Bottom line upfront, as they taught us bright-eyed young infantry officers in Building Four in what is now known as Ft. Moore, GA:

In asymmetrical warfare, where the two combatants have mismatched degrees of materiel might, it is standard for the insurgent force to carry out heinous acts of barbarism that provoke a draconian reaction from the more well-resourced side. 

The purpose of this approach is two-fold. 

The first is to attract the attention of the besieged party, and wider world, even if that reaction is horror and condemnation. 

The second is to bring on a backlash that ultimately benefits the original attacker. 

Hamas’s shocking attack on Israel of last Saturday, October 7, is a textbook example. The brutality of the attack—elderly Holocaust survivors in wheelchairs taken hostage, beheadings of children, bodies dragged through the streets, and more—has been widely reported. No matter what the political agenda, these are acts of pure evil: war crimes, irrespective of who committed them, or for what cause. It’s difficult to see how that helps Hamas, or its global approval rating. 

For the moment, therefore, Israel very much has the sympathy of the world. 

(Mostly. Hardcore anti-Semites will never take Israel’s side on anything, while hardline critics of the Israeli government will continue to insist that its sins outweigh anything that its enemies perpetrate against it. However, even they will likely admit that Hamas’s brutality has probably set the Palestinian cause back a hundred years.)

But once Israel begins what promises to be a ruthless counterattack—and it’s only barely begun—that sympathy will almost certainly begin to evaporate. That is an immutable law of warfare. 

After Israel has cut off the power and fuel and food and water in Gaza, and images of the resulting hunger and disease and medical calamity begin to appear on international television, after its fighter planes turn Gaza City to rubble, after IDF infantrymen and tanks begin killing people, and civilian casualties inevitably occur, that pro-Israel solidarity will quickly start to crack. The world will soon forget the horrors of October 7 and concern itself only with the horrors of Tel Aviv’s response. 

We saw this same dynamic after 9/11. On September 12^th, the headline in the French newspaper Le Monde read, “Nous sommes tous américains”—“We’re all Americans.” (From the French!) But it was not long before the massive US military response—and specifically, the pointless, deceitful quagmire of Iraq—had the world back to hating us again.

Which was exactly as Bin Laden wanted it. Hamas too. That only makes its attack more appalling….but it will not protect Israel from condemnation.

VERY FINE PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES REDUX

Hamas is a brutal, fascistic organization that oppresses even its own people, and is overtly dedicated not just to the obliteration of Israel as a state but to the explicit extermination of Jews as a people. Even in the Arab world it is widely reviled. Those Westerners who take its side in this crisis in any way are divorced from reality.

That is not to say that the Netanyahu government is saintly. It is a danger to Israel’s future as a democracy, as the widespread protests by hundreds of thousands of Israelis last year showed. Its treatment of the Palestinian people is indefensible and unsustainable, and an obstacle to a lasting political solution in the region that is just and acceptable to all sides. But there is no comparison between the two combatants in this new war.

In fact, Hamas’s attack has been a massive gift to Bibi, deflecting his other troubles and rallying the Israeli people around him. Only a few months ago, Israeli reservists were threatening not to show up for duty—an unimaginable protest in a country that valorizes military service even more than the US. (And in Israel that valorization is not just a matter of “thank you for service” yellow ribbons and F-16 flyovers at NFL games.) 

Now all those reservists have their boots on and the Galils in hand and are heading to the Gaza border, angrily. 

Indeed, Hamas’s fortunes and Bibi’s are intertwined. The last thing the former wants is peace, let alone the establishment of a Palestinian state. What Hamas benefits from is continued violence, chaos, strife, and division, and they’re doing everything they can to make sure matters stay that way, a pattern we’ve repeatedly seen in the region. (See: the assassination of Rabin.) Do you think they want Bibi out of power and replaced by a moderate democrat who doesn’t invite widespread outrage both domestically and internationally? Of course not. There is a strange symbiosis between Hamas and the Likud government, not unlike that of Al Qaeda and the American neo-cons at the turn of the millennium (as masterfully detailed in Adam Curtis’s 2004 BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares).

It is difficult to expect Israel to play by Marquess of Queensbury rules in fighting a foe that gleefully does not. But rightly or wrongly, the world will hold Israel to a higher standard. Yes, a sovereign state is expected to behave better than a criminal gang, but that ethos rarely survives the first angry shot….particularly when Israeli soldiers are so understandably driven for revenge, and will be operating in a densely packed urban area against an irregular opponent it’s hard to imagine that a counterattack ordered by Benjamin Netanyahu is going to be measured and careful, particularly when he would love to position himself to the right wing, both at home and abroad, as The Man Who Saved Israel. 

The conversation is further complicated by the mutual bad faith of anti-Semites who—in all situations, not just this one—dishonestly insist that their criticism of Israel is merely anti-Zionism and not racially motivated, and of others who just as dishonestly use the charge of anti-Semitism to protect various Israeli governments from legitimate critique when it is warranted. 

I am not calling for Israel to turn the other cheek. It cannot. But with Hamas cowardly hiding among the mass of the Palestinian people of Gaza, using its own brethren as human shields, it will be all but impossible for the IDF to conduct this war without inflicting massive bloodshed and suffering on the civilian population. “So be it,” say some: “Hamas does that to its enemies without so much as a batted eye.” But it is not a matter of being unwilling to descend to its level. Insurgents have fought this way since the Boer war, if not before, and the armies fighting them have faced these same dilemmas from Algeria to Northern Ireland to Iraq. The guerrilla behaves monstrously, is largely unaffected by condemnation, provokes brutality in response, then benefits from the opprobrium that rains down on its foe. 

I don’t have an answer for this riddle—I am only predicting the pattern that we are about to see repeated. 

FESTIVAL OF IGNORANCE

Israel’s intelligence failure in not anticipating this attack is a separate matter, though I suspect Bibi will dodge it just as deftly as Dubya did in 2001.

But as George Packer points out in The Atlantic, the 9/11 comparison goes only so far. Hamas is situated right on Israel’s border, and with the aid of Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, and others, poses an existential threat to the Jewish state that Al Qaeda never did to the United States. (The scale of casualties in the October 7 attack also dwarfs that of 9/11, per capita.) That means that Israel’s response to this latest crisis, unlike America’s in the so-called Global War on Terror, is far more urgent and dire.

The world would be far better off if Hamas ceased to exist, but it’s hard to see how that can be accomplished without untold death and destruction in Gaza and the attendant condemnation it will bring. The idea that Israel is going to be able to minimize civilian casualties during the coming air and ground war, even with a quasi-evacuation of the battlespace, strikes me as naïve. That fantasy—predicated largely on a misplaced faith in high tech—has plagued us ever since the Persian Gulf war, from which I returned to find that both the American people and the punditocracy had been deceived (or self-deceived) into believing that war had become a bloodless video game. That delusion has never entirely gone away, not even after it was thoroughly disproved in the bloody debacles of Afghanistan and the second Iraq invasion.

But we as a nation have never been especially sophisticated when it comes to understanding warfare, or political conflict of any kind. And in America, the subject of Israel in particular invites a lot of ignorant bloviating from all sides. 

As usual, Trump, with clockwork reliability, showed up on Fox to attack his friends (Netanyahu, in this case) and praise the bad guys (saying that Hezbollah “are very smart”). He also claimed if he were still POTUS the US intel community would have pre-empted the attack. It’s only a matter of time before he suggests that Israel should drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. 

Israel’s communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, succinctly called Trump’s remarks “shameful,” adding that, fortunately, “We don’t have to bother with him and the nonsense he spouts.” Would that the US could say the same. Asked by a reporter if Trump’s comments make it clear that he can’t be relied on, Karhi replied, “Obviously.” I hope American voters who think Trump is a friend to Israel will remember that thirteen months from now.

(Anyway, I thought Jared fixed the Middle East, didn’t he?)  

Meanwhile, the clown car of Republican dysfunction continues to careen across American politics, even during a crisis. The inability of House Republicans to hit the pause button on their general chaos even amid this catastrophe and get it together sufficiently to vote for aid to Israel is about as damning a demonstration of GOP unfitness to lead as you can possibly imagine. One hopes that, too, will be remembered at the polls come November 2024.

But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Some right wing talk radio that I dipped into recently was blaming the Hamas attack on—hold on to your hat—Biden, and also Obama, and not on even the flimsiest of grounds, but simply because (I kid you not) that they are both “communists.” I know radio is an old-fashioned medium, but I didn’t realize its radio waves were still reaching us from the 1950s. One jock complained that Biden had not even condemned the Hamas attack, even though he pointedly had, days before, and in terms so pro-Israel that a friend of mine on the left was already furiously accusing that same Joe Biden of being complicit in war crimes that Israel hadn’t even committed yet. (No mention of whether this was why his dog Commander was banished from the White House last week.) 

But complaining that right wing talk radio is ill-informed is like complaining that Limburger cheese smells bad.

For those looking for a sober, detailed, well-informed survey of the issues, I invite your attention to this interview in Politico with former special envoy Dennis Ross, one of the key US negotiators in the Oslo peace process, director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under George H.W. Bush, special assistant to President Obama, and special advisor on Iran to Hillary Rodham Clinton when she was Secretary of State. (Thank you, Justin Schein, for posting it.) Among Ross’s insights is his confidence that Hezbollah and Iran were intimately involved in the planning of the attack, and the possibility of the former actively entering the fight in the north.

For further civilized and thorough responses by some of our countrymen, go here (thank you Ori Hanan Weisberg for writing it, and Aaron Naperstak for re-posting it) and here (thank you Sabrina Gordon). 

THE OCTOBER WAR + 50

I don’t want to dog pile on Francis Fukuyama and his 30 year-old theory (which he has clarified over the years anyway), but with two major, incredibly brutal land wars raging simultaneously in Ukraine and Gaza, it has never felt less like “the end of history.”

This isn’t Israel’s first “October war,” of course. A half-century ago, my dad was the senior aide-de-camp to the commanding general of the XVIIIth Airborne Corps when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, almost 50 years to the day of the Hamas attack. I remember being ten years old and standing outside the kitchen of our quarters at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, eavesdropping on my parents as they talked in hushed tones after Nixon had put the corps on alert for deployment to the Middle East, as well as sending warships to the Med, recalling nuclear-armed B-52s from Guam, and raising the Pentagon’s alert posture to DEFCON III. 

(Actually, it wasn’t Nixon’s doing, as he was drunk, and consumed with the ongoing fallout of the Saturday Night Massacre at the time; Kissinger, Haig, and Schlesinger were essentially running the country. And actually my parents were not talking in hushed tones: my mother was highly upset and my father was trying to downplay the danger.)

Israel won that war, and it may win this won too, but Hamas’s attack could still net gains. Israel’s counteroffensive may well destroy it, the same way that the Global War on Terror destroyed Al Qaeda, or the United States’ response to Tet 1968 destroyed the Viet Cong both on the battlefield and as a viable political entity going forward. But both of the movements represented by those “defeated” players still triumphed, in part because of their suicide bunts, with the organizations themselves merely replaced by like-minded successors that arose from their ashes, such as ISIS in the case of the GWOT, or allies, in the case of the VC.

As incredible as it may seem, and as evil as it is, Hamas may have scored a similar strategic (if pyrrhic) victory here. By no stretch of the imagination is Hamas a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and its obliteration will not solve the “Palestinian problem” or bring lasting peace to the region. As Dennis Ross notes, irrespective of October 7 and the counterattack that is only beginning, we will still have to engage in a substantive peace process in Israel and Palestine, working with players of good will on all sides. (That leaves Hamas out.) It would stretch the union rules of Pollyanna-ism to suggest that this crisis might have a silver lining in the end of that terrorist organization at the same time it injects new urgency into the global push for a lasting and fair two-state solution. It would be ironic if an organization that does nothing for the Palestinian cause accidentally advances it, at the cost of its own existence. But either way, Israel is going to have a very hard time coming out of this war without intense criticism for its response.

In the meantime, the people of Gaza—men, women, and children, young and old, the aged and infirm and able-bodied alike, mothers and fathers and infants and grandparents—are about to be flattened with the full force of a modern military engaged in a 21^st century version of Napoleonic total war. The people of Israel—men, women, and children, young and old, the aged and infirm and able-bodied alike, mothers and fathers and infants and grandparents—have already been subjected to horrific violence that beggars the imagination. And all this, of course, is just another chapter in a bloody history of warfare in that region that has been raging for almost 80 years. 

I do not mean to engage in a specious bothsidesism. Hamas and Israel are in no way going to be equally to blame for the final outcome of this unfolding catastrophe. But the human suffering on all sides is going to be immense. And unfairly or not, over time, Israel, as a legitimate state, is going to receive more condemnation than the non-state murderers who started this thing.

All warfare is ultimately won in the information space, and Israel could easily wind up losing this one. As horrified as the world is right now by what Hamas did, don’t be surprised if, a year from now—if not sooner—opinion swings, unfairly or not, toward the nation that was the victim of that attack. 

That’s another thing they taught us in Building Four.

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Photo: Aftermath of Israeli airstrike on Gaza City, October 9, 2023, in response to Hamas attack of two days before. Precious little respect for John Lennon’s birthday or his suggestion to give peace a chance. 

Credit: Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images