Gaza is Netanyahu's Afghanistan
Clueless about victory. No plan for a plausible post-war administration
Politicians are sociopaths, not thinkers. They are fixated on the seizing, maintaining, and exercising power for its own sake. There is no purpose higher than narcissism.
Take Prime Minister Netanyahu’s merciless genocide in Gaza. The goal is to awaken jingoism and frighten Israeli voters or the Knesset from changing horses in midstream.
He declares his military objective is the destruction of Hamas. But he proffers no metric for determining whether destruction has arrived. Hamas members do not advertise themselves. And military body counts are notoriously unreliable as the Vietnam War confirms. “A Better War” by Lewis Sorley reports, “Body count may have been the most corrupt—and corrupting—measure of progress in the whole mess…A survey found 61% or officers believed that the body count was often inflated. Typical comments by the respondents were that it was ‘a fake—totally worthless,’ that ‘the immensity of the false reporting is a blot on the honor of the Army,’ and that they were grossly exaggerated by many units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like McNamara (DOD) and Westmoreland (General).”
Netanyahu is an echo of U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke to Afghanistan when asked to define post-9/11 victory, “I would say this in defining success in Afghanistan…We’ll know it when we see it,” borrowing from Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964).
Depend upon it. Israeli will be entangled in Gaza for decades or more like the United States in Afghanistan for 20 years to bring back a second edition of the Taliban more brutish than the first. There is no plausible post-war solution that would involve any semblance of a Palestinian or United Nations administration. Any Palestinian who provided any assurance against a repeat of October 7 would be assassinated as a traitor. Israel would never permit a United Nations presence after its experience in 1967 when the United Nations withdrew the United Nations Emergency Force from Gaza at the command of Egypt’s belligerent President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Israel’s rule in Gaza will be like Great Britain’s rule over Palestinian under a League of Nations mandate after World War I. British forces were sporadically attacked. Terrorism flourished. The King David Hotel was blown up Jewish terrorists killing 91. The British finally left in despair in 1948 tacitly accepting defeat.
Israel will attempt to remain in control of Gaza forever because yielding anything to Palestinian self-determination would be execrated by Israelis as at least a partial victory by the Hamas October 7th murderous attackers. Peace plans will be proposed as regularly as the rising and setting of the sun and all will be DOA. We see the same phenomenon in Ukraine since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Unearthbound hopes blind the species to reality.
There is nothing in the stars or international law or history that mandates an end to every war. Indeed, the human species has been engaged in warfare from the beginning of time but for intermissions of varying brevity.
Israel is faithfully following the French Bourbon monarchs before the French Revolution: they forgot nothing, and learned nothing.