“We will eliminate Hamas. We will triumph. “It may take time, but we will come out of this war stronger than ever.” The words of Israeli Prime Minister Beniamin Netanyahu are not only intended to convey resolution, but also to highlight that this war in Gaza is different. Israel no longer intends to punish and deter Hamas. Now he wants to destroy it completely.
It is not an easy task. Hamas is at the same time a religious idea, a social movement, a political party, a government and a hybrid militia committed to terrorism. And whatever happens in Gaza, it remains a powerful political force in the West Bank. In private conversations, the Israeli military defines the objective: taking the main urban center, Gaza City; end the political and military leadership of Hamas in that territory; and destroy as much of its military capabilities as possible.
It’s something that could take weeks or even months of house-to-house fighting, given the extensive network of underground tunnels. In Iraq and Syria, local forces with air support and thousands of Western soldiers spent 277 days in the streets of Mosul and 90 in Raqqa in 2017 fighting against the Islamic State jihadists.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak argues that Israel faces four limitations. Three concern war: how to fight despite the presence of hostages, how to avoid a two-front war involving the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, and how to manage time given the inevitable erosion of international support as suffering increases. Palestinian. A fourth concern refers to the day after the fighting: “Who can we pass the torch to?” asks Barak.
That question constitutes a diabolical problem for which Netanyahu has no solution. The attack carried out by Hamas on October 7 highlights the danger posed by the Israeli policy of controlling the territory from the outside, sealing its perimeter by land and sea. In the past, the occupation of Gaza, home to more than 2 million people, proved too costly to maintain. Under pressure from violence from Hamas and other militias, Israel withdrew the last soldiers and settlers from the territory in 2005.
In the absence of a viable political and security strategy for the “day after,” any military victory can be reversed. “Let’s remember Afghanistan. Let’s remember Iraq. Let’s remember Lebanon,” Barak warned in a recent online seminar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an American think tank. Barak was referring to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the American invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. All three were provoked by terrorist acts. All three were marked at the beginning by great military successes. And all three turned into serious political defeats.
“The Israelis are in the same state as us right after 9/11,” says Kenneth Pollack of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “We were very angry and scared. We focused primarily on destroying anyone who threatened us, without paying the slightest attention to what would come next.”
America’s “global war on terror” began triumphantly. Just two months after al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States in September 2001, US-led forces controlled Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. The Taliban government had disappeared. Al Qaeda was beleaguered. Its boss, Osama bin Laden, was located in Pakistan and killed in 2011. But the Taliban was fighting a growing insurgency. Having lost more than 2,400 military personnel, the United States left the country in 2021. The Afghan government collapsed almost immediately and the Taliban returned to power.
The Iraq war was also inglorious, and much bloodier. There again, American forces quickly took the capital, Baghdad, in April 2003. President George W. Bush strutted on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln under the banner: “Mission Accomplished.” In reality, Iraq was on the brink of civil war. American forces captured dictator Saddam Hussein, but soon faced bloody insurgencies by Sunni and Shiite militias. U.S. forces withdrew in 2011, although they returned in smaller numbers in 2014 to help defeat the Islamic State after it captured swaths of Iraq and Syria (see chart). The United States lost a total of about 4,500 military personnel, not to mention the 300,000 Iraqis who died, most of them civilians.
For Hussein Ibish of the Arab Gulf States Institute, a center based in Washington, D.C., the lessons are clear. Terrorist and insurgent groups, he maintains, resort to spectacular violence to provoke an irrational response: “They know that the damage they can cause to the dominant power is limited. And they understand that the damage that the dominant power can do to itself is infinitely greater.”
Israel’s own history offers similar warnings. In June 1982, during a tense ceasefire in artillery exchanges along Israel’s northern border and amid another series of attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Palestinian umbrella group, Gunmen shot and wounded the Israeli ambassador in London. The Israeli government considered the attack a casus belli and took the opportunity to invade Lebanon and dismantle the PLO, even though the attack was attributed to its rival, the Abu Nidal group. Israeli forces laid siege to the PLO in West Beirut and forced Yasser Arafat and thousands of fighters into exile. Bashir Gemayel, a Christian ally of Israel, was elected president of Lebanon.
And then everything fell apart. Gemayel was killed in a bomb attack. Before the eyes of Israeli forces, his Phalangist militias took revenge by killing Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. An Israeli commission of inquiry found Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Defense Minister, indirectly responsible for the massacre, after which he was dismissed. A year later, under pressure from anti-war protests, Prime Minister Menachem Begin announced his resignation.
One consequence of the Lebanese hornet’s nest was the replacement of the PLO by Hezbollah, a more formidable Shiite militia that managed to expel Israel from Lebanon in 2000. There was another repercussion for the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The first intifada (“shakeout”), the “stone war” that began in 1987, set the stage for the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO of 1993. Arafat triumphantly returned to Gaza the following year.
Hamas then appeared as the main force of violent rejection of the agreements and strove to destroy them by copying Hezbollah’s suicidal tactics. He forced Israel out of Gaza in 2005 and won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006. The following year, he expelled the Palestinian Authority (PA), the administration created by the PLO. Without Arafat (who died in 2004), locked into patches of autonomous territory in the West Bank and unable to move toward statehood through negotiation, the PA soon fell into disrepute and sank into autocracy and corruption.
Since 2006, Israel’s wars have been based on punishment and deterrence; and they have sought not so much to destroy their enemies as to make them pay such a high price that it would serve as a deterrent to those who, like Hamas and Hezbollah, wanted to attack Israel.
Now, deterrence is not easy to measure. In the case of Hezbollah, it has more or less persisted since the last major war in Lebanon, triggered in 2006 by a cross-border raid in which Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers. The fighting caused widespread destruction, especially in Dahie, a Shiite neighborhood in Beirut. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah later admitted that he would not have ordered the raid if he had known Israel’s reaction would be so severe.
In Gaza, however, the periods of calm have been shorter. Israel has engaged in what some call “mowing the grass,” that is, periodically hitting Hamas to weaken it. In response to its rocket fire, Israeli forces have relied primarily on retaliatory bombing and protection of its Iron Dome air defense system. In Gaza, ground units have only entered reluctantly.
Deterrence continues until it suddenly stops. Hamas’s bloodlust on October 7 was “perhaps the cruelest action in 100 years of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians,” Ibish notes. However, Israel is falling into the Hamas “trap” in the ferocity of its punishment. The fighting will shift Israel’s international sympathy towards the Palestinians, allow Hamas to claim leadership of the Palestinian cause and destroy the prospects for a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Ibish says.
Israel is in no mood for moderation. Let’s forget about mowing the grass, what he wants is excision. However, this eradication creates a new problem. “If you want to eliminate Hamas, we are talking about a political issue, not a military one,” says Lawrence Freedman, of King’s College London. “Something has to be established or else Hamas will come back.”
The Israelis in Lebanon in 1982, like the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001, had allies on the ground and also, however flawed, some semblance of plans for the future. Today, in Gaza, Israel acts alone. The PA is weak and can in no way afford to be perceived as returning to Gaza on Israeli tanks. For the most part, Arab governments have little sympathy for Hamas, but also little courage to be seen conspiring with Israel against it.
“I don’t care what happens next,” says Eitan Shamir, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. “Whatever it is, start by destroying Hamas.” The Allies went to war against the Nazis and only later came up with a plan to run postwar Germany, he notes. In his view, the misfortunes of the United States and Israel began when they began to meddle in local politics instead of quickly leaving. Furthermore, the US experience has little relevance to Israel, Shamir says. The United States participated in some expeditionary wars and was able to order the troops to return home: “The case of Israel is completely different. We fight for our homes. “We have no other option.”
For the large number of Israelis who, like Shamir, think that peace is unattainable in the near future, the only option is to continue hitting enemies hard until they disappear or change. If the current war gives Israel a few years of tranquility, they believe, that will be enough.
However, Israel does not have a free hand. International law and sometimes national public opinion limit the harshness of their response. It counts on the West, and especially the United States, to defend itself from international pressure, but that support is not unlimited. The United States’ promise to “cover Israel’s back” risks making that country complicit in Israeli actions to the detriment of its interests in the region and elsewhere. To take one example: Arab commentators are already drawing comparisons between America’s denunciations of Russian atrocities in Ukraine and its leniency over the Israeli bombing of Gaza.
These concerns explain why Secretary of State Antony Blinken has dedicated himself to touring the Middle East trying to achieve the opening of a humanitarian corridor that allows the entry of vital supplies into Gaza and the departure of at least some people to Egypt. Now, for now, Blinken’s thinking about a post-Hamas world is nourished above all by clichés: “a region that is united, integrated, normalized relations between its countries, people working with a common purpose for common benefit.”
The solution will not be easy. All the more reason to think about her now. Jay Garner, the US general in charge of establishing the new administration in Iraq in 2003, complained that George Marshall, head of the US army during the Second World War, had had more than two years to plan for post-Hitler Germany; He, on the other hand, was only given a few months to prepare for post-Saddam Iraq. Israel and the world may have even less time to prepare for what comes after Hamas in Gaza.
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Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
