The Gaza Squid Games

Israel wants to kill Hamas while Hamas wants Israel to kill Palestinian civilians

Daily headlines from the Israel-Hamas War are as predictable as they remain shocking. Today we read how Hamas is allegedly launching rockets into Israel from designated civilian “safe zones,” while the IDF is stating such actions automatically make these locations legitimate targets.

Of course Hamas is using their own civilians as “human shields” — a term that no longer has meaning since they’re not being used as protection, but as a way to further degradate global public opinion about Israel through their deaths. And of course the IDF is killing them, anyway, because Israel is hellbent on wreaking revenge for October 7th and “destroying Hamas”.

The goal of Operation Al Aqsa Storm was to trigger Israel into bombing and invading Gaza with a relentlessness sufficient to stoke global anti-Israel/anti-US and antisemitic fervor, and derail the Israel-Saudi security deal. For bonus points, Hamas also hoped to in turn trigger Hezbollah to attack from Lebanon, and the West Bank to erupt in total chaos.

Thanks to Biden sailing two carrier groups into the region, and Xi from China likely giving the Iranian mullahs a call that Beijing didn’t want its supply of oil disrupted with a major Middle East conflict, the war has not spread. But the region remains red hot, and Gaza has descended into a full blown humanitarian crisis, with 16,000 dead Palestinians and counting.

Meanwhile, TikTok feeds throughout the world continue to stream with ghastly visuals of crushed and dismembered Palestinian children, as most nations aside from the US condemn Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza. Despite relatively rapid advances and encirclements on the ground, Hamas is definitively winning the information war throughout the planet.

The US/Israeli strategic rift is noteworthy, and begs the question of Israel having “no choice” in how it mounts such a brutal campaign. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was right when he recently said: “The center of gravity is the civilian population, and if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

In other words, it behooves Israel to understand that a military “victory” pales in comparison to losing the information war against their enemies. The legacy Israeli attitude that “everyone hates us anyway” must succumb to the realization that they are more vulnerable than ever before, even in America, where monolithic political support is starting to crumble.

Nothing captures that better than the splintering of the Democrats, with consequences that will reverberate into the 2024 elections and beyond. Hamas knows this, and from the beginning has exploited Palestinian underdog appeal to woo millions of global advocates, ironically including leftists who would be the first to suffer under any kind of Hamas’ rule.

Consider the population of Muslim and pro-Palestinian supporters throughout the swing states, more than enough to get Trump re-elected. These demographics clash with larger blue states having most of the Jewish and Israel-friendly voters, whose votes are less decisive for a Presidential election. Enraged battleground liberals could very well tank Biden.

Given all this, what should Israel do? For starters, not take Hamas’ bait. After all, a basic tenet of military strategy is to not do what your enemy intends you to do. Instead, Israel should refortify its borders, clean up its own internal problems, and acknowledge that negotiating with the Palestinians is long overdue, necessary, and inevitable for survival.

Along the way, yes, the IDF needs to remove Hamas from power. But such an operation must be conducted more slowly, methodically, and humanely. The US has already established similar precedents in Fallujah and Mosul, where they spent months prepping the urban battlefield by removing civilians from harm’s way and providing relief wherever needed.

The IDF should be able to hold two ideas in its strategic head at the same time: 1) Eliminate Hamas, and 2) Do so without this level of civilian death and suffering. But as was easily foreseen, immediately after the ceasefire Israel has doubled down on its relentless and callous assault on all of Gaza, apparently learning nothing from the first phase of the invasion.

Netanyahu himself exacerbates this entire catastrophe, whose personal and political survival hinges on a continued state of emergency. After using Hamas against the Palestinian Authority to preclude a Two-State Solution, and diverting force strength from the Gaza border to protect illegal West Bank settlements, he ignored his own intelligence service attack warnings.

Will the US, knowing that Israel’s excesses have already whiplashed politically at home, put sufficient pressure on Israel for them to change their strategy? The Biden administration is walking a fine line between private and public dissent, and the realization that if truly pressed, Israel will just go ahead and do whatever it wants without the US having any say.

As the IDF continues to close in on Hamas in the South of Gaza after laying siege in the North, signs of a protracted and brutal urban guerrilla war are already evident. Militants are assimilating into the tightly packed, displaced civilian population, so that when Israel finally declares their “destruction” of Hamas, chaos will likely reign for months if not years.

The ultimate outcome doesn’t bode well for Israel. Netanyahu has already hinted that the IDF will maintain a presence, if not a full occupation, in Gaza to ensure security, and rejected the idea of governance by the Palestinian Authority. That makes the entire Gaza endgame dangerously ambiguous: Not knowing where you’re going makes each step uncertain.

Undaunted, Israel’s only apparent strategy seems to be killing as many Hamas militants as possible, as quickly as possible. As is painfully evident, that de facto results in killing thousands of Palestinian civilians along the way. The ironic and tragic paradox of this entire mess is that’s exactly what Hamas intended Israel to do from the second they invaded on October 7th.