(Dobbs) Are Israel's Tactics Less Defensible Than Its Goals?

If Israel isn't winning, it is losing.

It was easy at the beginning to defend Israel. It’s not as easy anymore.

The facts of what happened on October 7th haven’t changed. Hamas attacked. It was barbaric. Murders, kidnappings, torture, rapes. There was perversion of the worst kind, and since that darkest of days, we have learned more to corroborate the crimes of the terrorists. I wrote just a week after the attack: “Hamas is no longer a nasty bug to swat. It is a murderous serpent to extinguish.” A week ago in The Wall Street Journal, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, put it more diplomatically: “Israel had not just the right to respond but the necessity: to show that Hamas would pay a high price for its savagery, to keep the perpetrators from killing again.”

That was, and still is, Israel’s goal. On the very night of October 7th, Prime Minister Netanyahu went on television and set the stage for what he felt Israel must do: “We will turn all the places that Hamas hides in and operates from into rubble.” But he also told his citizens, it would come with unbearable costs: “We will win but the price will be heavy.”

Those costs are what I wrote about one week later: “They cannot kill Hamas without killing a lot of innocent Palestinians in the process. Whether from air assaults or an invasion, the misery inevitably will mushroom, and it will spread far beyond the militants who started this war.” 

That is what has happened, and as Washington Post foreign affairs columnist Ishaan Tharoor said, “What makes this calamity all the more stunning is that it’s entirely the product of human decisions.” Human decisions on both sides of the conflict. Which leads to two questions: did the war have to unfold the way it did? And, given the heavy price Netanyahu forewarned, is Israel winning?

The terrorists still must be extinguished, but what has changed is— although the war is far from over— it’s not looking like Israel can finish the job. So far at least, they can’t even get all their hostages back. As geopolitical forecaster George Friedman put it last week, “A decisive battle is hard to imagine.” Hamas has been badly hurt— command centers have been demolished, weapons have been seized, tunnels have been collapsed, fighters have been put on the run, leaders have been killed. By Israel’s own estimate, it has taken out more than 13,000 of the roughly 30,000 armed terrorists of Hamas. But what that means is, most of Hamas is still alive, so the murderous serpent is still breathing. And Israel’s continuing campaign to squash it has become not just calamitous for Gaza’s civilian population, but with the appalling yet unremitting reports of Palestinian children dead and starving, counterproductive for Israel itself. To its credit, Israel has helped enable aid to suffering civilians but, to its discredit, it hasn’t been on nearly the scale that’s required.

Israel still has its champions, those who haven’t forgotten what started this war, and those who don’t believe there is any other way for Israel to reach its ultimate goal to exterminate Hamas. After the Jewish director of a film about the Holocaust, “The Zone of Interest,” used his acceptance speech for an award at the Oscars to criticize Israel for “dehumanizing” Palestinians just as the Nazis dehumanized Jews, several hundred Jewish members of the movie industry signed a letter refuting his criticism, arguing there is no “moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”

But still, as Richard Haass also wrote, “Recent months have seen perceptions of Israel turn sharply negative around the world. A March Gallup poll found that 58% of respondents in the U.S. hold a very or mostly favorable view of Israel, 10% below this time last year and the lowest it has been in 20 years. Worse, the U.S. is now the only developed country with a net favorable rating of Israel.”

That makes Israel not the winner, but the loser.

When its long-sought alliances with Arab states are put on indefinite hold, Israel is the loser. When some long-time allies rebuke its retaliatory attacks in Gaza, Israel is the loser. When the foreign policy chief of the European Union says Israel is using “starvation as a weapon of war,” Israel is the loser. When the leader of the United Nations calls conditions in Gaza “a moral outrage,” Israel is the loser. When the president of the United States— far and away the most crucial friend Israel has— argues that its military response is “over the top,” Israel is the loser. “A lot of innocent people are starving,” Biden said last month. “A lot of innocent people are in trouble and they’re dying and it’s got to stop.”

But it hasn’t. Israel still is determined to wipe Hamas off the face of the map. As Bar-Ilan University professor Eytan Gilboa told the Associated Press from Tel Aviv, “Is there anyone of sound mind here who is willing to leave Hamas in Gaza? That won’t happen.” And in an essay last week called “What Would You Have Israel Do to Defend Itself?”, New York Times columnist David Brooks doesn’t think it should. “Victorious, Hamas would dominate whatever government was formed to govern Gaza. Hamas would rebuild its military to continue its efforts to exterminate the Jewish state.” 

Where does that leave Israel? Increasingly condemned, increasingly alone. And increasingly doomed for the future. Every Palestinian child in Gaza who has lost a daily meal, or lost a home, or lost a limb, or lost someone he or she loved, is ripe for recruitment for the Hamas of tomorrow, whatever form that might take. As Brooks also wrote, “Israeli tactics may be reducing Gaza to an ungovernable hellscape that will require further Israeli occupation and produce more terrorist groups for years.”

You can throw in Palestinians on the West Bank where ultra-right Jewish settlers have sometimes been let loose to torment local citizens and where, for security reasons, Israel has clamped down and put more people out of work and out of income. Just last week, in the name of what it considers its biblical right to the land, the Israeli government seized about four more square miles of Palestinian-controlled territory east of Jerusalem. It will build more Jewish settlements. Amidst all the tension right now, no matter who is actually entitled to the land, it’s a downright provocative move. So West Bank Palestinians too feel increasingly oppressed.

Unless every Palestinian is run out of the region, and that won’t happen, some analysts see a future Israeli neighbor— whether it’s independent or occupied— that’s called neither the West Bank nor Gaza, but Hamastan. 

That— which also implies continuing influence in the region by Iran because if Hamas lives, Iran lives with it— would be Israel’s worst nightmare. It would be a breeding ground for people impoverished or displaced or oppressed, whether by government, by hunger, or by war. Those are the people terrorist groups look for. They put food on their tables and a roof over their heads. They become a proxy for family. They give them community. They give them power. Sometimes terrorists are ideological fanatics, but sometimes they’re just people with a grievance, people who need a meal and a job.

Gaza right now is flush with people like that, young and old. That’s why, in any future configuration of Palestinians living side-by-side with the Jewish state, Israel likely is the loser. 

Richard Haass from the Council on Foreign Relations concluded in the Journal, “As events have proved, it was never realistic for Israel to achieve its stated goal of eradicating Hamas. Many of the group’s members will survive, and elements of its dogma will persist and even spread.”

So how does the war end? As Rand Corporation analyst Raphael Cohen wrote a month ago in Foreign Policy, “If the international community wants Israel to change strategies in Gaza, then it should offer a viable alternative strategy to Israel’s announced goal of destroying Hamas in the strip. And right now, that alternate strategy simply does not exist.” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens argues more bluntly, “The best way to get Hamas to stop fighting is to beat it." That’s accurate, but also just theoretical. It seems increasingly clear that President Biden was right when he told Netanyahu that he needs “a coherent and substantial strategy” to beat Hamas. But it also must be a strategy that relieves the suffering of the innocent, not aggravates it. None of us can turn our eyes away from that because all of us have to wonder, did the war have to unfold the way it did?

Israel has always done what it felt it needed to do to survive, sometimes in the face of global condemnation. But right now, in the bigger scheme of things, its survival strategy doesn’t look like it’s working. After so many “collateral” deaths and whole neighborhoods of homes and businesses reduced to rubble, are its tactics less defensible than its goals?

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.