On the Unprecedented Challenge Facing Israel in Gaza

Professor Azar Gat, the chair for national-security studies at Tel Aviv University, has a piece worth everyone’s attention at Haaretz (which came to my attention thanks to a post on X/Twitter by the great historian, Niall Ferguson). Pushing back against “the derangement that has come to play a significant role in public discourse in the West, especially in academia,” Professor Gat describes the unprecedented challenge that confronts Israel in the Gaza battle space:

Tens of thousands of armed men embedded in a dense urban, civilian fabric, with booby-trapped buildings, all linked by hundreds of kilometers of tunnels unprecedented in scope and in military sophistication. Added to this is a massive deployment of rockets that are fired from within this conurbation at Israeli towns and villages — a situation that is unprecedented in the history of guerrilla and counter-guerilla wars.

There is no way to eliminate this array without causing massive destruction. Anyone who argues that it is forbidden to cause such destruction must propose feasible alternatives that would enable the elimination of Hamas in Gaza in the sense defined above; otherwise, they are arguing that the situation in effect gives Hamas immunity.

For Israel, unlike its critics, the war is existential. Gat convincingly contends that the nation has “no future in the Middle East” if it fails to achieve the declared goal of the war: “the destruction of Hamas as a semi-state military organization with a massive military infrastructure that controls Gaza.”

In this endeavor, Israel’s major problem is twofold.

First, the rules are changing on the fly, even as it has exceeded in its obligations under international law, by keeping civilian casualties — even if one accepts Hamas’s inflated civilian death numbers — at about 1.5 civilians killed per terrorist killed. That is strikingly below the rates that were standard in wars of the 20th century. As Gat points out, “History offers no examples for conquering a dense and fanatically defended urban area without causing . . . destruction” in civilian areas. Yet, due to the international politics of the conflict, Israel has been expected not only to protect the Palestinians — who celebrated the atrocities of October 7, even if they did not actively carry them out — but to furnish them with food and medicine. Naturally, these “food deliveries also feed Hamas and sustains its war effort.” (Gat adds the important caveat that “in Gaza there is not death from starvation as in Yemen and Ethiopia today, but rather food insecurity, sometimes acute.”)

Second, largely because of political sentiment in Israel regarding the imperative of achieving its war aim, it was too slow to adapt to the new political reality that “humanitarian aid is a necessary condition for the continued pursuit of the war in Gaza.” Gat contends that this “failure” has “far-reaching strategic implications”:  Though it ostensibly disserves, or at least further complicates an immensely challenging war effort, it is in Israel’s interest to be seen “as the standard-bearers of the aid, even if only for operational reasons.”

To get a sense of the actual stakes and battlefield conditions, rather than the libelous cartoon version brayed in pro-Hamas agitation on American university campuses, read Professor Gat.