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Maybe I misunderstood who you had in mind as “foreign policy intelligentsia.”
I think if you asked the average pro-Palestine demonstrator if there should be a ceasefire, they’d say yes. Even though it doesn’t pretend to be a lasting solution, a lot of the messaging is about how Gazans are dying now, and stopping that is a core goal.
I think organizers and theorists would say something similar. The Rorschach option isn’t mainstream.
Yup. I'm not talking about a ceasefire, which is the only moral choice when Israel as much as admits it has no realistic plan to achieve anything in particular.
If this is a punitive expedition fine, they've achieved your proportional punishment. Thousands more Gazans have been killed, and some number gang raped in prison it seems.
But this nonsense of permanent security isn't a real goal. I would intellectually respect our foreign policy apparatus and Israel's government more if they were frank genocidaires honest about their plans. As it is they are engaged in an orgy of violence with no realistic goal.
I’m not seeing where the demand for permanent security has torpedoed a more realistic plan. We’ve been facilitating awkward, partial solutions since the beginning.
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Except that this isn't true. Retrieve as many hostages as possible, neutralize Hamas, work out a some arrangement where Gaza is less of a threat than it was before (most likely involving other nations, or just leaving Gaza disunited enough that Hamas or another similar organisation can't completely militarise it again). Any or all of those things might be (very) difficult, but that's quite a different thing from what you said.
None of these goals are realistic, or at least they aren't working towards them in any meaningful way. I agree with Trump, and anyway the deaths of 100,000 to rescue a few hundred is so desperately out of proportion it has lost all sense. At this point Israel has bombed and marched across all of Gaza multiple times, if they haven't neutralized Hamas yet color me skeptical that the next 100,000 corpses will solve the problem. And working out a plan for a future government of Gaza was a good idea to work out before the war, as Israel was repeatedly urged to do by the international community, not after. Israel is strategically flailing, despite their infinite ability to tactically dominate.
I don't know, Hamas have lost huge numbers of soldiers, commanders, vital parts of their infrastructure and ability to smuggle weapons. Some sources suggest they've basically stopped firing rockets into Israel, even after Haniyeh's killing. That all seems pretty meaningful.
The central thesis of the article you mentioned - that Hamas are undercounting the number of dead Gazans by a factor of anywhere between 2 to 4, seems wildly unrealistic, especially given that Hamas' main strategy is to use negative propaganda to bring international condemnation and pressure on Israel.
Talk of proportionality is also meaningless - nations generally speaking don't respond to wars of aggression by seeking to inflict the exact same damages that were inflicted on them. I've never heard anyone argue that the correct response to Pearl Harbour was for the US to kill an equal number of Japanese soldiers and civilians, then go home.
I'm not sure why you're so skeptical, they seem to be making solid progress. This sounds a bit like like saying if the D-Day landings didn't completely neutralize Germany then there's little reason for anyone to have thought further fighting would achieve anything.
It sure helps to know exactly what to aim for, but you can come up with plans during the war and after. And pretty much any outcome is better for Israel than what was there before.
You've seemed to be a generally smart guy and good poster, so don't take this personally, but this is why I stopped reading books or watching movies about WWII for seven years. WWII is the source of all our war metaphors, and that narrows our imagination.
That said, these particular comparisons are inapposite. At no point in either the European or Pacific theaters were the Americans or Russians flailing about randomly. Throughout the process, they had specific aims and plans they were working towards. Their intention was to occupy Germany and Japan, and institute by force a government which they would sustain by force for however long it took for those nations to be trustworthy self-governing members of the international community again. Importantly, the Allies understood that after victory, after surrender, they would take on responsibility for Japanese and German (and other national) civilian populations. They would take on responsibility for the administration of the territory, the provision of necessary goods, and the healing of the harms of the war. At no point was this in doubt. The Battle of the Bulge, won or lost, wouldn't have changed the intended outcome of the war for the Allies.
Israel has no intention of occupying Gaza and providing administration or aid to the population. They have no plan to institute a government, nor even a publicly stated outline of what an acceptable government would look like. A Hamas Rudolf Hess or a Gazan Donitz are unimaginable, because it's not clear how a Palestinian could obtain a position to offer an unconditional surrender, or under what terms Gazans could organize to achieve any kind of self governance. We need a Gazan Konrad Adenauer, but I don't see a path to finding one.
All this is complicated by the structure of Gazan vs German/Japanese society, and I'm not unsympathetic to the plight facing the Israelis. If they wanted to invest their resources in occupying Gaza, in forcing families apart and educating Gazan children in government-run schools which would inculcate new values, I might not support it but I would respect it. But as of now, they aren't doing that. Their win conditions are something like Gazans stop hating us, unlikely to be advanced by their current strategy, or all the Gazans are dead, which they will presumably reach eventually though I doubt they've made significant progress towards extinction during the current war.
Much appreciated (and you).
They definitely had plans, but I'm sure those plans were secondary to their prime objective (military victory). We'll never know, but I can't imagine that the allies would have stopped the war effort if for any reason they couldn't agree on what to do with Germany and Japan once they'd surrendered. Forcing surrender was the ultimate goal.
Maybe our disagreement is just semantic in nature (and I might have misunderstood some deliberate hyperbole), but I wouldn't equate Israel not wanting to administer Gaza as "random flailing". Their campaign definitely hasn't followed a straight line from A to B, which they bear a certain amount of responsibility for, but they've made strategic advances.
I don't agree with this. I think their win condition is that Hamas is largely neutralized (probably defined as breaking their organisational structure too much to be able to maintain truly operational as a coherent military entity) and that Israel control the main points that can be used to smuggle weapons back into Gaza, such as the Philadelphi corridor. At that point I imagine they'll leave Gazans to their own devices, conducting occasional raids like they do in the West Bank to stop any terrorist group that looks like it's building up too much power.
I don't see how anything beyond this, such as taking a more active hand in administering the region, is feasible. Even if we assume that Israel has the money and manpower to try and nation-build, it would be a diplomatic impossibility. Israel hasn't been in Gaza since the mid 2000s, and most of the world still thinks/acts as though Gaza has been under oppressive occupation for the last several decades. Imagine what would happen to their global reputation under an actual occupation. There would be constant protests or acts of rebellion and it's not hard to imagine how the international media/NGO complex would cover even the gentlest attempts to maintain order. So they would be forced to leave, at best putting Israel back where they were once the war had ended, at worst leaving Gaza with much of its infrastructure rebuilt and ready for use as military infrastructure by Hamas or a new terrorist group.
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