After a weeklong truce, Israel is once again bombing Gaza. The proximate cause of this resumption of violence was an alleged cease-fire violation by Hamas. But another round of fighting was inevitable, irrespective of Hamas’s conduct, as the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains committed to the terrorist group’s eradication.
“With the return to fighting, we emphasize: The government of Israel is committed to achieving the war aims,” Netanyahu said Friday, “freeing our hostages, eliminating Hamas and ensuring that Gaza will never again pose a threat to the residents of Israel.”
The Israeli right is scarcely alone in believing that their nation’s war cannot end until Hamas surrenders. Rather, this is the consensus view among Israeli and American political leaders alike. Even many in the U.S. insist on the necessity of Hamas’s elimination. Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, an anti-occupation Jewish group, said Thursday that peace “will never happen with Hamas controlling Gaza. Israel has the right and obligation to ensure Hamas can never do this again.” Bernie Sanders shares this basic assessment, saying recently, “For the sake of regional peace and a brighter future for the Palestinian people, Gaza must have a chance to be free of Hamas.”
The progressive case for Hamas’s eradication is not difficult to make. The group just perpetrated the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, an atrocity that also claimed the lives of innocent Bedouins, Arab Israelis, and Thai workers. Its militants and their allies tortured parents in front of their children, and children in front of their parents. They raped and murdered women and burned whole families alive.
This spectacular violence, combined with persistent rocket attacks, has displaced hundreds of thousands of Israelis from southern Israel, many of whom will not feel comfortable returning to their homes so long as Hamas retains any martial strength.
Before October 7, there was already a dearth of political will for a two-state solution in Israel with much of the Israeli electorate convinced that it had no partner for peace among the Palestinians and/or that a Palestinian state would constitute a threat to Israeli national security. Changing these views will be impossible so long as Hamas governs Gaza. Indeed, for Netanyahu and his allies, this had heretofore been Hamas’s great virtue: With an Islamist terror group governing Gaza, and its secular rival running the West Bank, the lack of a unified, moderate Palestinian leadership limited international pressure for a two-state solution.
Hamas’s overthrow therefore seems like a precondition for a final settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict. In fact, even a “permanent cease-fire” would seem impossible so long as Hamas retains military capacity. Israel hawks aren’t wrong to suggest that calls for a permanent truce with a group committed to violent resistance are incoherent. Hamas exists to advance the Palestinian cause through violence. Asking the group to honor a permanent cease-fire is tantamount to calling for its surrender.
In light of these considerations, many liberals have concluded that the Israeli government must (1) seek Hamas’s destruction (but in a careful, targeted way that evinces great concern for the lives of Palestinian civilians), (2) help the Palestinian Authority secure control of Gaza, (3) then halt settlement expansion and negotiate with the PA over a two-state solution.
This vision is logically coherent and morally defensible. It is also utterly detached from reality.
In truth, there is simply no way for Israel to disempower Hamas by force without killing an enormous number of Gazan civilians. The actually existing Israeli government, meanwhile, is not interested in either minimizing harm to innocent Gazans or facilitating a two-state solution.
Tolerating Hamas’s ongoing existence, and control of a substantial portion of the Gaza Strip, is a terrible option. But it is plausibly the best one available for the welfare of Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Before October 7, liberals might have doubted the Israeli government’s capacity to ethically open a post office. Yet since that terrible day, many liberals have persuaded themselves that Netanyahu’s regime is capable of ethically waging a regime-change war.
There was never any rational basis for this idea. Yes, Israel’s unity government is slightly less radical than the one that preceded it. But Netanyahu is still in charge. And from the earliest days of the war, Israel’s leadership signaled its commitment to collective punishment. On October 9, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a complete siege of Gaza, saying, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” One day later, an IDF spokesperson announced that Israel had already dropped “hundreds of tons of bombs” on Gaza, and that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
Since then, Israel’s campaign has claimed the lives of as many as 13,000 Gazans, two-thirds of them women and children. More than 300 Palestinian families have lost ten or more members. A majority of Gazans have been displaced from their homes and are subject to acute shortages of food, water, and medicine.
All this death and destruction is not merely a tragic by-product of Israel’s war on Hamas. Rather, the devastation of Palestinian society is a deliberate aim of Israel’s war effort, according to current and former Israeli intelligence officials who spoke this week to +972 Magazine, an Israeli publication.
These officials affirmed what many observers have long suspected: In many instances, Israel bombs Palestinian civilian infrastructure not because doing so is necessary for destroying a high-value Hamas target but rather because they hope that devastating Palestinian society will generate “civil pressure” on Hamas. As +972 reports:
“We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas,” said one source who took part in previous Israeli offensives in Gaza. “Sometimes it is a militant group’s spokesperson’s office, or a point where operatives meet. I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is what they told us.
“If they would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it,” the source added.
These accounts are consistent with Israeli officials’ own public descriptions of their government’s approach to past counterrorism operations against Hezbollah. In October 2008, then-commander of the IDF’s northern front Gadi Eizenkot said that Israel would devastate “every village from which shots were fired in the direction of Israel,” deploying “disproportionate power” that would “cause immense damage and destruction.” In their assessment, Eizenkot continued, “Harming the population is the only means of restraining” secretary-general of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah.
This became known as the “Dahya doctrine.” And its basic logic is identical to that of the allies’ “terror bombing” strategy in World War II. During that conflict, the allies murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese and German civilians in a bid to turn them against their governments’ war efforts and force surrender. Expert consensus generally holds that these methods, now proscribed under international law, were of limited efficacy, as civilian populations tend to respond to such terror by rallying behind their governments.
In previous conflicts, Israel’s approach to terror bombing had been distinct from the World War II version, as the government primarily targeted civilian infrastructure, rather than civilians themselves. This meant providing multiple evacuation warnings before striking an apartment building or other non-military structure. But +972’s reporting suggests that Israel has frequently dispensed with such measures during the present war, bombing multiple high-rises without warning. And an Israeli government official did tell the press on October 9 that “roof knock” warnings to targeted buildings would not be mandatory in the present war.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has also reportedly increased its tolerance for “collateral damage” when targeting Hamas militants. In the not too distant past, Israel felt constrained by concern for civilian life, even when targeting the most high-ranking Hamas operatives. In 2003, Israel had the opportunity to kill a group of top Hamas officials, including the leader of its military wing. Yet instead of dropping a one-ton bomb on the building where these militants were meeting, thereby ensuring their destruction, Israel dropped a smaller explosive so as to avoid killing many civilians in the area. Israeli officials feared that the smaller bomb wouldn’t be powerful enough to kill their targets,but erred on the side of averting civilian casualties, anyway. Their fears proved correct, and the militants escaped.
During the current conflict, by contrast, Israel has reportedly been massacring entire Palestinian families for the sake of taking out junior Hamas operatives of scant military value. As +972 reports:
“In the past, we did not regularly mark the homes of junior Hamas members for bombing,” said a security official who participated in attacking targets during previous operations. “In my time, if the house I was working on was marked Collateral Damage 5, it would not always be approved [for attack].” Such approval, he said, would only be received if a senior Hamas commander was known to be living in the home.
“To my understanding, today they can mark all the houses of [any Hamas military operative regardless of rank],” the source continued. “That is a lot of houses. Hamas members who don’t really matter for anything live in homes across Gaza. So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.”
Israel’s tolerance for civilian casualties when targeting high-ranking Hamas officials has been even more expansive. According to the officials who spoke with +972, the IDF “ knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander.”
Liberals can condemn Israel’s indiscriminate bombing while affirming support for its broader campaign. But the Netanyahu government has never cared what liberals think. The nature of the current Israeli government is not going to abruptly change. We are dealing with far-right entho-nationalists who are hell-bent on concealing their humiliating national security failures beneath a sea of Palestinian blood.
American liberals may hope that Hamas’s destruction will clear the way for the PA to govern Gaza, which will in turn make negotiations over a two-state solution possible. But the Israeli government has little interest in that outcome. Indeed, Netanyahu has promised that the Palestinian Authority will not be allowed to govern a postwar Gaza. According to a report in the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, Netanyahu’s preferred endgame involves “thinning the population of Gaza to the minimum possible,” by helping Gazans flee the war-torn strip by sea for other countries.
In truth, there is no ethically scrupulous war effort — conducted in the name of a two-state solution — for liberals to support. The only war on offer is one waged against both Hamas and Palestinian society in the name of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea.
Further, even if the Israeli government had concern for Gazans’ well-being, it still would struggle to eradicate Hamas without perpetrating a crime against humanity. Even as Israel has prioritized destruction over accuracy, it has managed to kill only between 1,000 and 3,000 Hamas militants, according to the Israeli government’s estimates. In other words, it has killed — at most — a little over 10 percent of Hamas’s 30,000 fighters. If the ratio of militant-to-civilian deaths stays constant, this would suggest that eradicating Hamas would require the slaughter of more than 100,000 Palestinian civilians.
Yet there’s every reason to believe that this ratio is liable to become more weighted toward civilian death going forward. Much of the population of northern Gaza escaped Israel’s bombardment by fleeing south. The next phase of Israel’s war, however, will be focused on southern Gaza, where nearly 2 million Palestinians are concentrated. Netanyahu’s fantasy of shipping the Gazan people off by boat notwithstanding, these civilians presently have nowhere to run. For this reason, the Biden administration is “extremely worried that an Israeli operation in the southern Gaza Strip” would “lead to significantly more civilian casualties,” according to Axios.
Killing many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians for the sake of eradicating a single terrorist organization (which would quite likely be replaced by another in the medium term) is morally abominable. But it is also very likely geopolitically unsustainable. Bloodletting on that scale would likely make the Biden administration’s support for the war effort untenable owing to both domestic and foreign pressures. And it would also substantially increase the risk of a wider regional conflagration.
Defenders of Israel’s war insist that failure to destroy Hamas would mean consigning the Israeli public to another October 7 in the near future. But there is little reason to believe this is so. The terrible truth, which the Netanyahu government is doing everything in its power to obscure, is that the 10/7 attacks could have easily been prevented or, at the very least, quickly defeated.
Israeli intelligence had intercepted Hamas’s battle plan for October 7 more than a year before the attack. In July, an Israeli intelligence analyst had warned her superiors that Hamas had conducted a daylong training exercise that appeared consistent with that battle plan. But a colonel in Gaza dismissed these concerns, according to emails obtained by the New York Times. Officials privately conceded to that paper that “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, the Israeli government ignored this intelligence and continued to devote more IDF troops to the protection of illegal settlements in the West Bank than that of legal Israeli communities in the nation’s south. Meanwhile, Israel’s top signals intelligence unit was not operational on October 7, as the government had decided to allow the unit to take weekends off.
October 7 was a historical anomaly for a reason. Israel possesses world-class intelligence and defense capabilities. Were its government actually focused on protecting southern Israel from Hamas, it would have had little difficulty in preventing a slaughter on the scale of 10/7. Netanyahu and his allies were simply asleep at the wheel.
In any event, Israel has already significantly degraded Hamas’s military capacities. Combine that with a reallocation of troops to Israel’s south, and redoubled intelligence efforts, and the risk of another attack on the scale of 10/7 should be minimal. At the very least, that risk is not so intolerably high as to justify the mass murder of Palestinian civilians.
In the long run, Israel should seek to disempower Hamas by demonstrating that Palestinians can redress their grievances through nonviolent methods. It should cease expanding settlements in the West Bank and negotiate with the Palestinian Authority over a two-state solution.
The current Israeli government will do none of that, of course. There is no steering Netanyahu and his allies toward political solutions. The most that powers like the United States can hope to do is constrain their bloodlust. For American liberals, the order of the day must be harm minimization. And that means pressing for as durable a cease-fire as possible.
Whether it would be morally permissible for a progressive Israeli government to kill a significant number of Palestinian civilians, as part of a maximally scrupulous regime-change war aimed at creating the political foundations for a two-state solution, is an interesting trolley problem. But that’s all it is. Liberals must not mistake a thought exercise for the actual policy question facing them. One can support a far-right government’s mass murder of Palestinian civilians or an inevitably temporary peace that leaves an Islamist terror group in control of much of Gaza. The people of the region deserve better options. Perhaps, someday, they will have them. But for now, there is nothing to do but give temporary peace a chance.
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