The current war in Gaza is not an isolated conflict that began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants launched an attack inside Israel. Framing the war this way, as John Spencer does in a recent article in Foreign Affairs (“Israel Is Winning,” August 21, 2024), invites many dubious assertions about Israel’s purported progress toward its war aims and its supposed efforts to protect civilians. And it accepts without question the Israeli government’s official position that “Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population,” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in a speech in January. To simplify the conflict to a fight between Israel and Hamas is to ignore the on-the-ground realities that indicate Israel is waging an indiscriminate war on all Palestinians.
A more accurate understanding of the war must take its broader context into account. What is happening now in Gaza is one battle within the larger conflict that has shaped the Israeli-Palestinian relationship since the founding of Israel and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the new state’s territory in 1948. Today’s fight cannot be removed from that history and geography; gaining the upper hand in the current battle is not the same as winning the wider war. Spencer falls into this trap, miscasting Israel’s temporary tactical achievements as strategic victory and underestimating how Israel’s unwillingness to pursue a political resolution that recognizes the Palestinians’ right to self-determination will in the end diminish its chances of success.
In the war Spencer describes, Israel has three aims: “to recover all hostages, secure its borders, and destroy Hamas.” To win such a war, Israel would have had to focus on taking out Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. One might expect Israeli forces to launch precise strikes on Hamas military targets while Israeli diplomats lead an effort to isolate Hamas politically. Instead, Israel has conducted a campaign of broad devastation in Gaza, attacking the territory’s civilian population; demolishing its health, educational, and social infrastructure; and destroying its food production, shelter, and sources of potable water. There is a disconnect between these indiscriminate tactics and the discrete goals that Spencer identifies.
Israel’s actions suggest that its true goal is to terminate Palestinian aspirations for self-determination. As the fighting rages in Gaza, members of Israel’s far-right government, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have vowed to resettle the territory with Jewish Israelis. The minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has cleared the way for Israeli settlers to rampage through Palestinian villages across the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself has denied any possibility of Palestinian statehood, signaling that there is no Palestinian future, with or without Hamas. The Basic Law passed in 2018 by the Israeli legislature made this much clear, affirming that only Jews have a right to self-determination in the territory that includes the West Bank and Gaza. Most recently, the Knesset’s ban on the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA’s operations in the West Bank and Gaza not only ensures a deepening humanitarian crisis but also aims to delegitimize Palestinians’ refugee status and claims to their original homes and lands. Although it insists otherwise, the Israeli government has demonstrated over the past year that its ultimate target is not Hamas but the Palestinian will to resist occupation and subjugation. It is, in effect, applying a military solution to a political problem. Far from moving toward victory, Israel is becoming less secure in the region, less stable at home, and less likely to find a durable solution with the Palestinians.
FAILING STRATEGY
Even by the measures of success that Spencer and the Israeli government rely on, the war is not going well. On all three objectives—recovery of hostages, border security, and eliminating Hamas—Israel claims to have made significant progress, but the evidence suggests otherwise. What progress Israel has made, moreover, offers a troubling precedent for the lowering of moral standards in the pursuit of victory.
The vast majority of the 251 hostages taken by Hamas and other armed groups on October 7 who returned to Israel alive were recovered through diplomatic negotiations in November 2023. The Israeli government insists that military force compelled those concessions—a claim Spencer echoes. But Hamas’s expressed willingness to make a deal undercuts that assertion: in October 2023, Hamas issued a statement offering to return all civilian hostages in exchange for the release of all Palestinians held in Israel and an end to hostilities. Israel’s military operations, meanwhile, have killed more hostages than they have retrieved, and the ongoing campaign threatens the lives of those who remain in Gaza. In late August, Hamas killed six Israeli hostages shortly before Israeli troops could reach them, underscoring the need to negotiate rather than use military force to secure their release—an approach supported by the majority of Israelis.
It is true that Israel’s border with Gaza is more secure now than it was before the war, but that is only because the military operation inside Gaza is keeping a lid on cross-border threats. The underlying tensions connected to Israel’s pre–October 7 blockade of Gaza—the very tensions that fueled Hamas’s initial attack—have not been addressed. Limits on trade and humanitarian assistance entering (or leaving) Gaza are far stricter than they were before, and there is still no clear path to granting Palestinians self-determination and other political rights. Even now, Hamas militants have reemerged and attacked Israeli forces in parts of Gaza that the Israeli military had supposedly secured, and the group continues to launch rockets into Israel. As Spencer notes, Hamas has pledged to attack any other foreign security force that comes into Gaza. Thus, to hold its temporary gains, Israel appears stuck in a counterinsurgency campaign for the foreseeable future.
Israel’s actions suggest that its true goal is to terminate Palestinian aspirations for self-determination.
Israel’s other borders, meanwhile, have become less secure, not more. In May, two Egyptian soldiers died in a skirmish with Israeli forces across the border. Although Egypt remains committed to the two countries’ peace agreement, its ability to secure the Sinai border with Israel is increasingly tenuous. At Israel’s northern border, daily clashes between Israel and Hezbollah and other armed groups have displaced more than 80,000 Israeli civilians and a million Lebanese, have left portions of southern Lebanon with Gaza-like devastation, and have not stopped Hezbollah from launching rockets into Israel. Attacks on Israel are coming from farther afield, too, including from Iran and Houthi forces in Yemen.
Finally, as is obvious to most observers, Israel cannot kill its way out of the threat posed by Hamas and other armed Palestinian factions. Despite Israel’s claims, Hamas is not an Iranian proxy; it is a deeply rooted Palestinian movement that cannot be eliminated solely by wiping out its armed wing. As the political scientist Robert Pape argued in Foreign Affairs in June, Israel’s reliance on military tools, particularly airpower, makes Hamas “more popular and its appeal stronger than before October 7,” which in turn makes Israel’s eventual strategic failure more likely. And as CIA Director William Burns put it in September at a public event in London, “the only way you kill an idea is with a better idea.”
Spencer himself noted that after more than ten months of continuous Israeli bombardment, Hamas remained “the main political power” in Gaza. The group is now popular across the region, too: in a poll conducted by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in 16 Arab countries a few months after the October 7 attack, nearly 70 percent of respondents expressed support for Hamas. Far from a political win, Israel’s campaign has earned it a deluge of criticism from scholars, jurists, and the UN International Court of Justice, all of which damages Israel’s geopolitical and economic standing.
What is more, events since the publication of Spencer’s article cast further doubt on the idea that Israel’s goals are limited to defeating Hamas and retrieving the hostages. Israel’s assassinations of the Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh and the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, ought to have provided a clear opportunity for Israel to negotiate favorable terms to end its campaign as the United States encouraged it to do. Instead, Israel has continued its relentless attacks and is still blocking aid deliveries in northern Gaza, where roughly 400,000 Palestinians remain, all of which suggest that Israel’s ultimate goal may be to depopulate the territory. And in the north, the fight with Hezbollah has escalated. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon has displaced a million people and devastated portions of that country’s south, which will generate further instability, not security, for Israel.
WHAT KIND OF VICTORY?
The problem with the argument that Israel is winning the war is not just that the analysis is unsound. More important, and more dangerously, it encourages Israel to continue—and tempts others to support—an approach to warfare that causes massive civilian harm. The Gaza Health Ministry puts the death toll at over 43,000, which is roughly two percent of the territory’s population (a proportional figure in the United States would be over six million). The U.S. Agency for International Development reported in August that 96 percent of people in Gaza were at high risk of famine. In a letter published in The Lancet in July, researchers suggested that Israel’s operations in Gaza would end up being responsible for an estimated 180,000 deaths, factoring in not just direct violence but also the long-term effects of proliferating disease and the loss of access to resources.
Israeli forces are acting with systematic disregard for fundamental principles of international law and engaging in recurrent attacks launched despite the foreseeable and disproportionate harm they cause civilians. The Israeli army is carrying out major military operations without prior warnings or safe quarter in some of the most densely populated residential neighborhoods in the world, and directly attacking civilians and the infrastructure that is indispensable for their survival.
Spencer calls for Israel to “secure new leadership in Gaza to replace Hamas.” But after having been subjected to the Israeli army’s onslaught, Palestinians in Gaza are highly unlikely to support any leadership “secured” by Israel. The only path out of this quagmire is one that includes an immediate cease-fire, the unfettered flow of humanitarian assistance, the release of Israeli captives in exchange for Palestinian captives in Israeli custody (many of whom are held unlawfully, without charge or trial, and subject to abuse and torture), and steps toward a just and lasting political settlement that recognizes Palestinian aspirations for self-determination.
The journalist and former UN peacekeeper Philip Winslow titled his 2007 book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Victory for Us Is to See You Suffer. By this definition, perhaps Israel is indeed “winning.” But such a victory is not one that strategists or military analysts should endorse, nor one that the future historians will commend.