Ohad Zwigenberg/AP Photo
Israeli tanks head toward the Gaza Strip border in southern Israel on Thursday, October 12, 2023.
On October 7, Hamas launched a surprise attack from Gaza that caught the Israeli state completely flat-footed. Roving gunmen and rockets killed some 1,300 people—primarily civilians, many at a music festival and a collective farm—and took an unknown number hostage.
Many commentators have compared Hamas’s brutal attack to 9/11 in terms of the shock and horror inflicted on Israeli society. If anything, this understates the impact—the percentage of the population killed is many times greater than 9/11, the method of killing far more visceral and bloody, and the hostage-taking without precedent. Terrorist attacks against civilians are more than worthy of righteous condemnation.
However, the 9/11 comparison fits well in that the Israeli government is reacting to a monstrous crime by vengefully lashing out in a way that harms both innumerable innocent civilians in Gaza and ultimately Israel itself.
In response to the attack, Gaza has been bombed heavily, and Israel has cut off all water, food, and fuel supplies, leading to an immediate humanitarian crisis. Gaza City’s main hospital is totally overwhelmed and running out of fuel. The Israeli government gave those residing in the north of Gaza 24 hours to relocate to the south—a preposterous demand to make of a million people—and a ground invasion seems to be in the works. Some 2,600 Gazans, at least, have been killed.
In this, the Israeli government initially had total support from the Biden administration. The U.S. Navy has ordered an astounding two full carrier battle groups to the area—one directly off the Gaza coast, and the other in the eastern Mediterranean—in a major show of force. “We stand with Israel,” the president said in a press conference. “Like every nation in the world, Israel has the right to respond—indeed has a duty to respond—to these vicious attacks.” State Department employees were explicitly forbidden from using de-escalatory language.
However, over the last few days there has been a marked change in approach. The Biden administration and other Western governments have reportedly been pressuring the Israeli government behind the scenes to cut back on its aggressiveness, and restore some basic services to southern Gaza at least. In an interview on 60 Minutes, Biden said: “Hamas and the extreme elements of Hamas don’t represent all the Palestinian people. I think that it would be a mistake for Israel to occupy Gaza again.” Let us hope it isn’t too late to avoid disaster.
IT HAS BEEN JUST OVER TWO YEARS, after all, since President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was the original so-called “good war” in response to 9/11, directed at a regime that was at least sheltering some of the perpetrators. After spending 20 years, trillions of dollars, and thousands of lives of American and allied troops, and getting hundreds of thousands of civilians and Afghan soldiers killed, what did we accomplish? The exact same group U.S. forces toppled in the first place took control of the country once again, quickly and easily. A more ignominious and senseless waste would be hard to imagine.
One invasion wasn’t enough for the Bush administration, of course, which launched war on Iraq based in part on a fabricated implication that Saddam Hussein had been somehow involved with 9/11. The result was even worse—a much more expensive, destructive, and bloody war, and a shattering regional crisis that led directly to the rise of ISIS. America’s reputation around the world was gravely harmed, as many of even our closest allies were convinced we had gone completely insane.
George W. Bush himself has weighed in on the current conflict, naturally on the side of Netanyahu and Biden, by arguing for war and against any kind of cease-fire or diplomacy. “My view is: One side is guilty. And it’s not Israel,” he said. “You’re dealing with cold-blooded killers. You can make all kinds of excuses why they are, but they are.”
Just like after 9/11, there has been heavy resistance to discussing an undeniable root cause of the Hamas attack, namely the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Back in 2015, Josh Marshall wrote an article for Talking Points Memo analyzing a number of random knife attacks on Israeli Jews that turned out to be highly prophetic. He concluded:
Of course, it’s wrong and evil in all cases to randomly pick out innocent civilians on the street and stab them. It’s not justified by the Occupation. It can’t be justified by anything … But it is just as obvious that it is unwise to pretend that all of this happens in a vacuum. The two peoples simply cannot live together with one side dominating the other … This is the price—either paid in one big payment or in installments on layaway over time—of Israel’s and most of the United States’ collective denial about the big status quo of the Occupation and the unrealistic belief that it can just be perpetuated over time.
One notable difference with 9/11, which led to a skyrocketing approval rating for Bush, is that Israeli Jews overwhelmingly hold Netanyahu and his government responsible for the attack. This is true on several levels. First and most obviously, Netanyahu’s core political promise (in part as cover for his egregious corruption) is that only he can protect Israeli civilians through an “iron wall” apartheid policy. Not only did he fail, it seems that the government ignored warnings from Egypt that some kind of attack was in the works.
Second, partly thanks to Netanyahu’s dependence on two tiny extremist settler parties for a majority in the Israeli parliament, during the attack many Israeli military units were out protecting feral settlers in the West Bank (who have provoked many bloody clashes with Palestinians over the last year) instead of being stationed at the border with Gaza. Third, failing to secure some kind of lasting settlement with the Palestinians has obviously stoked anti-Israel rage and hence support for Hamas.
Fourth and most importantly, Netanyahu has literally lent substantial material support to Hamas in the form of money and diplomatic legitimacy—not because he likes them, but as a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization, to divide the Palestinian people and obstruct the movement for a Palestinian state. Indeed, Israel has pursued similar policies for decades, which were directly implicated in the original formation of Hamas in the 1980s.
Again and again, Netanyahu and the Israeli nationalist right have prioritized the occupation and their own power over the safety and security of Israeli Jews (not to mention the human rights and lives of Palestinians). And this new war on Gaza might be the final culmination of this policy.
MANY ARGUMENTS FOR THE WAR are openly genocidal. Israel’s defense minister Yoan Gallant said the country is fighting “human animals.” Israel’s ambassador to Berlin Ron Prosor echoed the sentiment: “This is people who basically act as animals and do not have any, any respect for children, women.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog explicitly argued that Gazans bear collective responsibility for Hamas: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” he said. “They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” (Incidentally, aside from Israel propping up Hamas, there actually have been many protests against their rule from ordinary Gazans, in no small part because of Hamas’s record of summary executions of critics.)
As Abigail Hauslohner and Liz Goodwin write at The Washington Post, conservative American politicians have echoed this bloodthirsty talk. “Level the place,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “No rules of engagement,” said Rep. Max Miller (R-OH).
Now, Israel might “solve” its immediate Hamas problem through the methods of the worst butchers of history—that is, expelling and/or massacring all the 1.8 million people in Gaza, half of them children, and imposing a peace of the grave. But at what cost? As writer John Ganz points out, Israel’s core international legitimacy relies on the memory of the Holocaust. Committing a crime of extermination in Gaza would seriously erode that justification at the least. Indeed, it may well be that Hamas was counting on this reaction, just as Osama bin Laden was correctly counting on America to egregiously overreact to the 9/11 attacks.
If Israel has no generally accepted special reason to exist, and we are back into a world of dog-eat-dog nationalist competition, then its proximate security situation is bad—and now getting worse thanks to this war. There is already simmering conflict with Hezbollah on the Israeli border with Lebanon. The incipient normalization deal with Saudi Arabia is reportedly on ice. If Israel were to shove hundreds of thousands of Gazans into Egypt (the only way to go outside of an airlift or ship transport), that country would be enraged.
And while Europe and the U.S. have so far largely taken Israel’s side, as my colleague Robert Kuttner writes, that support is already cracking in some quarters thanks to Israeli brutality. Weeks or months of murderous street-to-street fighting will only sap support further. And if I were a Zionist, I would be distinctly uneasy about the fact that Donald Trump, the leader of an American conservative movement that is increasingly infested with isolationists and gutter antisemites, has been harshly critical of Netanyahu over these attacks. It’s easy indeed to imagine a future right-wing American administration simply deciding that it’s time for “America first,” and for Israel’s vast military and diplomatic aid to be cut off.
Despite “its military prowess, [Israel] remains a small nation, dependent on the support of bigger powers for arms and ammunition,” Ganz writes. “If that goes, it is a trap, a prison, just another forsaken stretch of sand not unlike Gaza.”
America is Israel’s greatest international patron by far, and Biden’s initial support has been celebrated with a large billboard on the main road into Tel Aviv, thus showing how the words of America’s leaders confer legitimacy on Israel’s actions. But indulging Israel’s worst instincts by backing a genocidal war in Gaza would be moral calamity and a strategic disaster for both Israel and the U.S. On such a course, it might not be just Israel that suffers future blowback.
The hesitant turn towards diplomacy and restraint is welcome, but insufficient. The Biden administration would be wise to keep pressuring Israel to stop committing war crimes, and realize that a just, lasting settlement with the Palestinians is the only way to true security.
