[After weeks of bombardment and thousands of deaths, what are
Netanyahu’s political and ethical limits? ]
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NO ENDGAME IN GAZA  
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Fintan O’Toole
November 16, 2023
New York Review
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_ After weeks of bombardment and thousands of deaths, what are
Netanyahu’s political and ethical limits? _

Rescue teams searching for survivors after an Israeli attack,
al-Maghazi, Gaza, November 5, 2023, Mohammed Zaanoun/Middle East
Images/AFP/Getty Images

 

If war is supposed to be the continuation of politics by other means,
Israel’s assault on Gaza seems to be the continuation by other means
of the absence of politics. It does not seem that Israel understands
what its endgame is. Without a clear sense of an ending, there can be
no answer to the most crucial moral and strategic question: When is
enough enough? Even in the crudely mathematical logic of vengeance,
the blood price for Hamas’s appalling atrocities of October 7 has
long since been paid. The body count—if that is to be the measure of
retribution—has mounted far beyond the level required for an
equality of suffering. Yet it appears to have no visible ceiling. What
factor must Jewish deaths be multiplied by? When, as W.B. Yeats asked
in a different conflict, may it suffice?

“Enough” is the word that Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s prime
minister, stressed in his remarkable speech of September 1993 at the
signing of the Oslo Accords:

We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today
in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough…. We
are today giving peace a chance and saying to you and saying again to
you: Enough. 

Enough is a both a political goal and an ethical limit. Without the
first, it is hard to set the second. To know how far you can go, you
have to know where you want to get to. Benjamin Netanyahu’s
government seems to know neither.

There has been much fine reporting on the dreadful intelligence
failures that allowed the massacres of October 7 to happen. But they
in turn arise from something much deeper: a cognitive failure. There
has been a literal false sense of security. Rabin, in his Nobel Peace
Prize acceptance speech in 1994, spelled out in the clearest terms the
impossibility of security without peace: “There is only one radical
means of sanctifying human lives. Not armored plating, or tanks, or
planes, or concrete fortifications. The one radical solution is
peace.”

Peacemaking is a political process. Wars may shape the circumstances
in which it is done, but they do not make it happen. Rabin, one of
Israel’s most accomplished warriors, understood that truth. With his
assassination and Netanyahu’s rise, it was deliberately unlearned.
Politics—the negotiation of a just settlement with the
Palestinians—was abandoned and replaced by the illusion that
security could indeed be created and maintained by planes, tanks,
fortifications, and surveillance technology. That illusion has died a
terrible death, but it retains a zombie existence. It persists because
the first condition of a return to politics would be the admission
that Netanyahu’s whole approach has been a disaster, not just for
the Palestinians, but for Israel.

Israel has already tried two radically different strategies in Gaza.
The first was a familiar military and political orthodoxy: conquest
and colonization. Gaza, having belonged to the Ottoman empire and then
to the British mandate in Palestine, was governed by Egypt after 1948,
though neither its traditional residents nor the large refugee
population were granted Egyptian citizenship. After its capture by
Israel in 1956, Gaza was quickly returned to Egyptian control, but
following its reconquest in the Six-Day War of 1967, the territory was
ruled by an Israeli military governor for almost forty years. (Civil
control of Gaza City was transferred to the Palestinian Authority in
1994.) In the late 1970s the right-wing government of Menachem Begin
imagined that this rule could be made permanent and stable if enough
Jews were settled in the territory. Eventually, 8,500 Jewish people
did settle in Gaza—a number large enough to create a sense of
existential threat for Palestinians but too small to be able to
control the strip. Israel needed three thousand soldiers to protect
these 8,500 Jews. In the second intifada it lost 230 of those
soldiers.

Ariel Sharon’s decision in 2005 to end the military occupation and
forcibly withdraw the settlements was not a wild caprice. It was a
recognition of reality: the post-1967 attempt at colonization could
not be sustained. By occupying Gaza, Israel had gained nothing and
lost soldiers, money, and international goodwill. It’s worth
recalling that Netanyahu supported the withdrawal for sound policy
reasons before he opposed it for cynical political ones.

It was not for nothing that in 2014, when Hamas was firing rockets
into Israel, Netanyahu did not support demands from his own foreign
minister Avigdor Liberman for a military reconquest and reoccupation
of Gaza. Netanyahu, when running for election, had made aggressive
noises about Hamas, claiming in 2008 that “we will finish the job.
We will topple the terror regime of Hamas.” But this was utterly
deceitful. Netanyahu never wanted to topple the Hamas regime. He
wanted to retain the threat that he might do it as a rhetorical trope,
a furious sound that signified nothing. It is this empty vessel that
Netanyahu is now seeking to fill with meaning and purpose—and with
blood.

For Israel’s real alternative to military occupation and
colonization was Hamas itself. The religious
fundamentalists—committed to extreme antisemitism and the extinction
of Israel—could be used to undermine the Palestine Liberation
Organization and, after 2005, to keep the Palestinian movement divided
between Gaza and the West Bank. The strangeness of this approach lay
not only in the illusion that a jihadist movement could ever be, in
practical effect, an ally of Israel, but in the weird form of war it
created. Since Hamas would continue to attack Israel, Israel would
continue to retaliate. The retaliatory attacks would be bloody and
often horrific in their toll of civilian casualties. But they would be
calibrated so as to ensure that Hamas stayed in power in Gaza.  

A review of Israel’s Gaza wars between 2009 and 2014, commissioned
by the US military from the RAND Corporation and published in 2017,
points out that this was warfare specifically designed _not_ to
defeat the enemy:

Israel never strived for a decisive victory in Gaza. While it could
militarily defeat Hamas, Israel could not overthrow Hamas without
risking the possibility that a more radical organization would govern
Gaza. Nor did Israel want to be responsible for governing Gaza in a
postconflict power vacuum.  

Implicit in this policy of repeatedly attacking a regime with
overwhelming firepower while not wanting victory over it was the
impossibility of an endgame. There would be no peace but also no
decisive war. Even if thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of
Israelis died in these intermittent eruptions of extreme violence,
their purpose was to maintain this brutality at what RAND calls a
“manageable” level.

The idea of controlled carnage ended in the unrestrained slaughter of
October 7. Netanyahu was forced to abandon overnight the scheme that
had been the touchstone of his whole approach to the Palestinian
question: keeping Hamas strong enough to deny authority to the
Palestinian Authority, but weak enough to pose no more than a sporadic
and limited threat to Israeli citizens.

The failure of Israel’s Plan A, military occupation, was
acknowledged with its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. The
even more catastrophic collapse of Plan B has been conceded, as it had
to be, after Hamas’s attacks destroyed the illusion of literal and
political containment. But the only response of which Netanyahu seems
capable is a completely incoherent mix of Plan A and Plan B. There
will be, for an unknown period, a military occupation. According to
Netanyahu, Israel “will for an indefinite period…have the overall
security responsibility” for the territory. But Israel will accept
no liability for the welfare of those who live there. Israel will
control Gaza but not govern it. This is not a plan. It is a fusion of
two failures.

Military occupation did not work when Gaza had a smaller Palestinian
population, when its cities were not reduced to wreckage, and when
there was one fewer generation raised on hopelessness and hatred. No
one really seems to think it can work now. Likewise, the belief that
Gaza could be controlled from the outside by an Israeli government
that had no accountability to its people, and that could insulate
itself from the consequent suffering, has proved to be a calamity. The
notion that the broken shards of these two collapsed strategies can be
glued together to create what Israel’s defense minister, Yoav
Gallant, calls “a new security regime” has no credibility.

Bombs and tanks do not answer questions. Who is to govern Gaza if not
Hamas or Israel itself? Does Israel really think that, without the
creation of a Palestinian state, somebody else—either an
international consortium or a Palestinian puppet regime—will sail
into a blood-soaked hellscape of rubble and dust, inhabited by
traumatized survivors, and take responsibility for rebuilding,
policing, and governing it? How is Israel going to make the kind of
peace with its immediate neighbors without which the security of its
citizens cannot be rebuilt?

While these political questions go unanswered, so do the moral ones.
How many deaths are too many? How are obligations to international law
and common decency going to be fulfilled in dense streets crowded with
children, women, the elderly, and the sick? What is the “self” in
Israel’s “self-defense”? Does it see its true image in this
bloodletting? Can it imagine a life beyond revenge?

_This article was originally published online October 31, 2023 in
slightly modified form. —The Editors_

_FINTAN O’TOOLE is the Advising Editor at The New York Review, a
columnist for The Irish Times, and the Leonard L. Milberg Professor
of Irish Letters at Princeton. His most recent book, We Don’t Know
Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, was published in the
US last year. (December 2023)_

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* Gaza
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* Israel
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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