How Israel’s war went wrong

Zack Beauchamp

February 20, 2024

At the end of November, Israeli reporter Yuval Abraham broke one of the most important stories of the war in Gaza to date — an inside look at the disturbing reasoning that has led the Israeli military to kill so many civilians.

Citing conversations with “seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community,” Abraham reported that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had changed its doctrine to permit far greater civilian casualties than it would have tolerated in previous wars. IDF leadership was greenlighting strikes on civilian targets like apartment buildings and public infrastructure that they knew would kill scores of innocent Gazans.

“In one case,” Abraham reported, “the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander.”

Abraham’s reporting showed, in granular detail, the ways that this war would not be like others: that Israel, so grievously wounded by Hamas on October 7, would go to extraordinarily violent lengths to destroy the group responsible for that day’s atrocities. In doing so, it would commit atrocities of its own.

At least 28,000 Palestinians are already confirmed dead, with more likely lying in the rubble. Around 70 percent of Gaza’s homes have been damaged or destroyed; at least 85 percent of Gaza’s population has been displaced. The indirect death toll from starvation and disease will likely be higher. One academic estimate suggested that nearly 500,000 Palestinians will die within a year unless the war is brought to a halt, reflecting both the physical damage to Gaza’s infrastructure and the consequences of Israel’s decision to besiege Gaza on day three of the war. (While the siege has been relaxed somewhat, limitations on aid flow remain strict.)

The Israeli government describes civilian death as a regrettable but inevitable consequence of waging a war to eliminate Hamas. But as of right now, that goal is still very far away — and may ultimately prove to be impossible.

There’s no doubt that the IDF has done significant damage to Hamas's infrastructure. Israel has killed or captured somewhere around one-third of Hamas’s fighting force, destroyed at least half of its rocket stockpile, and demolished somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of its tunnel network under Gaza. The more the war goes on, the higher those numbers will become.

But as significant as these achievements are, “none of them come close to eliminating Hamas,” says Dan Byman, a professor at Georgetown who studies Israeli counterterrorism policy.

The group, he explains, has “very deep roots in Gaza” — ones that could only be permanently removed if Israel had a good plan for a postwar political arrangement in Gaza. Yet at present, Israel still has no plan at all. With support for Hamas rising in reaction to Israeli brutality, Israel runs a real risk of actually strengthening the terrorist group’s political position in the long run.

A world where hundreds of thousands of Gazans suffer and only Hamas benefits is the worst of all possible worlds. Yet it is increasingly looking like a likely one.

How did we get here?

The truth is that this nightmare was depressingly predictable. When I surveyed over a dozen experts about the war back in October, they warned that Israel had a dangerously loose understanding of what the war was about. The stated aim of “destroying Hamas” was at once maximalist and open-ended: It wasn’t clear how it could be accomplished or what limit there might be on the means used in its pursuit.

Israel’s conduct in the war so far has vindicated these fears. The embrace of an objective at once so massive and vague has dragged Israel down the moral nadir documented in Abraham’s reporting, with unclear and perhaps even self-defeating ends. It is a situation that Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, terms “an era-defining catastrophe.”

Things did not have to be this way. After the horrific events of October 7, Israel had an obviously just claim to wage a defensive war against Hamas — and the tactical and strategic capabilities to execute a smarter, more limited, and more humane war plan.

The blame for this failure lies with Israel’s terrible wartime leadership: an extremist government headed by Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, a venal prime minister currently on trial for corruption who has placed his personal interests over his country’s even during wartime.

“You couldn’t have had a worse government to respond to a worse moment,” says Dov Waxman, the director of UCLA’s Center for Israel Studies. “People like to separate the war from the government that’s running it, but I think you can’t.”

It’s not too late for Israel to try something different.

While Netanyahu won’t change course voluntarily, both Israeli voters and the Biden administration have significant leverage over their policies. Their combined pressure might produce either a change in policy or a change in government, pulling Israel away from the abyss.

And in the longer run, a postwar Israel might begin reckoning with the deeply mistaken assumptions behind its terrible policy — and, in doing so, transform the future of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The inevitability of atrocity

Michael Walzer is the world’s greatest living military ethicist. His 1977 book Just and Unjust Wars is the seminal modern text in what’s called “just war theory,” the branch of political philosophy dedicated to examining when and how war can be waged ethically. Whether one agrees with it or not, his work is the baseline by which all other work in the field is judged and has influenced law and policy around the world.

On the American left, Walzer is also known as one of Israel’s most famous defenders. In a 2017 essay, he describes Just and Unjust Wars as the outgrowth of his attempt to reconcile his opposition to the Vietnam War with his support for Israel’s 1967 war against its Arab neighbors. After October 7, he has repeatedly defended Israel’s right to defend itself and put the majority of the moral blame for human suffering on Hamas. “Israel’s military response to the atrocities of October 7th is a just and necessary war,” he wrote in December.

Yet when we spoke in early February, Walzer was far more critical of Israel’s war effort than I expected.

“Israel has created new conditions on the ground [that] made it virtually impossible to continue the war” ethically, he told me. “I am hoping for a kind of ceasefire.”

Walzer is referring to the geography of the fighting. When Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza, it concentrated the fighting in the northern Gaza Strip — instructing Palestinian civilians to flee to the south to stay out of harm’s way. But today, Israel is threatening a major ground offensive in the southern city of Rafah, where huge numbers of Palestinian civilians have fled with nowhere else to go. For Walzer, Israel cannot wage war justly when Gazan civilians truly cannot escape.

But Walzer also pointed to a deeper moral problem with Israel’s seemingly impossible objective of destroying Hamas.

Generally, just war theorists believe that war cannot be ethically waged without having “reasonable prospects for success.” The logic is intuitive: War inevitably involves a lot of killing, and killing can only be justified if it accomplishes a greater good. If the objective behind the killing is impossible (or extremely implausible), then there is no greater good to be won from the bloodshed.

Walzer believes that many Israelis, traumatized by the events of October 7, did not fully appreciate how intermingled Hamas — the de facto government of Gaza — was with Gazan society. It’s an organization made up of not only tens of thousands of fighters, but also many civilian functionaries and a vast physical infrastructure. Truly destroying such an entity cannot reasonably be accomplished through force of arms alone — at least not without a yearslong military campaign and an unthinkable amount of civilian death.

Some Israelis are beginning to acknowledge this reality. In January, Gadi Eisenkot — a senior minister in Israel’s wartime Cabinet — declared that “whoever speaks of absolute defeat [of Hamas] is not speaking the truth,” and that Israeli hostages in Gaza could only be brought home as part of a ceasefire deal. A classified Israeli military intelligence assessment, reported by Israel’s Channel 12 news station, predicts that Hamas will persist as a terrorist organization even if Israel destroys much of its more conventional military capabilities.

“It was when they grasped the extent of the embeddedness and the tunnel city that they realized that was not a possible goal and therefore not a just goal,” Walzer says, speaking of his contacts in Israel. “The goal as stated on October 8 wasn’t wrong because we [outside Gaza] were so ignorant of what Hamas had become.”

Walzer may be judging Israel’s leadership a bit too leniently. Hamas’s deep entrenchment in Gaza was well-known prior to the war and was part of the reason previous Israeli governments had opted not to destroy the militant group. But Walzer is correct that the nature of the objective shapes the war’s morality — even down to the kinds of tactics Israel was willing to employ.

In previous wars with Hamas, Israel’s primary objective had been degrading Hamas’s military capabilities and deterring it from attacking Israel in the near future. These are relatively limited aims that can be accomplished through more discriminate military means. Israel didn’t need to destroy every Hamas rocket launcher or kill every commander — but rather do just enough damage to buy itself some safety.

“If your war aim is complete destruction of your adversary, then the military advantage of every strike increases because it’s a greater contribution to that aim,” says Adil Haque, a professor who studies the law and ethics of war at Rutgers University. “Given the physical layout of Gaza, you’re already setting yourself on a path toward killing tens of thousands of civilians.”

A significant level of civilian death is inevitable in urban warfare, and especially in Gaza given Hamas’s despicable tactic of stationing military assets in and around schools and hospitals. The IDF is facing a profoundly challenging operating environment with few true historical parallels.

Yet this does not absolve Israel of its decision to adopt a maximalist war aim or the unusually brutal tactics that followed from it. These were choices Israeli leaders made — and they were the wrong ones.

The damning failure to plan for war’s end

Lt. Col. Raphael Cohen is no one’s idea of a dove. As a US Army military intelligence officer, Cohen served two tours of combat duty in Iraq at the height of the anti-American insurgency. Now a reserve officer, he spends his days running a program on military strategy and doctrine at the RAND Institute. He has publicly argued that the reality on the ground in Gaza left Israel with little choice but to engage in the kind of war that it’s currently waging.

Yet there’s one area where Cohen’s review of Israel’s conduct is quite harsh: its lack of planning for the day after the war.

“They need to take the non-lethal side of the operation seriously,” he told me in late January. “If you don’t get the postwar planning right, whatever tactical gains you get are going to be fleeting.”

In the outlines offered by Israeli leadership early in the war, “destroying Hamas” could only be accomplished by replacing its regime in Gaza with something new and durable. In October, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said this explicitly — that the war must end with the “creation of a new security regime in the Gaza Strip [and] the removal of Israel’s responsibility for day-to-day life in the Gaza Strip.”

Regime change is the only conceivable way Israel could deliver on its long-shot objective of destroying Hamas. Yet, shockingly, Israel has no clear plan for what comes next. Every source I spoke to with knowledge of Israeli planning confirmed this; so does a volume of publicly available reporting and some recent comments from Netanyahu spokesperson Avi Hyman.

“All discussions about the day after Hamas will be had the day after Hamas,” Hyman said during a press briefing.

For quite some time after the war began, Israel refused to even conceive of a postwar plan. Some sources told me that preparations are getting underway, but there are still no firm conclusions nor any clear route to them. Netanyahu has publicly rejected an American proposal to place the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by the moderate Fatah faction based in the West Bank, in charge of Gaza after the war. He has offered no alternative in its place.

Without a postwar plan, Israel risks something worse than failing to defeat Hamas: bolstering it.

According to Devorah Margolin, an expert on Hamas at the center-right Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the entire point of the October 7 attack was to provoke a massive Israeli response. Handbooks and guidance sheets discovered on killed and captured Hamas fighters revealed instructions to be graphically, sadistically violent — instructions we know were fully carried out.

“The goal of that [ultraviolence] was to create a visceral response from Israel that would be seen as so disproportionate that the violence it carried out on October 7 was pushed to the side, and that Israel would be seen as the irrational actor,” she tells me. “In that sense, I think they actually succeeded.”

In the long run, making Israel look like the depraved side serves two strategic goals for Hamas. First, it puts the Palestinian issue back at the top of the Arab and international political agenda. Second, it convinces Palestinians that Israel must be fought with arms — and that Hamas, rather than the more peace-oriented Fatah, should be leading their struggle. Polling data both in Palestine and elsewhere suggest that they have made inroads on both fronts since October 7.

By inflicting mass suffering on Palestinians without a long-term plan for addressing the political consequences of their misery, Israel is playing right into Hamas’s hands. The current Israeli approach is less likely to destroy the militant group than to strengthen it.

Blame Bibi

Natan Sachs is the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution — making him, more or less, the leading Israel expert at one of Washington’s leading nonpartisan think tanks. Few people outside of Israel know the country’s politics better than he does.

When I spoke with Sachs in February, he told me that the mood in Israel “remains extremely grim and extremely vulnerable.” Israel’s war reflects a public that remains traumatized by October 7 and is convinced that they can only be protected by inflicting maximum destruction on Israel’s enemies.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is intentionally stoking the fury. “Responsible leadership would not only channel the anger and the need for prevention in the future,” he says. “It would also try to shape public expectations about what the future might be.”

This behavior is even worse than it sounds. Netanyahu is stoking war fervor without engaging in any serious planning for the postwar environment. It’s clear, both from speaking with knowledgeable observers and reading the Israeli press, that Netanyahu’s government is at the heart of this essential gap.

“When you talk to the IDF folks, their issue is like any military’s — they follow the guidance they’re given from politicians, and there is no clear guidance,” Cohen tells me. “They feel hamstrung because they can’t get out too far ahead of where the government is.”

Discontent with Netanyahu from inside the military is starting to go public. In late January, Defense Minister Gallant warned that “political indecision may harm the progress of the military operation” — suggesting that the government is shirking its duty to “discuss the plan … and determine the goal.”

Why is Netanyahu refusing to do his job? The most likely explanation is crass politics.

The prime minister’s ongoing corruption trial is very serious, with a conviction potentially leading to an extended stay behind bars. His primary motivation is staying in office and using that power to keep out of prison, which requires keeping his government together. As a result, his far-right coalition partners in the Religious Zionism faction — who oppose any Palestinian political control over Gaza and want to rebuild Israeli settlements there — have extraordinary influence over his decision-making.

To avoid crossing the far right, Netanyahu won’t allow for any serious planning for the war’s end. The necessary parts of any plan — adopting a concrete and achievable vision for victory and a realistic vision for a postwar order — would necessarily infuriate Religious Zionists and likely cause them to quit the coalition, thus throwing the country to new elections that Netanyahu will likely lose. The prime minister is very literally putting his own interests above the nation’s — something that Sachs says “wouldn’t be the case with many other [Israeli] leaders.”

“This specific individual,” he adds, “is a constant politician — even in the worst of times.”

Of course, pinpointing the roots of Israeli failures isn’t quite that simple. Israelis across the political spectrum immediately called for “destroying” Hamas in the wake of October 7, an understandable response to the day’s horror. Polling shows that the public is deeply divided on what the postwar political order in Gaza should look like, with no single option commanding majority support. Israelis are still traumatized and adrift, confident only that a return to the prewar status quo isn’t an option.

But, as Sachs pointed out, it’s not a leader’s job to follow public opinion but rather to mold it. A moment when people are scared and uncertain, where the old security paradigm seems broken and no new one has emerged to replace it, is exactly the kind of time where leaders with vision can convince the public to follow them toward a better future.

“Every question about Israel’s response has to be considered in light of the members of this government, and particularly Netanyahu’s dependence on the far right,” says Waxman, the UCLA professor.

So if “Blame Bibi” is an oversimplification, it’s not much of one. At its heart, the war has gone badly because the man leading it is not up to the task. So long as his government remains in power, the odds of Israel climbing out of its moral and strategic nadir are negligible.

Can things get better?

Dana El Kurd is a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington and a leading expert on Palestinian politics. When we talked about the scale of suffering in Gaza, the pain in her voice was palpable. “There’s not even words I can put to it,” she told me.

Despite this, she managed to have some empathy for Israelis — and warn that their current approach isn’t going to make anything better for them. Based on everything she knows about the internal political dynamics of Palestine, continued mass killing will only empower its violent radicals in the long run.

“I totally understand the shock of the October 7 moment, and what it might have meant to Israelis who thought they were immune,” she tells me. But making [Gaza] uninhabitable...is not going to resolve the conflict.”

The first step for things getting better is for Israel to take what El Kurd is saying seriously — and fundamentally revise its war aims accordingly.

Israel could do this by committing to a version of the American proposal for the PA to take over Gaza, reorienting its strategy around laying the groundwork for PA entry. The PA has its flaws — it is both demonstrably corrupt and authoritarian — but it is at least credibly committed to peace. And there is no real alternative: An international occupation of Gaza is extremely unlikely, and an indefinite Israeli occupation would be a disaster for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

 

“The big thing is that something needs to replace Hamas in Gaza, and I think the Biden administration pushing the PA is appropriate,” Byman says. “God help us all, but this is the best we got.”

An alternative option is Israel abandoning its current hope for regime change in Gaza, instead seeking an indefinite ceasefire with Hamas in exchange for full release of the remaining Israeli hostages. This outcome would almost certainly leave Hamas in power. But it would stop a war that’s currently helping no one, allow for a flood of humanitarian aid to help Gazan civilians, and accomplish what a majority of Israelis now see as the primary war aim, bringing the hostages home.

These approaches have their problems, but both are much better than the status quo. Yet Netanyahu has ruled them out, believing that his right flank would abandon him were he to take either option. This means one of two things has to happen: Netanyahu needs to be forced to hold elections or somehow pressured into changing policy.

Part of the pressure will inevitably come domestically. Israeli frustration with the government’s handling of the war, especially its inability to bring the hostages home, is rising. 2024 has seen some return to anti-government protests that were common before the war (though currently at a much smaller scale).

Other forms of pressure should come from foreign powers — which is also already happening. A group of Arab states are drafting a proposal in which they offer to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel in exchange for a ceasefire and “irreversible” moves toward a Palestinian state. The United States has issued a first-ever executive order sanctioning violent settlers in the West Bank — an economic weapon that could easily be directed against the extremist ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet.

These efforts can and should be expanded, especially on the American side. President Biden’s early and loud support for Israel after October 7 has bought him extraordinary goodwill inside Israel, where he has a roughly 68 percent approval rating. His popularity vastly outstrips Netanyahu’s, which means that the prime minister’s current antagonistic approach toward the White House may be a political miscalculation.

But even if Netanyahu can be forced to change course — or simply forced out of power — the underlying problem will not be resolved. What is needed is not just a temporary peace, but a means to start addressing the roots of the conflict to ensure that the fighting doesn’t start up again.

“The main thing is that people aren’t trying to solve the conflict,” el-Kurd insists. “That’s why the conflict is ongoing.”

Any kind of real solution, then, aims at not just a temporary end to the fighting but resetting the fundamental dynamics of the conflict that brought us to such a terrible place.

“Out of a deal to secure the release of the hostages could become a lasting ceasefire. And out of a lasting ceasefire could become a political process leading to the creation of a Palestinian state,” says Waxman.

This is hard to imagine in the midst of war, with Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians surging and the two-state solution polling poorly among Israelis. But what’s true now may not continue to be true after the shooting stops. Aluf Benn, the editor of leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz, calls the period after October 7 “a turning point”: a moment where the traditional contours of politics have been called into question and it’s possible for things to go differently.

“It is up to Israelis to decide what kind of turning point it will be,” he writes in Foreign Affairs.

Benn is pessimistic that Israelis will take the opportunity to turn toward peace on their own. But there are also signs that the far right’s star is fading in Israel. And with the rest of the world renewing its attention to the conflict, new ideas are starting to emerge. The Arab states’ decision to tie future normalization to a Palestinian state, together with at least some American willingness to put pressure on Israel to change course, are signs that fundamental assumptions are being challenged.

“The only silver lining of things being what they are is that, when they are so bad, people are actively thinking about making it better,” says Mira Sucharov, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa.

That this passes for optimism is a testament to the grim reality on the ground. So many innocent people have already died, and more will die every day until the war ends. Nothing can bring them back to life.

But holding out some hope, even amid the darkness, is better than a descent into nihilism: a belief that Palestinians are defined by Hamas or Israelis by Netanyahu. They are not. We outsiders owe them faith that their basic decency can triumph.