Israel is not fighting for its survival (2024)

As of this writing, Israel’s war in Gaza has claimed the lives of more than 34,000 Palestinians, including 14,680 women, children, and elderly people, according to the United Nations. But that is just the tally of the identifiable dead. It does not include those rendered invisible or unrecognizable by rubble and fire.

And that death toll could surge in the coming days and weeks. Roughly 80 percent of Gazans have been displaced from their homes, there are acute shortages of food and medical supplies, and thousands of small children are suffering from malnutrition.

Meanwhile, 121 Israeli hostages remain unaccounted for following their kidnapping by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups on October 7. We do not know how many are already dead or what cruelties beset those still alive. We do know that Hamas fighters have subjected some of their captives to rape, according to the United Nations.

On Friday, Joe Biden unveiled a plan to end these nightmares: The president has presented a roadmap to a permanent ceasefire. Broken down into three phases, the plan ostensibly aims to secure an immediate and durable end to hostilities, which would secure the release of all Israeli hostages; a surge of humanitarian relief into Gaza; the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from that territory; and international funding for Gaza’s reconstruction.

Plenty of ceasefire proposals have been floated before, but two things distinguished Friday’s: According to Biden, it was the Israeli government’s own plan, and it did not explicitly call for the total destruction of Hamas as a military and governing power.

Israel’s commitment to complete victory over Hamas has been one major obstacle to peace. To this point, Hamas has proven resilient enough to withstand Israel’s onslaught and tolerant enough of Gazans’ suffering to insist on retaining power, no matter the human cost. Hamas has evinced some interest in trading hostages for Palestinian prisoners, but it has shown none in total surrender. If Israel no longer demanded the latter, then peace might be at hand.

In the days since Biden’s announcement, the Israeli government has distanced itself from the ceasefire proposal and reaffirmed its commitment to Hamas’s destruction. “Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement Saturday.

This response is unsurprising. Many Israeli voters find the idea of Hamas’s ongoing military presence in Gaza to be an intolerable security risk, and this is especially true on the nation’s right. Were Netanyahu to accept the agreement, his governing coalition would likely dissolve.

Achieving peace in Gaza will therefore require a counterforce to Israel’s domestic political pressures. In recent weeks, the Biden administration threatened to freeze arms transfers to Israel if it conducted an assault on Rafah without a plan for protecting civilians in that city, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had taken refuge. Israel proceeded to launch an airstrike that killed 45 Palestinian civilians in the city’s safe zone. If the White House wishes to turn its blueprint for peace into a reality, it may need to enforce its own red line.

Such a measure would attract considerable opposition. Israel hawks in the United States insist that the Jewish state’s struggle against Hamas is existential and cannot end without that organization’s destruction. From this perspective, the death toll in Gaza is a tragic but unavoidable cost of a necessary war.

World War II analogies figure prominently in this line of argument. Last week, in a column titled, “Do we still understand how wars are won?” the New York Times’s Bret Stephens accused Israel’s critics of historical amnesia.

After all, he notes, the last time the United States fought a war in which its very existence was conceivably at stake, Allied bombers “killed an estimated 10,000 civilians in the Netherlands, 60,000 in France, 60,000 in Italy and hundreds of thousands of Germans,” while the firebombings of Japanese cities and atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed nearly 1 million Japanese civilians.

Stephens notes that we do not remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a genocidal leader. Rather, we fondly remember leaders “who, faced with the awful choice of evils that every war presents, nonetheless chose morally compromised victories over morally pure defeats.”

Today, Stephens writes, Israel finds itself waging such an existential war: Hamas has called for wiping the country off the map, and the Jewish state cannot know security until it destroys its enemy’s “capability and will to wage war,” a task that entails tragedies like the one that claimed 45 civilian lives in Rafah in late May. Rather than threatening to withhold arms transfers to force Israel into appeasing Hamas, Stephens argues, the United States must “understand that [Israel has] no choice to fight except in the way we once did — back when we knew what it takes to win.”

But this line of reasoning is morally and intellectually bankrupt. That we are more horrified by the mass killing of civilians today than we were in 1945 is a mark of progress, not amnesia. And in any case, Israel’s war with Hamas is not remotely analogous to the Allied cause.

By the time the United States and Great Britain began bombing Dresden and Tokyo, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were already in the process of mass murdering tens of millions of people. Hamas may have genocidal intentions, but it does not have genocidal capacities. Waging total war on Gaza is not necessary for averting the imminent slaughter of Israeli civilians; to the contrary, doing so risks the lives of the few Israelis whom Hamas is currently in a position to destroy.

Further, the Axis powers genuinely threatened the existence of neighboring states. Hamas is incapable of defending its airspace, let alone conquering Israel. The Israeli government is right to insist that Hamas must not be allowed to launch another October 7, but that attack was only possible due to easily avoidable failures of intelligence and border defense.

More fundamentally, Israel’s ends cannot justify its means in Gaza when those ends are themselves unjust. The Netanyahu government is not fighting to liberate Gazans from despotism and establish the foundations for a two-state solution. To the contrary, it is committed to Palestinian statelessness and dispossession.

The people of Gaza deserve better than Hamas, but the Israeli government has neither the capacity nor the will to give Gazans what they deserve. The best it can do for the moment is stop killing them.

Stephens is far from alone in analogizing Israel’s war in Gaza to the Allied cause. In conversations with US officials last fall, Israeli leaders “referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries,” according to the New York Times.

At around the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended his nation’s bombardment of Gaza by referencing Britain’s bombing of Copenhagen in 1944. In an interview with Piers Morgan last October, Israel’s ambassador to the UK noted that “over 600,000 civilian Germans” were killed by allied bombing campaigns in World War II, and then asked, “Was it worth it in order to defeat Nazi Germany? And the answer was yes.”

This argument’s popularity owes little to its substantive merits.

The sole virtue of Stephens’s analogy is that Israel does in fact seem to be emulating the Allies’ method of “strategic bombing” (also known under the less euphemistic term of “terror bombing”). Strategic bombing campaigns aim not only to degrade the enemy’s capacity to wage war, but also their will to do so by imposing intolerable losses and suffering upon the civilian population. Anonymous Israeli officials told +972 Magazine last fall that the IDF was doing precisely this in Gaza, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in the hopes that this would turn Gazans against Hamas’s war effort. As one official observed, the logic of this strategy — deliberately harming civilians to put political pressure on an adversarial government — is the logic of terrorism.

The +972 report is consistent with some Israeli officials’ characterization of their past counterterrorism operations against Hezbollah. In October 2008, then-commander of the IDF’s northern front Gadi Eizenkot said that his army would devastate “every village from which shots were fired in the direction of Israel,” deploying “disproportionate power” that would “cause immense damage and destruction,” as “Harming the population is the only means of restraining” the enemy.

So, there are some grounds for likening Israel’s conduct in Gaza to the Allied powers’ strategic bombing campaigns, even as the latter took civilian life on a much greater scale. But this is where the merits of Stephens’s argument end.

The flaws in his reasoning are several. First, it is worth noting that the Allies’ “strategic bombing” campaigns predated the modern laws of war. Today, they would be understood as unambiguous war crimes. Anyone who believes in progress or the “rules-based international order” should celebrate the fact that mass murdering civilians is less morally permissible in 2024 than it was in 1945.

What’s more, there is far from consensus among historians about the efficacy of strategic bombing. Some scholars maintain that the bombardment of cities typically leads civilian populations to rally behind their nations’ war efforts.

For the sake of argument, however, let’s stipulate that the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo were indispensable to Allied victory, and therefore morally justified, given the radical evil of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The fundamental problem with Stephens’s argument is that Israel’s war with Hamas is not remotely analogous to World War II.

By the time the Allies began bombing German and Japanese cities, those two nations had already conquered neighboring lands and begun murdering innocents on a world-historic scale. Nazi Germany killed an estimated 17 million civilians and prisoners of war. Imperial Japan killed as many as 30 million civilians in East Asia, while subjecting many thousands to torturous medical experiments and germ warfare.

In other words, the existential threat posed by these powers was not merely hypothetical. And their desire to perpetrate genocide was not merely aspirational. Whether it is morally permissible for a military to kill civilians in large numbers in order to end an apocalyptic atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust or the Japanese occupation of China is a vexing question.

But this is not the question that Israel faces today. Hamas may have genocidal aspirations. But as of now, it has scant capacity to kill Israelis outside of Gaza. And bombarding that territory’s cities has made the safe return of Israeli hostages less likely, not more so, a point that has not been lost on many of the captives’ families.

In reality, Israel does not need to level Gaza in order to ensure its own existence. To prevent October 7, all the Netanyahu government needed to do was take its intelligence seriously and fortify its borders. Israeli intelligence obtained Hamas’s battle plan for October 7 more than a year in advance. Last July, an Israeli intelligence analyst warned her supervisors that Hamas had conducted a training exercise that appeared to match the intercepted battle plan. But a colonel dismissed these concerns, according to emails obtained by the New York Times. As Israeli officials conceded to the Times,“Had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.”

Instead, Israel persisted in leaving the border fence with Gaza thinly defended, so as to devote more IDF troops to the protection of illegal settlements in the West Bank.

The fact that Hamas’s rockets rarely succeed in killing Israelis tells us nothing about the organization’s moral character. But it does tell us something about the scale of the threat that it poses to Israel. Hamas is not a burgeoning imperial power. And it has no serious prospect of becoming one. Israel’s capacity to restrict the flow of arms and goods into Gaza places tight constraints on Hamas’s capacity to amass economic and military power.

It is quite understandable that Israelis do not like the idea of Hamas persisting in Gaza after October 7. No one should. But it does not follow that the very existence of Israel depends on Hamas’s elimination, let alone that these existential stakes give Netanyahu’s government the right to “fight in the way we once did,” even if that involves incinerating Palestinian refugees in their tents.

This is all the more true when one considers that Israel does not actually have a remotely feasible plan for eliminating Hamas, facilitating the formation of a stable successor government in Gaza, or pursuing a lasting peace with the Palestinians.

When the United States bombed Japan and Germany, it was not simultaneously engaged in the settlement of Japanese and German land. The Israeli government, by contrast, has been forcing Palestinian communities in the West Bank off their land, while subjecting the broader territory to a form of apartheid rule.

Establishing a postwar governing authority in Gaza that simultaneously boasts legitimacy in the eyes of its people and cooperates with Israel on security issues would be difficult today under any circ*mstances. In a context where the Netanyahu government remains committed to expanding settlements — and, in so doing, humiliating Fatah in the West Bank, Palestine’s only alternative power center to Hamas — it is wholly impossible. Until that changes, an uneasy truce with a Hamas-governed Gaza may be the best of Israel’s bad options.

But Netanyahu’s problem isn’t merely that he cannot install a replacement for Hamas without abandoning his coalition partners’ commitment to the West Bank’s annexation. It is also that his military has proven incapable of eliminating Hamas to begin with. As soon as Israeli troops began leaving northern Gaza, the militant group started reestablishing itself, forcing the IDF to return and reengage in fighting. By all appearances, Israel has no viable alternative to Hamas to offer Gaza’s 2 million people beyond unending war and occupation.

Stephens is not wrong that we remember the justice of the Allies’ cause more than the horrors of their war crimes. But the suffering of Dresden and Hiroshima would be harder to rationalize or overlook in a world where neither gave way to peace and prosperity, but rather, to an endless cycle of counterinsurgency wars and the illegal settlement of German and Japanese lands by American religious fanatics.

In Gaza, Israel is not choosing a “morally compromised victory” over a “morally pure defeat.” It’s choosing a morally abominable quagmire. The bereaved parents of Rafah will take no comfort in the thought that hundreds of thousands German and Japanese civilians knew a similar pain in the 1940s. We shouldn’t either.