"And in fact, because Gaza has no particular religious significance, I think even the most right-wing Israelis have barely expressed interest in this territory qua land."
This isn't correct - the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 was very much pitted against a religious sense of the value of the land of Israel. Broadly the article frames the two conflicts as largely unrelated but the religious rights' feeling of betrayal after the hitnatkut - and their subsequent feelings of vindication - are a big explanatory factor of what is happening here
I don't think the disengagement is discussed enough in terms of the internal trauma it caused within Israeli society... it was a massive deal
Really good post, Matt (if you read these comments) - it is tough to stake out a sensible position in this discourse but you manage it.
One thing I would say though is that the idea that Israel can stand on its own without U.S. support is increasingly less true. That's why the aircraft carriers are there, but it's also true for the military aid that the U.S. routinely provides. Hezbollah really is an enormous threat which even many senior Israeli officials describe as near-existential.
Not to endorse either approach, but for the sake of analysis: might you see the two different outcomes from these two different approaches to these two territorial areas as related? I mean that to say Israel totally withdrew from Gaza and got a steady stream of rockets and a massive ground invasion/slaughter in return. OTOH, Israel’s continual occupation of the West Bank has not allowed the militant groups there to build up any such capacity to launch anything remotely resembling the type of attack Hamas can launch from their de facto sovereign territory. Need Israel have a massive slaughter come from the West Bank to make their intervention justified?
Dumb question: what if Israel paid reparations to displaced Palestinians for all territory they’ve taken post 1948, and leave it at that? Stop building on the West Bank, say they’re finished negotiating. Gaza could use all the money to rebuild.
You find me the Palestinians who were around in 1948 who had property taken from there, maybe. It Israel gets a demilitarized Palestine for it.
Since Palestinians, according to the UN, are the only refugees who pass on refugee status to second, third and fourth generation, not really. The children, grandchildren and great grandchildren should get compensation from the Arab countries that received them and then intentionally restricted them on housing, employment and other rights for pure Machiavellian reasons. Israel absorbed more MENA Jews than Arab countries took Palestinians, and nobody is asking for them to be paid for their stolen property and expulsion.
I wonder if the "justness" of Israel's war in Gaza is really the most salient issue. Is its ground war in Gaza really the most appropriate and wise path for Israel to take, regardless of it's formal "right" to "punish" Hamas.
What does "destroy Hamas" mean? What would that even look like? Israel has not answered that question- and probably doesn't even know.
What happens after Israel returns from Gaza- after spending 2 weeks, months, years-or decades-there? What will have changed? Israel doesn't know. It has no plan for after the "war"- beyond "punish."
What Israel is doing now is seat-of-the-pants revenge- just like we did after 9/11. That might work- but probably won't.
I really hope that Biden comes out and shoots down the idea of US peacekeepers with a firm "F-no" as that's an idea I've seen floated around. It's just a horrendous idea and needs to be nipped in the bud.
> It’s not like Israel is avoiding military targets in favor of shelling a city (something that does happen in wars) or deliberately targeting a civilian population center as a means of psychological warfare (something the United States has done in the past).
It's hard for me to square this statement with their repeated intentional bombing of a refugee camp.
I don't in any way want to minimize what Hamas did, but in the end Israel will have killed civilians, many of them children, many multiples of times what Hamas did. I don't have much of a dog in this fight, but both Hamas and Israel's actions seem pretty awful and unjustifiable to me.
You realize that this "refugee camps" is a dense neighborhood in Gaza in which there were many Hamas targets and infrastructure, yes? Do you think there is any possibility to fight a terrorist organization embedding itself in civilian population except by targeting it where it is? Do you realize that the presence of enemy combatants makes it a military target according to international law?
I recommend this Dispatch episode on international law to help clarify things:
I agree with everything Matt says. I just think the US should pay way less attention to the Middle East and focus instead on Latin America. We had a major hurricane destroy Acapulco (1 million people) and we need major help with our incredibly inept government. I know Matt has written about it, but in the public discourse in the US they just notice when people show up at the border. Send the carrier group down here (with help).
Matt: "But Israel really did try to reach a modus vivendi with Hamas for a long time."
A different view:
"On Aug. 26, [2006] Israel and the Palestinian Authority both accepted a cease-fire agreement after a 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza that left 2,100 Palestinians dead and vast landscapes of destruction behind.
"The agreement calls for an end to military action by Israel and Hamas as well as an easing of the Israeli siege that has strangled Gaza for many years.
"This is, however, just the most recent of a series of cease-fire agreements reached after each of Israel’s periodic escalations of its unremitting assault on Gaza.
"Since November 2005 the terms of these agreements have remained essentially the same. The regular pattern is for Israel to disregard whatever agreement is in place, while Hamas observes it – as Israel has conceded – until a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by even fiercer brutality.
"These escalations are called “mowing the lawn” in Israeli parlance. The most recent was more accurately described as “removing the topsoil” by a senior U.S. military officer, quoted in Al-Jazeera America."
Noam Chomsky, Truthout, 2014
As Chomsky explains, Israel's goal is to separate Gaza from the West Bank, so that any eventual Palestinian state there will be landlocked and isolated.
As for Israel's 2005 withdrawal of its settlements from Gaza, Chomsky quotes Dov Weisglass, the Israeli official in charge of the operation:
“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” Weisglass told Haaretz. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a [U.S.] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”
“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde,” Weisglass added. “It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Matt, for some reason your piece forgets that Israel completely pulled out of Gaza in 2005, handing it over to the PA, and by 2007 Hamas violently took it over in a short civil war. Your plan makes no accommodation for a similar occurrence in the West Bank. As much as it’s a standard self-delusion of progressives to imagine really hard that there is no Hamas, the fact remains that without demilitarization of the West Bank and Gaza being a requirement, it’s an unacceptable security risk to Israel to hand over most of the West Bank on good faith alone. The events of October 7 would have been many times more lethal if Israel followed your plan.
You also forgot to mention the previous sticking points of the status of Jerusalem (should be neutrally administered by a UN force) and the so-called Right of Return (simple, Palestinians return to the Palestinian state).
Lastly, you continue the progressive line of denying Israel military aid, completely ignoring the reality of Iran and Iranian proxies, which are very much engaged in this war. Not a word on Hezbollah’s baseless threat to Israel. Acting like that threat isn’t real, and goes away with a peace deal between Israel and Palestinians is more progressive self-delusion with a strong anti Israel flavor.
if the announcement that the IDF is going to start organizing 'settlers without military training' as a territorial defense force I suspect that this is going to get a lot worse in the West Bank
Israel has universal conscription, though (with an exception for the ultra-Orthodox), so most settlers over age 18 have military training.
But I agree that armed settlers, as settlers, would have worse consequences than arming the same people as part of an IDF unit. Less discipline, more likely to attack on their own initiative, more likely to lead to large-scale violence in the West Bank, and the IDF would join in once it starts.
>What we need to do is admit that we cannot solve this problem and then try to contain the diplomatic blast radius by stepping back from the situation.
The article would be worse for it, but really you could replace the body of the article with the last sentence and it would be solid. There is no solution, because the parties in question fundamentally disagree, and the conflict will continue indefinitely. What more needs to be said?
- I have been told that our “aid” to Israel is money that they then use to buy our weapons. So it’s effectively a subsidy to our military. Is that true?
- Israel does seem to enjoy a very privileged position in our alliance, when it seems to me that they should be a junior partner. Prior to this, Netanyahu declined to support Ukraine and tied itself closer to Russia (I take satisfaction that that has backfired spectacularly). But Israel is the only country where government contractors are forbidden to support BDS — or at least, that is my understanding. They take our money, even if it’s for weapons we already want to sell them, and we should get some say in their policies.
- in terms of leverage, what if the US threatened to withdraw its veto at the UN?
"Prior to this, Netanyahu declined to support Ukraine and tied itself closer to Russia (I take satisfaction that that has backfired spectacularly)"
Russia has a lot of power and influence in Syria and could theoretically make Israel's life miserable on the northern border by turning a blind eye to men and material moving through.
Being that as it may, I don’t see why we don’t force Israel to align with us more explicitly. First and foremost, any alliance should work for us, not the other way around. We are the 500 pound gorilla.
"And in fact, because Gaza has no particular religious significance, I think even the most right-wing Israelis have barely expressed interest in this territory qua land."
This isn't correct - the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 was very much pitted against a religious sense of the value of the land of Israel. Broadly the article frames the two conflicts as largely unrelated but the religious rights' feeling of betrayal after the hitnatkut - and their subsequent feelings of vindication - are a big explanatory factor of what is happening here
I don't think the disengagement is discussed enough in terms of the internal trauma it caused within Israeli society... it was a massive deal
google image search "photos of disengagement from gaza" and it's pretty clear what the dynamic was
Really good post, Matt (if you read these comments) - it is tough to stake out a sensible position in this discourse but you manage it.
One thing I would say though is that the idea that Israel can stand on its own without U.S. support is increasingly less true. That's why the aircraft carriers are there, but it's also true for the military aid that the U.S. routinely provides. Hezbollah really is an enormous threat which even many senior Israeli officials describe as near-existential.
Not to endorse either approach, but for the sake of analysis: might you see the two different outcomes from these two different approaches to these two territorial areas as related? I mean that to say Israel totally withdrew from Gaza and got a steady stream of rockets and a massive ground invasion/slaughter in return. OTOH, Israel’s continual occupation of the West Bank has not allowed the militant groups there to build up any such capacity to launch anything remotely resembling the type of attack Hamas can launch from their de facto sovereign territory. Need Israel have a massive slaughter come from the West Bank to make their intervention justified?
Dumb question: what if Israel paid reparations to displaced Palestinians for all territory they’ve taken post 1948, and leave it at that? Stop building on the West Bank, say they’re finished negotiating. Gaza could use all the money to rebuild.
You find me the Palestinians who were around in 1948 who had property taken from there, maybe. It Israel gets a demilitarized Palestine for it.
Since Palestinians, according to the UN, are the only refugees who pass on refugee status to second, third and fourth generation, not really. The children, grandchildren and great grandchildren should get compensation from the Arab countries that received them and then intentionally restricted them on housing, employment and other rights for pure Machiavellian reasons. Israel absorbed more MENA Jews than Arab countries took Palestinians, and nobody is asking for them to be paid for their stolen property and expulsion.
The worry is that what is happening in the West Bank ultimately metastisizes into something as awful as what is happening in Gaza.
I wonder if the "justness" of Israel's war in Gaza is really the most salient issue. Is its ground war in Gaza really the most appropriate and wise path for Israel to take, regardless of it's formal "right" to "punish" Hamas.
What does "destroy Hamas" mean? What would that even look like? Israel has not answered that question- and probably doesn't even know.
What happens after Israel returns from Gaza- after spending 2 weeks, months, years-or decades-there? What will have changed? Israel doesn't know. It has no plan for after the "war"- beyond "punish."
What Israel is doing now is seat-of-the-pants revenge- just like we did after 9/11. That might work- but probably won't.
I really hope that Biden comes out and shoots down the idea of US peacekeepers with a firm "F-no" as that's an idea I've seen floated around. It's just a horrendous idea and needs to be nipped in the bud.
> It’s not like Israel is avoiding military targets in favor of shelling a city (something that does happen in wars) or deliberately targeting a civilian population center as a means of psychological warfare (something the United States has done in the past).
It's hard for me to square this statement with their repeated intentional bombing of a refugee camp.
I don't in any way want to minimize what Hamas did, but in the end Israel will have killed civilians, many of them children, many multiples of times what Hamas did. I don't have much of a dog in this fight, but both Hamas and Israel's actions seem pretty awful and unjustifiable to me.
You realize that this "refugee camps" is a dense neighborhood in Gaza in which there were many Hamas targets and infrastructure, yes? Do you think there is any possibility to fight a terrorist organization embedding itself in civilian population except by targeting it where it is? Do you realize that the presence of enemy combatants makes it a military target according to international law?
I recommend this Dispatch episode on international law to help clarify things:
https://thedispatch.com/podcast/dispatch-podcast/so-about-international-law/
Also this article by David French comparing to American actions:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/opinion/israel-hamas-isis-gaza.html
I agree with everything Matt says. I just think the US should pay way less attention to the Middle East and focus instead on Latin America. We had a major hurricane destroy Acapulco (1 million people) and we need major help with our incredibly inept government. I know Matt has written about it, but in the public discourse in the US they just notice when people show up at the border. Send the carrier group down here (with help).
If you like this post by MY I suspect you will also like this post by Josh Marshall
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-a-two-state-solution-really-no-longer-possible/sharetoken/urVvvhc5KK2c
"Israel denies Palestinians’ building permits"
My YIMBY eyes narrow.
Matt: "But Israel really did try to reach a modus vivendi with Hamas for a long time."
A different view:
"On Aug. 26, [2006] Israel and the Palestinian Authority both accepted a cease-fire agreement after a 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza that left 2,100 Palestinians dead and vast landscapes of destruction behind.
"The agreement calls for an end to military action by Israel and Hamas as well as an easing of the Israeli siege that has strangled Gaza for many years.
"This is, however, just the most recent of a series of cease-fire agreements reached after each of Israel’s periodic escalations of its unremitting assault on Gaza.
"Since November 2005 the terms of these agreements have remained essentially the same. The regular pattern is for Israel to disregard whatever agreement is in place, while Hamas observes it – as Israel has conceded – until a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by even fiercer brutality.
"These escalations are called “mowing the lawn” in Israeli parlance. The most recent was more accurately described as “removing the topsoil” by a senior U.S. military officer, quoted in Al-Jazeera America."
Noam Chomsky, Truthout, 2014
As Chomsky explains, Israel's goal is to separate Gaza from the West Bank, so that any eventual Palestinian state there will be landlocked and isolated.
As for Israel's 2005 withdrawal of its settlements from Gaza, Chomsky quotes Dov Weisglass, the Israeli official in charge of the operation:
“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” Weisglass told Haaretz. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a [U.S.] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”
“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde,” Weisglass added. “It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Matt, for some reason your piece forgets that Israel completely pulled out of Gaza in 2005, handing it over to the PA, and by 2007 Hamas violently took it over in a short civil war. Your plan makes no accommodation for a similar occurrence in the West Bank. As much as it’s a standard self-delusion of progressives to imagine really hard that there is no Hamas, the fact remains that without demilitarization of the West Bank and Gaza being a requirement, it’s an unacceptable security risk to Israel to hand over most of the West Bank on good faith alone. The events of October 7 would have been many times more lethal if Israel followed your plan.
You also forgot to mention the previous sticking points of the status of Jerusalem (should be neutrally administered by a UN force) and the so-called Right of Return (simple, Palestinians return to the Palestinian state).
Lastly, you continue the progressive line of denying Israel military aid, completely ignoring the reality of Iran and Iranian proxies, which are very much engaged in this war. Not a word on Hezbollah’s baseless threat to Israel. Acting like that threat isn’t real, and goes away with a peace deal between Israel and Palestinians is more progressive self-delusion with a strong anti Israel flavor.
if the announcement that the IDF is going to start organizing 'settlers without military training' as a territorial defense force I suspect that this is going to get a lot worse in the West Bank
Israel has universal conscription, though (with an exception for the ultra-Orthodox), so most settlers over age 18 have military training.
But I agree that armed settlers, as settlers, would have worse consequences than arming the same people as part of an IDF unit. Less discipline, more likely to attack on their own initiative, more likely to lead to large-scale violence in the West Bank, and the IDF would join in once it starts.
>What we need to do is admit that we cannot solve this problem and then try to contain the diplomatic blast radius by stepping back from the situation.
The article would be worse for it, but really you could replace the body of the article with the last sentence and it would be solid. There is no solution, because the parties in question fundamentally disagree, and the conflict will continue indefinitely. What more needs to be said?
A couple questions on this:
- I have been told that our “aid” to Israel is money that they then use to buy our weapons. So it’s effectively a subsidy to our military. Is that true?
- Israel does seem to enjoy a very privileged position in our alliance, when it seems to me that they should be a junior partner. Prior to this, Netanyahu declined to support Ukraine and tied itself closer to Russia (I take satisfaction that that has backfired spectacularly). But Israel is the only country where government contractors are forbidden to support BDS — or at least, that is my understanding. They take our money, even if it’s for weapons we already want to sell them, and we should get some say in their policies.
- in terms of leverage, what if the US threatened to withdraw its veto at the UN?
"Prior to this, Netanyahu declined to support Ukraine and tied itself closer to Russia (I take satisfaction that that has backfired spectacularly)"
Russia has a lot of power and influence in Syria and could theoretically make Israel's life miserable on the northern border by turning a blind eye to men and material moving through.
Being that as it may, I don’t see why we don’t force Israel to align with us more explicitly. First and foremost, any alliance should work for us, not the other way around. We are the 500 pound gorilla.