naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #3
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
This is interesting, and I don't disagree for some of the broadest tactical (ground war in urban combat sucks) or political (Hamas had as goals to undermine Israeli normalization and for the economics of terrorism) components, but :
I'll accept the joke about borders and despotism like a libertarian should, but as a matter of law and policy there's actually a lot of restrictions on exit or export from most modern countries. It's technically illegal to leave the United States as a citizen without a passport, there's a biometrics scan that's required for air travel and keeps getting floated for sea and land, and if you don't do all the paperwork for a serious export you'll risk getting pulled over by anything from a cop car to a literal Blackhawk depending on situation.
"Starve the Garrison" works only as a pre-modern tactic: in the modern era, any anti-Israeli forces that embeds with civilians will receive humanitarian aid before any serious literal starvation, and most of these groups have turned smuggling arms and material with aid shipments into an art form. That doesn't mean the IDF is too smart to try it (motions at Netanyahu), but it means you really need to consider other possible plans. Given other constraints (the available manpower you mention, that longer-lasting land grabs will jeopardize the Abraham Accord normalization that was the longer-term political target for the October 7th attacks, so on), I think it's more likely that the efforts in your 'gap' are going to be followed by a bombing and ground rapid strike campaign.
Looking at the West Bank from a country-level map gives a pretty misleading understanding of what's going on there. The real map looks more like this -- the clusterfuckery with Area C is one of the more sympathetic issues for Palestinians, but it also means there's a lot of IDF military infrastructure in the West Bank. Controlling the border with Jordan doesn't become perfect in that situation, but it does remain something that can be plausibly attempted.
I think you're underestimating how hard tunnel work is, and how readily it can be disrupted, and overestimating capacity. The tunnel under the falls at Niagra was excavated with dynamite, to go less than a half-mile.
A lot of the countries around Israel have the same problem: "better inside pissing out than outside pissing in". This is most overt for Saudis and the Houthis what with the religious stuff, but Egypt, Jordan, and Libya are all extremely aware that the Palestinian movement does not consider them just rulers or serious combatants. If Israel disappeared tomorrow, very few of those armed combatants would pick up a plow. To the extent Iran might reduce support, but Iran doesn't really like a lot of these other countries either, even if Iran hates them less than Israel.
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Notes -
This is interesting, and I don't disagree for some of the broadest tactical (ground war in urban combat sucks) or political (Hamas had as goals to undermine Israeli normalization and for the economics of terrorism) components, but :
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