Gaza’s stubborn facts must be confronted

As both John Adams and Nikita Khrushchev reminded their colleagues, “Facts are stubborn things.” Therefore, in regard to the war in Gaza commentators and policymakers alike must recognize and acknowledge those facts before giving in to hysteria, willful distortions of the record, groupthink, excessive pursuit of national interest or other cognitive failures.

Gaza is a problem, to use the Russian phrase, that is a suitcase without a handle, an issue that is not susceptible to effective management. Nevertheless, that hardly absolves us from thinking coldly about it based on facts even if analysts have disregarded them for too long. 

First, there is a veritable flood of comments from President Biden and others urging Israel to wage war in conformity with humanitarian considerations. There is an equally large number of articles admonishing Israel to formulate an endgame concerning Gaza’s future status after an expected Israeli victory. Much of this advocacy occurs on the basis of Clausewitz’s famous statements on politics being the objective of all strategic military operations.

However, much of this writing apparently ignores long-standing facts that will add to Israel’s burdens and preclude it from reaching its objectives of demolishing Hamas’s military machine and capacity to return to political governance in Gaza. And these facts have long helped make Gaza this suitcase without a handle. 

The harshness of Israeli rule was mitigated by the fact that Hamas workers regularly came to the kibbutzim that they attacked to work and receive military care while producing intelligence for Hamas. Hamas and the West Bank Palestinians have long-been ill-served by a leadership that, since 1947, has refused to accept any offers, made either initially by the United Nations or subsequently the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. 

They have systematically spurned generous offers by Prime Ministers Netanyahu in 1998, Barak in 2000 and Olmert in 2008 with U.S. support. Thus, these leaders, now engulfed in corruption, want a state handed to them on a silver platter.

Second, it is therefore clear that their leaders from 1947 to the present expect their people to die for them rather than to negotiate the process to a self-standing Palestinian political entity. These repeated failures have earned them the contempt and distrust not only of Israel but of Arab states, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf regimes. 

Their leaders’ private comments on Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are often scabrous and unprintable, but they will do nothing to reduce the intensity of the problem. Instead, they insist that this is Israel’s problem and that Israel must solve it without them despite their incitement to flee Israel in 1947-48. They fear a large Palestinian immigration into their countries for security reasons and will therefore resist cooperation with Washington to resist this problem. And they rightly regard Hamas and the Gazan population as proxies for Iran, which they greatly fear. Therefore, little or no help is to be expected from their quarter.

Third, since 1948-49 they have, to paraphrase Yeats, “fed their own and their people’s hearts with fantasies, their hearts have grown brutal on the fare.” Having created the fantasy that this is all Israel’s fault and responsibility, they have created a Frankenstein in the form of their own public, whose opinion terrifies them since they are illegitimate, authoritarian governments.

Seventy-five years of propaganda has demonized Israel, accusing it of genocide. Demonstrations like those we have seen as the result of misinformation or disinformation are widespread and represent a strong domestic check on what leaders understand to be their real interest in recognizing Israel and blocking Iran.

Fourth, and given Israel’s now greatly intensified distrust of any Palestinian would-be regime, it seems unlikely that Israel alone can safely determine the future of Gaza and factor in a wholly uncertain and unpredictable endgame into their strategic planning. Furthermore, Israeli officials are talking of controlling Gaza’s coast and further military non-kinetic operations to create a buffer in postwar Gaza.

In view of this situation, some have advocated a UN takeover of Gaza. But the UN’s record in the Middle East is, to say the least, checkered, and interested actors will likely continue to interfere with or attempt to pressure the UN to advance their particular interests over the overriding necessity of a peaceful entity that can advance a peace agenda with Israel and its neighbors and avoid falling prey to Iran.

Thus, the demands for a clear Israeli statement of an agenda seem to ignore the facts that have made and continue to make Gaza a suitcase without a handle. However well-meaning these proposals are and however consonant they may be with classic military theory, theory is of no value if it disregards the facts. 

Israeli operations must strive to be legitimate, attainable and politically viable, but Israel must deal with realities. Those facts were and remain stubborn and will obstruct any progress towards a lasting and viable solution if we continue to disregard them.

Stephen Blank, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a former professor of Russian national security studies and national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and a former MacArthur fellow at the U.S. Army War College. Blank is an independent consultant focused on the geopolitics and geostrategy of the former Soviet Union, Russia and Eurasia.