Will Israel really mount a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza? That is what they are threatening. But it is something they have avoided in the last several attacks on Gaza, and for good reason. Once they have entered the crowded city — whose density they are responsible for — their force advantage starts to decline rapidly. Hamas has an estimated 10,000 to 17,000 fighters, and aerial surveillance is difficult — and becomes more so, as it has been suggested that Hamas has abandoned all tech communications in battle to thwart surveillance, relying instead on messengers.
Ancient techniques, as they say. The whole of Israel was thrown into turmoil in 2006 when one soldier, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped. With Hamas now holding more than 100 hostages, a full-scale land invasion would offer the chance for them to take more. Israel could abandon the rules of engagement it has hitherto sort of stuck to, and wholly flatten Gaza City block by block, as it moves forward. But that would involve the direct killing of strategically placed hostages, and it may not be ready to do that.
It’s possible that levels of individual sacrifice that Israeli families might once have accepted for the greater good have weakened in recent decades, as terrorist incidents inside “green line” Israel have lessened greatly. This is surely part of Hamas’ plan in unleashing such high-volume atrocity. A country that once had a certain internalised stoicism, in the shadow of the Holocaust and the 1948 uprising, is becoming more like the rest of the West in expecting that life will be un-blighted by violence — and consequently more willing to countenance total oppression of the people threatening it.
With control of the power and water supply in Israeli hands, the assault on Gaza will be less of a war on another territory than a siege on a dissident internal province. It could grind on for months and months, in parallel with Ukraine’s endless slog. The numbers of Palestinians killed and wounded will presumably be far beyond anything from previous Gaza incursions, and there will be the same manner in which they are carried out — a cold and merciless steadiness, designed to contrast with the passionate, possibly sadistic violence of Hamas and others. It’s a measure of the blow that Hamas’ atrocity landed that Israeli government spokespeople, fanning out to every media outlet they could find, often struggled to keep their cool in the face of questioning about the wider context in which such atrocities occurred (unless this itself was calibrated outrage).
When the blow against Gaza comes, when it becomes clear — if this occurs — that it is death in orders of magnitude above any we have known, then the public of the world will split approximately four ways, I think. The Arab and Muslim world will erupt, one presumes, in ways that the leaderships are already crapping themselves about. Who knows how secure some of these regimes are? The petro-monarchies were always as much a target of hardcore ’70s Marxist-Leninist Palestinian groups such as the PFLP as Israel itself, and they have always depended to some degree on Israel’s stability for their own. The recent “Abraham Accords” started by Trump between Israel and the UAE were simply the latest, perhaps final stage in the long goodbye to Pan-Arabism. The imminent signing of one between Saudi Arabia and Israel may have been the overwhelming prompt for both Iran and Hamas to conclude that a very big blow was required.
In the West, the split will go several ways. The pro-Israel crowd — what is effectively a fusion between state, Labor parties and the right-shifted heart of the public — has been given a license to recrudesce political feeling into some very murky stuff indeed, a mix of Western supremacism, fuzzy racialism and exterminism musings. To legitimate the fantasy of restraint-free violence that the pro-Israel crowd want, they have turned this one-off bike-powered mega-gang raid into an existential threat, equal to the moment when Soviet-provided Egyptian tanks were roaring across the Sinai in a world where the Vietnamese had just kicked the Americans out, the provisional IRA had declared war on Britain, and Europe was gripped by red terror. Now that’s existential threat. An AK-47 raid on a nuclear power? Come on, man.
The Hamas raid was, if anything, an illustration of the grievous limits to Hamas’ capacity as anything of any scale. A lot of people throwing around “existential threat” appear to be genuinely stupid, and not know what it means. Others in this country, crowded into the ghetto of their opinion section, know exactly what the purpose of such fabulation is. The foreign policy establishment is relaxed and comfortable with the IDF raining down death on a mass scale. They now have to condition a pro-Israel section of the public to it, as Netanyahu’s political alliances drive forward the proposal to fully annex the West Bank.
Will the combination of the atrocious character of the Hamas raid and the propaganda of existential threat return support to Israel? There is little doubt about that. As earlier solidarities recede to memory, many “middle” people and one section of Gen Z will identify more with Israel than with the apparently grubby, gangsterish world of Palestinian resistance. Israel’s cities are bougie, LGBTQIA+-friendly start-up zones with increasing interconnections to our economy. As a society, they look a lot more like us than they used to. Many people progressive on cause A or B won’t need to withdraw solidarity from Palestine, because they never felt it.
That’s the third group. The fourth is the progressive left — both a general progressive section and a more conscious-left core within that. Your correspondent referred to Hamas’ actions and the left yesterday. Comments were switched off, so one checked the socials and the “feedback” was lively, with many turning around to repudiate Hamas’ actions while supporting Palestinians. But I do not see how this can be avoided, no matter what the causes — and the violence Hamas has resorted to is unquestionably a product of the situation Israel has created. There’s no doubt the steady, increasing pressure put on the Gazan population has been immense and intolerable. Indeed, the Hamas raid is an exception to the forbearance shown by the Palestinians against the systemic and institutionalised provocation visited upon them.
But it seems nothing they do, or don’t do, will bust the Palestinians out of their designated role as past victims’ present victims, to whom no empathy or political understanding is to be extended. From the right, there is an almost gleeful desire to make impossible requirements of the leadership and the people themselves to live under regimes that combine high-tech sequestration, the steady erosion of rights and continued theft of land, with the demand that the leadership take as its main role as that of disciplining its own people on Israel’s behalf. In the West Bank, this has resulted in steadily increased, casual, lethal violence by settlers against Palestinians, done with impunity — terror on the instalment plan.
The Hamas response is distinctively atrocious because it has imported the nihilistic levels of violence ISIS-style into politics where terror-violence had been more calibrated and strategic. Making judgements on what is and is not legitimate here is crucial. Calling on both sides to etc, etc is a waste of time — and an avoidance of the real moral questions.
The pro-Palestine left should have separated itself from this application of a new type of violence quickly and immediately, once it was clear that enough reports of large-scale killing were true. To not do so has been to attach the solidarity movement to an event that went beyond that to which solidarity can be offered. Not making that separation will corrode the movement, both internally and externally, as the full investigation and accounts unfold. The radical left was capable of doing that once; indeed, it used to reject all terror. Rising against colonialism made terror a necessary strategy. All the more reason to make some expression of limits. And if for no other purpose than to clear the slate for the greater horror and suffering that will come — is coming — from the lethal siege of Gaza.
