Haviv Rettig Gur:
Israel’s Winning One War While It Loses Another
Hamas’s fundamental plan
for survival is Gaza’s humanitarian suffering. It’s the catalyst for
international pressure on Israel. And it’s working.
Israel is fighting three
wars in Gaza: a ground war, a humanitarian aid war, and an information war.
They are all inextricably intertwined—and nothing has made that clearer than
the global outcry over the question of hunger.
As mounting evidence
emerges of widespread hunger in Gaza, Israel has allowed daily pauses in
fighting to permit it to distribute a surge in humanitarian aid. Meanwhile,
blame for the crisis has been cast upon Israel, who so far has offered almost
no explanation or clarity on what went wrong. Politics has muddled policy and
prevented both the development and publicity of a serious plan.
How is it that a
leadership that demonstrated astonishing competence in the 12-day war with Iran
has stumbled this badly to explain and execute any coherent strategy in Gaza?
The Ground War
The Israel Defense Forces now control about 75 percent of the Gaza Strip. Pockets of guerrilla resistance persist in some places. Further
expansion efforts by the IDF are limited, because there’s nowhere left to send
civilians where they’ll be out of harm’s way. Which means, among other things,
that there’s nowhere to advance without losing hostages.
On the question of the
ground war, Israel has basically “won” in that Hamas has been crippled, and
Israel controls the vast majority of territory. It has also won in another
sense—perhaps a more important one—which is the simple fact that Gaza has no
future with Hamas in charge. This was even recognized by the Arab League this
week, which for the first time demanded that Hamas disarm and surrender Gaza.
Hamas’s patron, Qatar, was part of that decision.
And yet, the war
persists. Why?
How is it that a
leadership that demonstrated astonishing competence in the 12-day war with Iran
has stumbled this badly to explain and execute any coherent strategy in Gaza?
First of all, because
Hamas won’t admit that it has lost. There are still 50 hostages, dead and
alive, in Hamas’s hands. Whether you like Israel or not, it’s a fair question
to ask what it will take to get Hamas to surrender, or rather, what is it even
fighting for anymore? Hamas now stands in the way of Gaza’s rebuilding, and
holding out in Gaza sustains what support there is among Israelis for the
continuation of the war.
But it’s fair to ask the
question of the Israeli side as well. Many Israelis—a majority of them—have
been telling us for months that Israeli leaders are unwilling to end the war
because they want to maintain political power.
And so the ground war,
largely successful in straightforward battlefield terms but with no political
end in sight, grinds on. And Israel, increasingly feeling the pressure, both
international and domestic, to reach an end, has been looking for months for
new ways to pressure Hamas.
That brings me to the
second war.
The Humanitarian Aid War
“Humanitarian aid war”
is a strange way to put it, but hear me out. Hamas’s fundamental plan for
survival—their main strategic weapon against Israel—is Gaza’s humanitarian
suffering. It’s the catalyst for international pressure on Israel that Hamas
argues will yet be its salvation.
During the ceasefire from January to March, Israel sent
in hundreds of thousands of tons of aid—enough
by World Food Programme estimates to feed Gazans for almost six months.
Then, beginning in March, Israel stopped sending aid. This wasn’t cruelty; it was a calculated
risk meant to destabilize Hamas and force it into concessions on releasing
hostages.
And it was, at its core,
a show. It was an attempt to play a game of chicken with Hamas. Aid would
depend on hostage releases—while Israel knew all the while that there were many
months of food still available in Gaza.
But the food ran out
faster than expected. Experts aren’t exactly sure why. Hamas was undoubtedly
stockpiling—footage has emerged of plentiful food in Hamas’s tunnels. Many
civilians were stockpiling, too, which is a highly rational response to their
situation that should have been part of any calculation of aid needs.
The bottom line: Food
prices started to rise, and reports of scarcity in various areas began to
filter out of the Strip.
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Read |
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Matti Friedman: Is Gaza Starving? Searching for the
Truth in an Information War. |
Loath to allow Hamas to regain control of aid and fund
its war effort but faced with real looming hunger, Israel resumed the entry of
aid in May via the mechanism of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which Israel and the U.S. set up in February. This organization was
meant to deliver aid without allowing Hamas to gain control of it.
Long story short, this
effort has now comprehensively failed.
UN numbers still show
that there is enough food in Gaza in terms of overall quantity. But those
numbers tell us nothing about hunger, because that food is not distributed
evenly according to needs. Everyone who can has stockpiled everything they
can—wouldn’t you?—and a great many Gazans have gone hungry. Not in small
pockets in some places, which is what the Israeli government is saying, but
sustainedly and widespread.
Don’t look at the quantity metrics. Look at the prices of flour and sugar in Gaza. They’re soaring. Food was going in, but it wasn’t getting
to the people. The Israeli government did not understand that. It now does.
There’s a lot to say
about this situation. Enough people have raised the alarm on moral and
civilian-suffering grounds, including in The Free Press, that we
don’t have to address it here. But it also represents a dramatic strategic
mistake on the part of Israel. The whole concept of the strategy to use aid as
pressure on Hamas was flawed at its very core. Why would Hamas blink first? Has
the Israeli government met Hamas? Why did they think this was going to work
with a group whose foundational strategy is Gaza’s destruction?
The whole concept of the
strategy to use aid as pressure on Hamas was flawed at its very core. Why would
Hamas blink first? Has the Israeli government met Hamas?
Now, global attention on the humanitarian crisis has
crashed down on Israel, allowing Hamas to secure daily pauses in fighting. This is something they only ever achieved in the past for hostage
releases. This was a military setback. And at no point did Israel respond to
the narrative—much less control it.
Israel has largely
succeeded in the ground war. But it has utterly failed in the humanitarian war,
in understanding the role of humanitarian aid in the strategy of the enemy.
The only place it has
fared worse is in the information war. In that arena, it has failed so
miserably that Hamas has been propped up at every turn, its resilience assured,
and all Israel’s gains in the battlefield jeopardized.
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The Information War
British prime minister Keir Starmer is among the leaders who announced they planned to recognize a state of Palestine at the
UN General Assembly in September. Each announcement was different, but none
were as ham-fisted and incompetently handled as Starmer’s. If there wasn’t a
ceasefire by the time of the UNGA in September, Starmer said, he’d carry out
the recognition.
How dumb is that?
Consider: If Hamas holds
out and refuses a ceasefire, it will get a Palestinian state recognition from
the United Kingdom. If it agrees to a ceasefire, it won’t get that recognition.
In other words, the
British prime minister just incentivized Hamas to continue the war.
What is motivating these
politicians to offer Hamas so great a political PR victory even as it refuses
to let Gaza out of its clutches?
There are many answers
to this question, not the least of them the domestic politics in each country.
But there’s one that Israelis must also understand.
When officials from these countries are asked about the rationale for
recognition, one often hears the same thing: “We think the war against Hamas is
legitimate. But it seems like fighting Hamas isn’t what the war is about.” They
point to far-right Israeli ministers who have consistently argued that the war should end with the mass removal of Gazans from Gaza.
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This makes Israel’s
every decision in Gaza suspect.
Israelis often shrug off the global disinformation campaign that paints them as the great villains of history, the victims of
genocide who have themselves become genocidaires. (Read The Free Press’s editorial on the disinformation war here.)
But it isn’t Israel’s
most virulent enemies who feel betrayed by its incoherence, by its inability to
articulate the endgame of this war. It’s Israel’s friends. I’ve heard from
journalists, pundits, even members of Congress—who all support Israel and believe
in its fundamental decency—that they have been unable to get any meaningful
answers from Israeli officials.
This absence of Israel
from the information space has been Hamas’s most important advantage in this
war.
Case in point: A top UN official said on the BBC in May that 14,000 Gazan babies were going to die in 48 hours. The real
story was that 14,000 cases of malnutrition might occur among Gazan children
within the next year if nothing changed—uttered even as aid
had resumed. But many of the outlets that ran the story didn’t have an obvious
address in the Israeli government to turn to.
Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu literally does not have a clearly identified English language
spokesperson. No one in the Israeli state apparatus tracks claims about the
country or the war and responds, handles damage control, or manages the
narrative and coordinates the message—the sorts of activities that every
political campaign understands is the bread and butter of a winning strategy.
It isn’t Israel’s most
virulent enemies who feel betrayed by its incoherence, by its inability to
articulate the endgame of this war. It’s Israel’s friends.
The Israelis have no
communication effort underway of any sort.
If circumventing Hamas
via the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is unachievable
at the scale required to prevent hunger in Gaza, what now? When do Israeli
leaders either sit down and come up with a serious strategy or convey that serious
long-hidden strategy to a world that has increasingly grown convinced the
strategy is a nefarious one? When do the Israelis understand the costs of
complete failure in the information war?
What Now?
We failed to understand
our enemy on October 7. Israel believed Hamas was deterred. It was not.
Since then, Israel has
continued to fail to understand the enemy. It tried to play a game of chicken
with humanitarian aid. It blinked first.
Obviously.
How could it have been
otherwise?
Which Israeli strategist
was dumb enough ever to think that Israel’s threshold of tolerance for Gazan
suffering was higher than Hamas’s?
And finally, we failed
to understand that when Israel does not speak to the world while people die,
Hamas is strengthened.
Israel cannot lose this
war. It can lose this round, of course. But as long as Hamas remains in Gaza,
there will inevitably be another round. Hamas has done nothing for the 38 years
of its existence except wage never-ending war on Israel’s existence. It bombed
every peace process; it doesn’t want a peace in which Israel isn’t destroyed.
And it is willing to burn Gaza to the ground as a sacrifice on the altar of
Israel’s destruction. Or in other words, both peoples will be stuck in this
war—a ceasefire may be attainable, but it would be a temporary respite
only—until Israeli leaders begin to understand the sort of war they are
fighting and get competent about fighting it.
Bibi, get the aid in
fast. Keep it coming consistently. Anything less is a game of chicken that
Hamas will win. And for God’s sake, take on the information war. You don’t have
to “win” it. But you also don’t have to lose it quite so comprehensively. Too many
soldiers have died, hostages have languished too long, too many Gazans have
died, and too many families have sacrificed, for you to do anything less.
