The Wrong Framing to a Complex Dilemma

Do we prioritize freeing hostages via a deal with Hamas, or fighting Hamas?

This is the common framing I see in the media of Israel’s current dilemma. However, I believe this framing offers a false dichotomy:

The current government has no plan for replacing Hamas as the governing power in Gaza.

It has rejected all plans to do so without proposing a plan of its own, and has refusted to commit to a plan even when there was American pressure to do so, or when members of its own security cabinet threatened to resign (and then, actually resigned).

This means the only way to bring the current war to an end will be a deal with Hamas.

The other option is indefinite war.

Assuming that we don’t want indefinite war, the one option left, under the current war fought by the current government, is to negotiate with Hamas.

The most the current war can do is delay the moment that negotiations happen and change Israel’s strategic position at the moment of negotiations. The question then becomes whether or not that delay is worth the lives of our hostages and of our soldiers.

Some will respond that I am missing one key option: victory. But even in a victory situation, we still need to negotiate the victory settlement with the ruling power -which would still be Hamas.

Also, what does victory mean?

Hamas is replenishing its fighting force such that some reports claim its numbers are nearly back to what they were at the start of the war.

The increasing number of Gazans who are displaced or lost family members due to the war is an ever-growning number of potential recruits; the grief felt by Palestinians as they suffer from the war’s effects is easily weaponized into hatred and support of Hamas’s terrorist ideology.

Over the past year and a half, Israel has thrown all its military might at Hamas and still not acheived victory.  How will continuing to fight for another year or more, under the same government, using the same (lack of) strategy, change the equation?

Given that we have occupied the West Bank since 1967, and there are still terrorists there, it seems unrealistic to think that anything other than an indefinite war against Gaza could defeat Hamas down to the last terrorist (especially as they continue to replenish their forces) or as an idelogy (which may be strengthened by the current fighting).

Meanwhile, the army by its own estimates does not have the resources to continue the war indefinitely and does not have enough soldiers to do so, especially as less people show up for reserve duty and the government continues to refuse to adequately draft Haredim.

In order for victory to be an achievable goal, it must be concrete and definable, and realistic in relation to the resources at hand.

The current government refuses to define a strategy or concrete war goal and refuses to relate its goals to the army’s own estimates of its military resources. For example, the government clashed with top army brass over distribution of aid. saying the IDF should do so when the army estimated itself incapable of carrying that out, and remained comitted to Haredi draft exemptions when top army staff said that doing so was not feasible in the current ongoing war scenario.

This means the common framing of Israel’s dilemma as: “Do we prioritize freeing hostages via a deal with Hamas, or fighting Hamas?” is completely wrong.

The dilemma is rather: Do we change governments and strategies? If we do not do so, do we want to engage in endless war?

If the answer to both these questions is no, then negotiations with Hamas are inevitable.

Then we are left with the question: How do we justify the continuation of the current war, which endangers Israeli hostages and Israeli soldiers, knowing that we will have to negotiate with Hamas? Is the delay in  negotiations worth the lives that are likely to be lost along the way?