After more than two months of warfare, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have done little to achieve their stated aims – the rescue of those captured by Hamas and the elimination of Hamas – by military means. Of the people – civilians and military – that Hamas had captured, the IDF has rescued one, and murdered three. Hamas claims others have died due to Israeli bombing and shelling, but this is impossible to verify.
In terms of eliminating Hamas, the Israelis claim that the kill ratio is two civilians to one military target, and that this is a good ratio. If this is true, then about 6,500 of the 20,000 killed in the Gaza Strip would have been military targets. If the upper limit of estimated Hamas personnel is taken to be 30,000, then it also means that the IDF is prepared to kill approximately another 70,000 people, of whom the vast majority will be civilians.
However, given that the IDF killed three of the people it was claiming to be rescuing, after they had stripped their shirt, scrawled SOS in Hebrew, and were waving a white flag, the IDF’s ability to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants is in doubt. Moreover, with about three IDF personnel being killed daily during military operations seems to indicate that neither the will to fight, nor the ability, of Hamas has been severely degraded.
The stated goals – the liberation of those captured, most of them civilians and many of them elderly or children, and the elimination of a militant group that wilfully murdered hundreds of civilians – were legitimate. But the way that Israel has prosecuted this war indicates either the IDF is entirely incompetent, or other unstated goals are taking precedence. Since October 7, the world has seen Israel killing thousands of civilians and taking hundreds more civilian captives. Israel may justify these actions as ‘retaliatory’, but the end result is a (much larger) replica of Hamas’ atrocities.
The release of 110 civilians by Hamas in the first round of ceasefire negotiations, initially resisted by Israel’s war cabinet, showed that there were other ways to do things. Since Israel released 240 Palestinian women and children as part of the deal, though, it showed the world that Hamas was hardly the only actor kidnapping and detaining civilians. Israel tries Palestinians under a military court, which has a conviction rate of 96-99% for any act of resisting its military occupation. It also holds hundreds as detainees even without conviction, often for years. The release of Palestinian women and children led to a surge of support for Hamas in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
The scale and manner of Israeli military operations are such that even its committed allies – the US, UK, Australia, and most European countries – are starting to use words like “indiscriminate bombing”, “killing rage”, and slowly starting to assert that the killing has to stop, or at least, be contained. Even Germany, which has defined the defence of Israel as a ‘Staatsräson’ – or national interest – due to the crimes of the Nazis, has now started to abstain from UN votes rather than merely following Israeli points.
None of this has impacted Israel’s military strategies. Partially, this is because two of the unstated goals of the IDF campaign are to restore the deterrence capability of Israel, and to re-establish trust between the state and society that such a massive security failure will not happen again. In other words, the military campaign is as much a psychological operation – directed both at Israel’s enemies and its own population to recreate an aura of invincibility that the Hamas October 7 attacks tore apart.
This meshes well with the political aims of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right cabinet. Netanyahu has always been a believer in the “Iron Wall” concept enunciated by the Russian-born Ze’ev Jabotinsky. In his famous 1923 essay by the same name, Jabotinsky stated that the Palestinians would not abandon resisting the colonisation of their land by Zionists until all hope of resistance was defeated by an iron wall of force. The survival of any form of resistance among the Palestinians is anathema for Netanyahu, and the catastrophic October 7 attack by Hamas proved that he was deluded in believing he had bludgeoned Palestinians into total submission.
The IDF campaign, therefore, is designed to pursue this goal – to annihilate completely any Palestinian resistance to the supremacism that Netanyahu and his ilk espouse. It is a goal that is next to impossible to achieve. As the history of slave revolts across the millennia show, going back even to the Biblical story of Moses, no matter how much you repress a people, the idea of resistance and the desire for freedom do not die. Nonetheless, Netanyahu will continue to try, and murder tens of thousands to do so.
