Leaders in crisis situations justify their actions by arguing that the ship of state must be guided by a strong hand on the wheel. Negotiating with the enemy is tantamount to surrender. The enemy must be exterminated, not accommodated. The revolutionary opponent of the status quo argues that compromise is tantamount to surrender. The people’s rights must be vindicated by a complete overthrow of the established reality or complete lost.
But are enemies ever exterminated, or rights completely vindicated? If not, is it politically rational to advance goals that cannot be realized?
The question could be applied to conflicts and struggles across history, but is particularly apt to pose to the main actors directing all sides in what has become a regional war between Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. Every side declares the sanctity and justice of their position with the chest-thumping brashness of a an adolescent boy. In pursuit of absolutely just claims, they assure the world, nothing is immoral: hostage taking, killing civilians, random rocket launches, assassinations, bulldozing of homes, bombing of schools, wholesale destruction of entire cities. That which is necessary is good, and against an implacable foe– as all sides paint their opponents as being– doing anything less than is necessary is a criminal abdication of political responsibility. Real leaders are those with the purported strength to to what is necessary, by any means necessary.
And what are the results thus far? Who is winning, and by what metric is victory to be decided? Thousands of people, mostly Palestinian non-combatants, are dead. Most of Hamas’ command hierarchy has been killed or captured and their political chief assassinated. Hamas has been decimated as an organized military force, as Netanyahu promised that it would be, but are Israelis safer? The struggle for a Palestinian state will continue as long as there are Palestinians. Hamas had 30 000 soldiers at the start of the phase of the long-standing conflict with Israel that began on October 7th. Much of its leadership has been killed, thousands of its best trained cadre are dead, wounded, or captured. Its ability to function as an organized, discipline, coherent military force has clearly been severely damaged. But there are as many millions of Palestinians as there are Israelis. They will not give up their fight for statehood just because one political expression of that struggle has been pounded into bits. Netanyahu and the Israeli racist far-right is not at war with Hamas and its supporters alone, but with the very idea of a Palestinian state. Have they succeeded in defeating that idea? Not even the commanders of the Israeli Defence Forces believe that a victory over an idea is possible.
And Hamas? Has their adventure of October 7th advanced the goal of achieving statehood? Ireland, Spain, and Norway have joined the list of nations that recognize the state of Palestine; the International Court of Justice has issued a preliminary decision that finds plausible evidence that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. The International Criminal Court is considering issuing arrest warrants for Israel’s leaders (and Hamas’s too, although many of them are now dead). But is an actual, viable, geographically contiguous Palestinian state closer today, August 2nd, than it was on October 6th? If it is, I would like to see the evidence.
The people of Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen: are their interests best served by squandering resources on supporting an armed struggle against a militarily superior foe? Their interventions are justified on grounds of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, but the more they intervene (especially Iran), the more they push America to maintain its support for Israel (support which never wavered but which was attenuated in historically unprecedented ways before Iran’s missile launch against Israel). When Iran intervenes it links the Palestinian struggle in the American mind to Iran, and no American leader is ever going to change policy towards Israel if doing so would appear to appease Iran. Is the principle of solidarity best served by military operations that save face but in effect strengthen Israel?
By any coherent metric every side is failing to achieve its stated goals. Israel’s assault on Gaza continues unabated, it lashes out at its enemies across the region, but so long as there is a missile hidden in a farm house somewhere, its civilians will not be safe. And even if there isn’t a missile hidden somewhere, so long as Israel is enemy to every other country in the region its population will never feel secure, and not feeling secure is tantamount to not being secure.
Palestinians have the right to self-determination, of that there is no legal, political, or moral doubt, but persisting with a militarized strategy that has brought the complete destruction of Gaza is madness. One can talk about the nobility of resistance all one wants, what counts in politics is results that improve the lives of the people that political leaders claim to represent. Bad as life surely was on October 6th in Gaza, it is immeasurably worse now (and will be, long into the foreseeable future).
On all sides, maximalists who insist on “harsh punishments” and complete victory. On all sides, death, destruction, insecurity, the sacrifice of present life for quixotic goals that will never be achieved because they demand eradication or complete capitulation of the other side– results that simply will not ever be achieved.
And so the beat(ings) go on.
From on high and outside it is easy enough to say: everyone, just stop and and put your heads together. But the nature of maximalist demands is that they lock the leaders into strategies and tactics that cannot succeed but whose failure cannot be admitted because such an admission would expose the incompetence of the leaders who chose them.
The conclusion is that there will be no hope for any country and people in the region to achieve the peace and stability that are the conditions of everyone’s life-security, life-development, and life-enjoyment until different leaders– leaders who will lead by saying “No, I am not going to shoot up a rave and take hostages;” “No, I am not going to drop 2000 pound bombs on schools and neighborhoods;” “No, I am not going to invade hospitals, not going to do anything that leads to premature babies having to be wrapped in tinfoil to survive;” “No, I am not going to launch missiles on trajectories where they might land on soccer fields” -get their hands on the wheel and steer their ships away from the reefs.
On what rational grounds could anyone who genuinely has the real life-interests of their people at heart disagree with the political necessity of policy based on those sorts of refusals? Yet, such is the state of the region that it would also be contrary to rational expectations to believe that such leaders (who no doubt exist) will be able to assume command any time soon.
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Hi Jeff. I read you regularly and appreciate all your posts. Of all the reasons that are commonly cited for armed conflict and struggle around the world, the one that has always stood out for me is nationalism. As supply chains and information and accounting systems become more and more globalized, the nation state itself becomes more and more an anachronism, or a convenient way of using national borders to continually keep certain people maintaining certain ways of life, other people on lower wages and inability to industrialize etc.
The ‘two-state solution’ has for me been doomed from the outset when one state is clearly superior in every metric and the other is left in a marginal and ever-reduced condition. Peace in the region, or in the land now called either Palestine or Israel can only ever come when people decide they can live together and share values and resources. That, to me is what ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free’ really means – but for all people, sectarian conflicts aside.
Of course, it is much more difficult to build something from nothing than from something that has been utterly destroyed. We cannot reverse engineer the previous decades of violence, and I have no hope at all that sitting Western governments have any plan in mind for a complete re-think, especially as no one wins political points for admitting wrong-doing, and especially in advocating for a diminished status in the world for more parity.
I try to imagine myself as person right now in besieged Palestine (and I can’t). Even in a flight-or-fight situation, these people seem to have no alternative, as flight has resulted in bombing of safe zones – repeatedly. From the higher leadership standpoint of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran – yes, you make perfect sense. The 7 October attack has done nothing but harm the people it was ostensibly unleashed to liberate. Unless liberation wasn’t the point – it was simply a boiling over of rage within decades of confinement and no one was seriously considering consequences. It’s what a desperate people does.
And in the end, all of the ‘appropriate responses’ end up being a result of an original dehumanization of the ‘other’.
No solutions here to offer, I’m afraid. But thanks, as always, for your words and insight. You’re a clear voice in a wilderness of banshees.
Hi Nathan. Thanks for the insightful and completely true comment. I meant to respond earlier but time got away from me (as it does). On the key issue of the nation state– I agree, it is an outdated form, but I have been struck more and more by the (deleterious, but real) power of inertia in politics. Institutional forms carry on long past the point where the conditions that made them useful have ceased to exist and operate (NATO is a case in point, designed for the Cold war, but it continues to exist 30 years after it ended). From above, as I say, it is easy to see the need for novel institutional arrangements, but finding some sort of practical foothold from which to build them is another matter. I persist– perhaps naively, perhaps somewhat self-interestedly– in believing that that external standpoints from above, so too speak, outside the fray– can help illuminate problems in a way that those too close to them cannot see, and in that way contribute at least indirectly to solutions. But those solutions take such a long time and leave too many people dead and maimed.