’re a progressive critic, go ahead, if you must, and recite the catalogue of Israel’s past alleged crimes –Deir Yassin, the Nakba, Sabra and Shatila, and now, this war in Gaza. If you’re looking for sanctimonious clout in holding Israel as morally culpable, then have at it.
But if you’re aiming to actually build a better life for Palestinians, the good news is that – based on Israel’s past record – the Palestinians can probably squeeze as positive a response out of the Israelis as Egypt and Jordan have managed to do. And they don’t have to fret over any inherent ethnic animus against them. Just ask the Israeli Arabs, who are doing quite well in living together with the Jews.
No need for any complicated diplomatic accords – whether of the Abraham or two-state variety. For Israel, it begins with a hand shake and an end to incitement.
It’s a simple frame that any clear-sighted simpleton could appreciate – and one that only an overly educated diplomat could miss.