The Israel-Hamas War

Many of my (mostly Left and far-Left) friends are baffled by my finding this situation complex, and some of them are outraged by my heavily-qualified sympathy for the Israeli side. So -- to clear my head; I don't expect to convince anyone, or even to be heard by them -- this is how it appears to me. I distinguish two questions about justifying recourse to war:

1) Is the war just?

2) Is there a reasonable expectation of winning it?

These are to my mind entirely separate questions from a third question, which is, 

3) is this war being conducted ethically, insofar as such a thing is possible?

Let's take these in turn. My friends will be surprised, or maybe just baffled again, when I agree with them on issue number (1). Hamas had sufficient reason to go to war. Israeli encroachments, particularly under the Netanyahu government, have been intolerable. The viability of a Palestinian state has been deliberately (and also inadvertently) rendered impossible by the Israelis; their treatment of Palestinians as a helot class would be casus belli enough, even if you simply throw away all the various historical arguments (which I think for sanity's sake might be a wise choice, in this particular conflict.)

So far, I and my lefty friends are on the same page. It's when we come to question (2) that we begin to diverge. Most of them would flatly deny the premise; in fact I suspect most of them would not understand its relevance. But it is a traditionally accepted test: for it to be right to begin a war, you must have a reasonable expectation of winning it. Hamas has no such expectation. They were never going to win this war. They are going to lose horribly. To begin this war, with not the slightest prospect of victory, was wrong, even though the casus belli was sufficient. So this is the first place we diverge.

On question (3) there is an apparent agreement among everyone (except Hamas itself, and people who accept a drastically alternate set of facts) that the brutal massacres of Israelis in October were wrong, and constitute a war crime. But there is apparently a crime passionnel defense accepted by some of my friends: The Palestinians were so justly and repeatedly outraged that nothing they do can really be held against them. I understand this defense. I do not accept it.

So now, flipping to the Israeli side. Their casus belli is simple and to me, beyond reproach: their people were brutally and deliberately massacred. They have not just a right, but a duty, to protect their citizens. To me their right to fight back against Hamas, and to destroy it, is clear, and I don't fully understand how anyone can dispute it. It's question (2) that troubles me. Is there a reasonable expectation of winning this war? At once we're faced with what the definitions of winning could look like. The expressed war aim, of freeing the hostages and eliminating Hamas, seems trivially achievable: that is to say. they can, at huge cost to themselves and a huger cost to the civilians of Gaza, kill or capture nearly everyone who at the outbreak of was identified as a member of Hamas, and possibly rescue a few of the hostages. Can they avoid creating, in the process of doing so, another generation of "Hamas," whether it goes by the same name or not? I doubt it. Israel desperately needs clarity on their war aims, for the sake of their own souls. There are some -- a minority at present -- whose war aim actually is genocide. To be unclear will be to drift that way. That's how the American genocide of its indigenous peoples mostly played out: haphazard, half-intentioned, half blundered-into. Without blazing clarity and resolution, Israel will wander down that path, and the "genocide" accusation -- which I presently think unjustified -- will gradually become true.

And I suppose I must turn to question (3), since I don't seem to be able to convince myself to just be silent. For the most part, I think that the Israelis are conducting this war ethically. Siege is legitimate when an enemy fortifies a civilian habitation. As far as I can tell the IDF is not trying to kill civilians. They are trying to defeat Hamas. Our own War on Slavery hinged on the siege of Vicksburg, which was every bit as much of a deliberate humanitarian crisis. If you mean to win a war, and your enemy fortifies and defends a town, you conduct a siege. (And if you don't intend to win a war -- see question (2) above -- you have no business fighting it). So -- yes. I find the siege of Gaza horrifying too. But it doesn't look to me like a war crime. It looks to me like the war that Hamas has insisted upon. 

Whether it's wise for Israel to let Hamas set the terms and chose the terrain is another question. I don't know whether a cease-fire is the right thing or not: without a clear alternate path it seems as likely to be just prolonging the misery. And I do not know if there is some alternate path. The Israelis are possibly the most creative people on earth, and I passionately wish for them to get the hell out of this and come to clarity, and national unity, about what the end of the road is to look like. The road of unclarity leads to exactly one place, and they don't want to go there.  

I've been very ill for the past few days, which may have given me some insight, or may have made me especially stupid -- probably the latter, since no one sensible would comment on this conflict, if they didn't have to.  But I'm posting this mostly to get the damn ruminations out of my head. Thank you, to such friends as I still may have. Lots of love.