Three thoughts on Gaza
I'm sorry, but this is what everyone's talking about so it's what I'm thinking about
In no particular order:
We care about this too much
I’m just copying a point made by Matt Yglesias here, but it’s a little bizarre that we spend so much time and energy thinking and arguing about Israel and Palestine. There are historical reasons why this issue occupies so much brain space around the world — we care about it today because we cared about it yesterday, and we cared about it yesterday because we cared about it the day before that, and ultimately it all gets tangled up in weird religious movements and cold war politics that really shouldn’t matter today. But this is all anyone has been able to talk about for the last three weeks, so I’m here to share a few thoughts that are hopefully somewhat original.
But really, if you care about suffering in the world, what’s going on in Sudan right now is worse than what’s going on in Gaza, as terrible as the Gaza situation is. “Wait, what’s going on in Sudan right now?” I hear you asking. Exactly. (It’s a brutal civil war. East Africa is just full of brutal civil wars.)
There’s no Plan A
The last time I wrote about Israel and Gaza, I aligned myself with Team Ceasefire. That’s still basically where I am. But as the pro-ceasefire position has come in for a lot of scorn in recent weeks, I think it’s worthwhile to expand on my thinking a bit.
There are basically three paradigms for how things should go between Israel and Gaza in the coming weeks:
Plan A: Israel narrowly targets Hamas in Gaza, inevitably killing some innocent civilians along the way, but proportionate to its war aim of eliminating the threat from Hamas once and for all. These attacks succeed, and Israel enjoys peace and security on its southern border for the indefinite future, as a more moderate entity gains control of the Gaza strip.
Plan B: Israel conducts a massive, broad-based bombing campaign and subsequent ground invasion against Hamas. Because Hamas is hiding in the civilian population, this results in truly staggering amounts of death among innocent civilians who have nowhere to flee. Many Hamas operatives are killed, but many survive, both in Gaza and around the middle east. The massive civilian casualties drive more Gazans to join up with Hamas or similar terrorist groups, and the aggression against Israel continues more or less uninterrupted.
Plan C: Israel declines to attack Gaza. Hamas “gets away with it,” although the Mossad looks into ways to do surgical assassinations of select leaders. Some leaders are subsequently assassinated; most are not.
And my basic argument is that there is no Plan A. Plan A is a set of desired outcomes. But there are no actions that Israel could undertake right now that would secure those outcomes. I agree — completely! — that Plan A would be best if Israel could do it. They can’t. What will happen is Israel will say “Plan A is our plan,” and then they’ll do Plan B. The real choice that Israel faces is between Plan B and Plan C.
Now, Plan C is bad! Letting Hamas get away with it is bad! But Plan B is worse, because in Plan B (unlike Plan C), tens of thousands of innocent people, a huge number of which are children, get killed, for basically no reason other than to satisfy the need for revenge, to make it so that “Hamas doesn’t get away with it.” Vengeance on Hamas is worth something, but it’s not worth the price in terms of civilian life.
If you think Plan B is better than Plan C, you have very different values than I do, but that’s fine, I guess. Just don’t argue against Plan C by gesturing at Plan A. There is no Plan A.
The War on… Hamas?
One common argument I hear in defense of Plan B is that this is normal military self-defense: Hamas declared war by invading Israel, and now Israel is joining the war, with all the suffering that this inevitably implies. (“War is all hell.”) I’m deeply ambivalent about this argument because I’m unsure how well the conceptual scheme matches the facts on the ground.
If this is a war, who is it a war between? “Israel and Hamas” is the usual answer. But Hamas is not a state. Back during the war on terror, one criticism that was made was that “war on terror” was a misnomer. You can’t declare war on terror. That’s an emotion, or a tactic (terrorism). Those aren’t the kinds of things that can be defeated militarily. They’re not the kinds of things that one can declare war on. Even if we understood that war in narrower terms, as a war on the organization al Qaeda, al Qaeda isn’t a state either. They have no standing army, no capital that could be captured. We could — and did — deploy the military against various al Qaeda members by invading (or conducting unauthorized military operations) in countries where al Qaeda members were hiding (and at least one completely unrelated country), but the conceptual framework of “war” never really fit. In some ways, it feels like that’s why we invaded Iraq. We were promised a war, so we needed a war, so we found a country to invade. (Afghanistan wasn’t enough.)
And all of these points basically apply to Israel’s “war on Hamas.” Hamas isn’t a state. It’s a diffuse terror network. Now you might object that, while Hamas is a diffuse terror network, it’s centered in Gaza. Hell, it’s the government of Gaza. And that’s true, but it’s noteworthy that this isn’t being cast as a war between Israel and Gaza. And I think one reason you don’t hear about “A war between Israel and Gaza” is because Gaza isn’t a state either. Indeed, this is kind of the whole problem!
In some ways, Hamas is the government of Gaza. But in other ways, Israel is the government of Gaza. It feels like we’re pretending that we have a two state solution already, that Israel is one state and Hamas’s Gaza is another state, the army of Gaza invaded the state of Israel, and now the Israeli army is responding, just like in the Six Days War. And that’s not entirely wrong. But it’s just as accurate to say that Hamas is a terrorist organization operating within the borders of greater Israel, and Israel is responding by killing its own citizens in horrific numbers. It’s a bit like if a group of Texan separatists invaded Louisiana and killed over a thousand people, and the US responded by calling up the army and leveling the entire Dallas/Fort Worth area. That would be a crazy way for the US to respond! Now, the situation in Gaza is not exactly like that. But it’s a bit like that.
The not-quite-Israel, not-quite-not-Israel status of the Gaza strip makes it hard to apply the usual categories to understand what’s going on there. So the idea that this is a war between Israel and Hamas doesn’t quite fit. I’m suspicious of the framework. (And even if the framework does apply, I don’t think it provides a reason to prefer Plan B to Plan C.)