A few days before Christmas and two and a half months after Hamas killed more than 1200 men, women and children in a terrorist onslaught, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “We’re continuing the war to the end. It will continue until Hamas is destroyed – until victory … until all the goals we set are met: destroying Hamas, releasing our hostages and removing the threat from Gaza.”
It is on these three measures then, that Netanyahu will seek to claim victory. But how achievable are they in reality, and to what extent will they be achieved before Netanyahu the politician satisfies himself that he can claim that the mission has been accomplished?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives a security briefing with commanders and soldiers in the northern Gaza Strip on Christmas Day.Credit: AP
The issue of the hostages presents the most obvious measure of success. All of the approximately 110 living hostages who were taken and the bodies of around 20 believed to have died must be returned. It is a deeply political issue for Netanyahu on whose watch they were kidnapped and the pressure from their families for their return is becoming an increasingly significant domestic issue.
For its part Hamas understands the importance of the hostages and won’t give them up easily. With the degree of devastation that Gaza has suffered during the campaign, the likelihood that all the hostages’ remains will be recovered is questionable.
If Netanyahu’s ability to deliver on the most straightforward of his goals is questionable, then talk of “destroying” Hamas is even less likely. Hamas’s senior political leadership sits outside the country and Israel, or whomever will be responsible for providing security and basic services in the aftermath of the Gaza operation, will likely be unable to stop Hamas from reconstituting. It may well take years to achieve, but in a densely populated substate of more than two million people with few economic prospects and many who will have lost a friend or extended family member to Israeli military action, willing recruits won’t be hard to find.
The same goes for his promise to remove the threat from Gaza. Short of reprising its occupation of Gaza, unless the Israelis can find a security guarantor for the narrow, 41 kilometre long strip to its west then the threat will remain. Arms can be smuggled in, rocket manufactured or assembled and the warren of tunnels that Israel is finding and destroying can be re-built, albeit slowly, unless whatever security authorities are in place are sufficiently motivated or diligent to prevent this.
Illustration: Andrew Dyson
The only potential for a substantive, lasting guarantee of security is for negotiations for the presently chimeric two-state solution to re-commence. Whether such an option even exists is debatable – the Palestinians have squandered previous opportunities, and successive Israeli governments, by encouraging land grabs and illegal settlements, have ensured that whatever offer they may eventually put on the table will be far short of what was offered decades ago. But Netanyahu will not even concede the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state, in part due to his own beliefs but also by his need for the support of the right for his own political survival. In an article published in the Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu claimed there were three prerequisites for peace: the destruction of Hamas, the de-militarisation of Gaza and the de-radicalisation of Palestinian society.
Describing Palestinian society as radicalised says much about Netanyahu – at heart he is a survivor, a political tactician. But he is not a strategist and far from being a statesman. And therein lies the conundrum for Netanyahu. Having spectacularly failed in the primary responsibility of any national leader – to protect his country’s citizens from attack, Netanyahu understands that his only chance of political survival is to double down on his appeal to the far right at home. But the manner in which he is doing this, and prosecuting the Gaza campaign, is all stick and no carrot. Calling for the Palestinian education system to re-write curricula while destroying Palestinian schools and universities does nothing to encourage Palestinians to take his calls seriously. Then again, his audience is always internal.
A tactical victory in Gaza is virtually assured – Israel claims that it has killed some 8000 fighters and significantly degraded half of Hamas’s battalions. There is no doubt that Hamas’s infrastructure and logistical support network has been significantly damaged. But its Gazan-based senior operational leadership appears largely intact for the moment, although their long-term survival is questionable. Just how long Israel can maintain the scale and intensity of its ground campaign is also a constraining factor in what level of victory it will ultimately achieve. Mobilisation on this scale is a strain on the Israeli economy and at some point a decision will have to be made to reduce its forces in Gaza.
Israel’s tactical victory though, doesn’t necessarily convert into strategic success. It has largely lost the information campaign, as the indiscriminate savagery unleashed by Hamas on October 7 recedes into the background, replaced by imagery from a devastated Gaza. Incidents like the one in which Israeli soldiers shot and killed three half-naked Israeli hostages, reportedly escaping under a white flag, add to suspicions about the degree to which the Israeli military discriminate between targets of necessity and targets of choice.
Israeli national security rests on the concept of deterrence and its approach in Gaza has been with a view to restoring the deterrence lost on October 7. But in a multi-generational conflict where the present political and socio-economic conditions hold little attraction for millions of Palestinians, what Israeli planners see as restoring deterrence many Palestinians will see as justifying future attacks. Netanyahu will claim victory if he retrieves most of the hostages and significantly degrades Hamas. And while this will represent a tactical victory for Israel, the strategic outcome is far less easy to predict.
Dr Rodger Shanahan is a Middle East analyst and a former army officer with extensive operational and diplomatic experience in the region.
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Netanyahu isn’t destroying Hamas – he’s making it stronger
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29.12.2023
A few days before Christmas and two and a half months after Hamas killed more than 1200 men, women and children in a terrorist onslaught, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “We’re continuing the war to the end. It will continue until Hamas is destroyed – until victory … until all the goals we set are met: destroying Hamas, releasing our hostages and removing the threat from Gaza.”
It is on these three measures then, that Netanyahu will seek to claim victory. But how achievable are they in reality, and to what extent will they be achieved before Netanyahu the politician satisfies himself that he can claim that the mission has been accomplished?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives a security briefing with commanders and soldiers in the northern Gaza Strip on Christmas Day.Credit: AP
The issue of the hostages presents the most obvious measure of success. All of the approximately 110 living hostages who were taken and the bodies of around 20 believed to have died must be returned. It is a deeply political issue for Netanyahu on whose watch they were kidnapped and the pressure from their families for their return is becoming an increasingly significant domestic issue.
For its part Hamas understands the importance of the hostages and won’t give them up easily. With the degree of devastation that Gaza has suffered during the campaign, the likelihood that all the hostages’ remains will be recovered is questionable.
If Netanyahu’s ability to deliver on the most straightforward of his goals is questionable, then talk of “destroying” Hamas is even less likely.........
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