by James M Dorsey
Hamas has Israel where it wants it.
The group’s insistence that ending the war be part of any ceasefire deal and refusal to disarm strengthens its position.
To be sure, Israel has severely weakened Hamas militarily. Moreover, Hamas barely scores double digits in Gaza opinion polls.
Hamas may no longer be able to organize an attack on the scale of its October 7, 2023, assault on Israel in which some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed. Even so, Hamas still has a de facto presence in much of Gaza.
Moreover, based on-19th century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz’s principle of “war as a continuation of politics by other means,” Hamas is scoring points in what amounts to a war of attrition as Israel relentlessly batters the Strip.
The group has lured Israel into waging a forever war in which it has only bad options if it continues to insist on destroying the militant group.
In doing so, Hamas, like Israel, has no regard for the horrendous price innocent Gazans are paying for the two sides’ machinations. More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war.
Hamas on Wednesday rejected an Israeli ceasefire proposal because it demanded that the group disarm and did not commit Israel to ending the war and pulling out of Gaza.
In the absence of an end to the Gaza war that recognises Palestinian rights, Israel is moving towards re-occupation of the Strip and/or ethnic cleansing.
Last month, the Israeli military drafted a plan to re-occupy Gaza as a way of defeating Hamas.
The plan envisions corralling the Gazan population into Al Mawasi, a narrow coastal strip that Israel has repeatedly attacked despite declaring it a humanitarian safe zone.
Al Mawasi would keep Palestinians out of Gazan cities, including Khan Younis and Rafah, and what is left of the Hamas tunnels they conceal.
Under the plan, Israel would shoulder responsibility for ensuring access to food and services.
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Unwittingly, US President Donald J. Trump may have played into Hamas’ hands by advocating the resettlement in third countries of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians so that the United States can turn the Strip into a beachfront real estate development.
By advocating resettlement, Mr. Trump took ethnic cleansing of Gaza mainstream and enabled Israel to declare it government policy.
Meanwhile, Hamas, taking a leaf out of the Vietcong’s playbook, is forcing Israel to re-occupy ever more Gazan land by continuously moving into areas Israel evacuates in the belief that it has cleared them of the group’s presence.
The Hamas strategy has forced Israel to reverse its insistence for much of the war that it would not re-occupy the Strip from which it withdrew in 2005 but has blockaded since.
“What we saw in the first 15 months of (the Gaza) war is that when we attack one hideout, they would move to a different one. We understood we have to split the areas so they cannot move from one to another. Otherwise, it’s like water,” said Yaron Buskila, a lieutenant colonel in Israel’s military reserves and chief executive of Israel Defense and Security Forum, a security-oriented think tank.
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The Israeli military has so far divided Gaza, one of the world’s most densely populated territories, into four separate zones, with more to come.
Israeli troops have taken over two-thirds of the Gaza Strip since March 18, when Israel renewed its military action in violation of a ceasefire.
Since then, Israel has moved the population out of 65 per cent of the Gaza Strip to create ever-expanding buffer zones, pressure Hamas to release its remaining hostages abducted during the group’s October 7 attack, instigate anti-Hamas protests, and ultimately surrender on Israel’s terms.
“Many territories are being seized and added to the security zones of the State of Israel, leaving Gaza smaller and more isolated,” said Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz.
Tania Hary, director of Gisha, an Israeli human rights NGO, said the buffer zones occupied 48 per cent of Gaza, while evacuation zones accounted for the remaining 17 per cent from which Israel has removed Palestinians.
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Breaking the Silence, an Israeli NGO founded by military personnel who served in occupied territory, reported that troops in a buffer zone around Gaza City were ordered “to deliberately, methodically and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighbourhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions.”
Breaking the Silence described the buffer zones as a “death zone of enormous proportions.” It quoted a soldier serving in one of the zones as saying his unit was ordered to shoot on sight at anyone within the zone’s perimeter. The soldier said his unit believed there were no civilians in Gaza. Anyone entering the perimeter was considered a terrorist.
Critics charge that Israel hopes that its squeezing of Gazans into ever smaller areas of a territory that 18 months of war has rendered all but uninhabitable, its more than month-long blocking of the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and its killing zones will persuade Palestinians to “voluntarily” leave the Strip.
In the same vein, the Israeli measures could push Gazans beyond the point of no return at which they turn on Israeli troops rather than Hamas.
For its part, Hamas, by standing its ground in the knowledge that Israel will not entertain a ceasefire that has seeds of recognition of Palestinian national rights, believes it is helping Israel dig itself into an ever-deeper hole and raising the price Israel pays for its refusal.
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Already, Israel’s war conduct has severely damaged its international standing, put it at risk of being indicted on charges of genocide in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), elicited International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, and earned it a condemnation in the court of international public opinion.
To be sure, backed by the United States, Israel has so far shrugged off the cost.
The question is for how long it will be able to do so.
If Hamas has learned the Vietnam war’s lessons for insurgent movements, Israel has forgotten the conclusions drawn by its legendary military commander and defence minister, Moshe Dayan, during a two-month reporting stint on the war in 1966 for Israeli newspaper Maariv.
Once in Vietnam, Mr. Dayan recognised the Viet Cong’s strategy and the hollowness of US assertions that, in the words of Haaretz editor-in-chief Aluf Benn, “sound uncannily like IDF (Israel Defence Forces) spokespersons in the current war: enemy body counts, percentage of territory ‘under our control.’”
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Moshe Dayan. Vietnam Diary
Rereading Mr. Dayan’s book on Vietnam, Mr. Benn noted that American generals, like Israeli commanders today, “showcased an aggressive spirit, relying on overwhelming firepower and advanced technology that the enemy didn’t possess, and exhibiting indifference to the ‘collateral damage’ of the Vietnamese civilians, bombed and displaced, in the same way as the IDF high command disregards Palestinian civilian casualties.”
As Israel moves ever closer towards re-occupation of Gaza, Mr. Benn suggested IDF Chief-of-Staff General Eyal Zamir “would do well to read Dayan’s ‘Vietnam Diary’ before giving the order to ‘move in.’ He might learn something about the price of hubris and brutality.”
If Mr. Zamir follows Mr. Benn’s advice, he will discover that one of Mr. Dayan’s main criticisms of America’s conduct in the Vietnam war is particularly relevant to Gaza.
Mr. Dayan argued that lack of intelligence constituted US forces’ most significant operational problem. Unable to distinguish Viet Cong fighters from civilians meant that US bombings missed their targets, killed non-combatants, and drove civilians into the hands of the Communist insurgents.
Much of that is true for Israel in Gaza with one caveat: whether Israel possesses the intelligence may be less relevant than the fact that Israeli political leaders and military commanders propagate the myth that there are no civilians in Gaza, as most recently documented by Breaking the Silence.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.