Israel Is Not Winning its War

In late October 2023, I asked what would happen when Israel found it could not win its war in Gaza. It has been almost two years, and we have something of an answer. The stated aims of the war in Gaza were the defeat of Hamas, and the return of the hostages. Many of the leaders of Hamas have been killed, Gaza devastated, nearly 60,000 people killed, and the population starved to the point of famine, but the defeat of Hamas remains far from accomplished. According to Israeli estimates, Hamas retains about 40,000 members, pretty much the same numbers as at the start of the war. About 200 hostages have been released, mostly due to an early ceasefire deal, but about 50 remain in captivity, at least half of them presumed dead. 

The clearly stated goals of the war have not been met despite a level of destruction almost never seen before in history. In December 2023, the Associated Press reported that, “In just the first two months of war, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the US-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.” Even at that time the devastation was clearly visible from space. One and a half years later, they have reached such catastrophic levels that people have stopped making any comparisons, possibly because no worse examples exist except for the nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. 

Along with the stated goals were two unstated goals. The first was the elimination of any possibility of a repeat of the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023. The second was to put an end to the Palestinian question that remains the root of Israel’s insecurity. There are ways to ensure both, or at least as much as possible. In September 2024, the Jordanian foreign minister offered a comprehensive deal, a reiteration of the Saudi King Abdullah’s 2003 deal, of normalisation with the region and the guarantee of security for Israel. As with the 2003 offer, Israel and its allies have comprehensively ignored this path. Instead, the Israeli government has chosen the moment when its population is traumatised and it has the backing of its allies, to expand the war to every and all organisations that have disputed how the Israelis act – and this means primarily Hezbollah (and Lebanon), the Houthis in Yemen, and the Iranian government. The end goal seems not just to manufacture regime change in a country or two, but to change the whole regime of West Asia so that no country can dispute Israel’s supremacy.

This is, in some ways, the natural end result of the 1923 Iron Wall argument of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the early Zionists who has become more influential over the last half century. Jabotinsky argued that once the moderate Arabs agreed to Israel’s existence, “Then we may expect them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizen, or Arab national integrity.” The problem is that this rests on the elimination of the Palestinian question, or as he wrote, in the same paragraph preceding this, “As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter, because they are not a rabble, but a living people. And when a living people yields in matters of such a vital character it is only when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall.”

For all of Israel’s power, for all the diplomatic, financial, and military backing by the United States and the European states, the ‘iron wall’ has consistently been breached, never as calamitously as on October 7, 2023. We can argue until the cows come home whether this is because Israel has refused to negotiate in good faith or whether it is impossible for them to reconcile as long as the Palestinians exist as a people – Jabotinsky himself argued that it impossible to compensate them – that does not matter. What matters is that Israel and its allies believe that only by the building of an unbreachable Iron Wall will they ever be safe. 

By definition, this is an impossible condition. No country on earth, ever, has unbreachable security, something that the Israelis are finding out as their vaunted Iron Dome anti-missile system is actually tested by Iran and some missiles continue to breach it. But if peace is not possible under such a system, then the only option is for Israel to be surrounded by states so weak that they cannot resist any punishment that Israel determines.

It is important to note that this aligns closely to the US worldview that sees itself as the “indispensable nation” and one that can act as it wants, when it wants, and how it wants without justification – as seen most obviously during the long “War on Terror” and when it passed a law in 2002 allowing it to act against the international Criminal Court if its people were ever charged. It is also a throwback to the policy of European colonial actors – Jabotinsky and early Zionists all saw the foundation of Israel as a colonial project – and thus it is unsurprising that European states and European settler states have largely backed Israel – even if some are starting to question it. Indians should understand this well, as our own history of British colonialism was very much of the East India Company and the British Empire making efforts to surround their colonies by weak buffer states that could not threaten them. Even the Soviet Empire, which tried to harness anti-colonialism against the US and its allies, behaved the same, surrounding itself by weaker, subjugated states in its periphery, something that Putin has tried to revive in Ukraine.

The brutal truth is that this policy works until it does not. A state of perpetual war is exhausting to even the countries pursuing it, and it empowers other states that benefit from being seen as guarantors of stability, in this case China. Furthermore, broken states where people are denied security and dignity are excellent breeding grounds for extremist non-state organisations such as the LTTE, Al Qaeda, ISIS, and a host of others, and as the vocal champions of Palestinian rights – many of them Jewish – assert themselves across the world, in particular in the US and Europe, it is as easy to say that Israel has given the Palestinian question renewed life as to say it is closer to finishing it. 

Omair Ahmad is an author. His last novel, Jimmy the Terrorist, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and won the Crossword Award.

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