The Path Not Taken

David Brooks devotes his New York Times column to a critique of the Biden Administration’s Israel policy critics of Israel’s strategy in Gaza in general:

There seems to be a broad consensus atop the Democratic Party about the war in Gaza, structured around two propositions. First, after the attacks of Oct. 7, Israel has the right to defend itself and defeat Hamas. Second, the way Israel is doing this is “over the top,” in President Biden’s words. The vast numbers of dead and starving children are gut wrenching, the devastation is overwhelming, and it’s hard not to see it all as indiscriminate.

Which leads to an obvious question: If the current Israeli military approach is inhumane, what’s the alternative? Is there a better military strategy Israel can use to defeat Hamas without a civilian blood bath?

He summarizes the alternatives he sees:

One alternative strategy is that Israel should conduct a much more limited campaign. Fight Hamas, but with less intensity. To some degree, Israel has already made this adjustment. In January, Israel announced it was shifting to a smaller, more surgical strategy; U.S. officials estimated at the time that Israel had reduced the number of Israeli troops in northern Gaza to fewer than half of the 50,000 who were there in December.

The first problem with going further in this direction is that Israel may not be left with enough force to defeat Hamas. Even by Israel’s figures, most Hamas fighters are still out there. Will surgical operations be enough to defeat an enemy of this size? A similar strategy followed by America in Afghanistan doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

A second problem is that the light footprint approach leaves power vacuums. This allows Hamas units to reconstitute themselves in areas Israel has already taken. As the United States learned in Iraq, if troop levels get too low, the horrors of war turn into the horrors of anarchy.

Another alternative strategy is targeted assassinations. Instead of continuing with a massive invasion, just focus on the Hamas fighters responsible for the Oct. 7 attack, the way Israel took down the terrorists who perpetrated the attack on Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972.

The difference is that the attack on Israelis at Munich was a small-scale terrorist assault. Oct. 7 was a comprehensive invasion by an opposing army. Trying to assassinate perpetrators of that number would not look all that different from the current military approach. As Raphael Cohen, the director of the strategy and doctrine program at the RAND Corporation, notes: “In practical terms, killing or capturing those responsible for Oct. 7 means either thousands or potentially tens of thousands of airstrikes or raids dispersed throughout the Gaza Strip. Raids conducted on that scale are no longer a limited, targeted operation. It’s a full-blown war.”

Furthermore, Hamas’s fighters are hard to find, even the most notorious leaders. It took a decade for the United States to find Osama bin Laden, and Israel hasn’t had great success with eliminating key Hamas figures. In recent years, Israel tried to kill Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, seven times, without success.

The political costs of this kind of strategy might be even worse than the political costs of the current effort. Turkey, a Hamas supporter, has made it especially clear that Israel would pay a very heavy price if it went after Hamas leaders there.

A third alternative is a counterinsurgency strategy, of the kind that the United States used during the surge in Iraq. This is a less intense approach than the kind of massive invasion we’ve seen and would focus on going after insurgent cells and rebuilding the destroyed areas to build trust with the local population. The problem is that this works only after you’ve defeated the old regime and have a new host government you can work with. Israel is still trying to defeat the remaining Hamas battalions in places like Rafah. This kind of counterinsurgency approach would be an amendment to the current Israeli strategy, not a replacement.

Critics of the counterinsurgency approach point out that Gaza is not Iraq. If Israel tried to clear, hold and build new secure communities in classic counterinsurgency fashion, those new communities wouldn’t look like safe zones to the Palestinians. They would look like detention camps. Furthermore, if Israel settles on this strategy, it had better be prepared for a long war. One study of 71 counterinsurgency campaigns found that the median length of those conflicts was 10 years. Finally, the case for a full counterinsurgency approach would be stronger if that strategy had led to American victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, which it did not.

A fourth alternative is that Israel should just stop. It should settle for what it has achieved and not finish the job by invading Rafah and the southern areas of Gaza, or it should send in just small strike teams.

before launching ito a critique of the Biden Administration’s position:

This is now the official Biden position. The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has argued that Israel can destroy Hamas in Gaza without a large invasion but “by other means” (which he did not elaborate on). The United States has asked Israel to send a delegation to Washington to discuss alternative Rafah strategies, which is good. The problem is that, first, there seems to be a budding disagreement over how much of Hamas needs to be destroyed to declare victory and, second, the I.D.F. estimates that there are 5,000 to 8,000 Hamas fighters in Rafah. Defeating an army that size would take thousands of airstrikes and raids. If you try to shrink the incursion, the math just doesn’t add up. As an Israeli war cabinet member, Benny Gantz, reportedly told U.S. officials, “Finishing the war without demilitarizing Rafah is like sending in firefighters to put out 80 percent of a fire.”

If this war ends with a large chunk of Hamas in place, it would be a long-term disaster for the region.

I think he’s right to criticize the Biden Administration’s policies with respect to the conflict but IMO his criticism is not on target. The problem with the Biden Administration’s policies (and I use the plural deliberately) is that the administration has been focused strictly on domestic politics. To avoid alienating American Jewish supporters of Israel and their votes and contributions its initial reflex was to support Israel 100%. Now that unequivocal support of Israel risks costing Joe Biden critical swing states, they’re backpedaling. I think that the initial posture was an error and that error has already cost them. Now they’re trying to undo the error and in doing so hurting themselves more.

I have no idea what Israel’s objectives are at this point for reasons that will become clearer. What they have been doing is clearing Gaza of Hamas seriatim, driving the civilian population into the uncleared areas. To what end?

Assuming that Israel’s objective is to eliminate Hamas while minimizing harm to the civilian population of Gaza, there was another alternative at the outset. They could have cleared an area, fortified it, attracted the civilian population into the newly cleared area with food and medical attention, providing that ONLY in the cleared areas, and promoted that widely. They could have searched every civilian coming into the pacified area to prevent civilians from bringing weapons with them. As they expanded their operations against Hamas they could have expanded the civilian encampment they were creating.

I also think I know why they didn’t do that: it’s incredibly painstaking and risky. It reduces the number of troops available for offensive operations and the encampments need to be heavily guarded to prevent them from becoming enemy bases at your rear. But it would have been an alternative.

Now that alternative is gone and Israel has little choice but to stay their present course which I believe they will do regardless of world or U. S. opinion.