Oct 7, 2023, is a date that will forever haunt Israel. The events of that day were grisly: Hamas carried out a vile attack on Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis and taking another 251 hostage. But Hamas’s attack soon led to far greater atrocities, with Israel’s retaliation against Hamas devolving into a prolonged war of unimaginable savagery in Gaza.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu started the war in Gaza without any realistic vision of how to end it. His chief concern was protecting his fragile coalition government – which depends on the support of far-right religious zealots – and shielding himself from being tried on corruption charges.
So, while Israeli troops reduced Gaza’s cities to rubble, Netanyahu also launched an all-out assault on Israel’s laws and institutions, all in the name of achieving “total victory” over Hamas – which, from the Netanyahu government’s perspective, appears to be synonymous with Palestine.
Two years later, Israel can hardly be considered victorious. At least 60,000 Palestinians are dead, with even the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) admitting that 53,000 had died as of May, and those who remain in Gaza are enduring a severe and escalating humanitarian crisis, which has drawn increasingly sharp condemnation from a growing share of the international community. Meanwhile, Israeli society is deeply fractured, and the underpinnings of its democracy have been shattered, perhaps irreparably.
No student of history
There is some irony in the fact that the Israeli leader who opened Pandora’s Box in Gaza is the son of an acclaimed historian. Admittedly, Benzion Netanyahu – who studied the end of Jewish life in medieval Spain through the lens of antisemitism, and regarded Jewish history as a series of holocausts – was something of a fatalist maverick. But his son has shown little interest in understanding history at all – only in using it to advance his political goals and interests.
To justify his opposition to constructive Western engagement with Iran, Netanyahu compared former US president Barack Obama’s negotiation of an agreement in 2015 to limit Iran’s nuclear programme to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1938. No matter, apparently, that Israel’s own security establishment strongly supported the Iran nuclear deal.
To justify his ultimate goal of wiping out the Palestinian national movement, Netanyahu has even gone so far as to exculpate Adolf Hitler for coming up with the idea of exterminating Europe’s Jewry, instead blaming Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husseini for planting the idea in Hitler’s mind.
He has also likened Hamas’s Oct 7 massacre to Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 – an event that led to the obliteration of Japanese cities less than four years later.
Netanyahu is hardly the first world leader to demonstrate the dangers of historical ignorance. When political scientist Graham Allison and historian Niall Ferguson proposed establishing a Council of Historians to advise US presidents, they cited the profound ignorance that shaped former president George W Bush’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq.
Allison and Ferguson also criticised Obama’s “inattention” to Ukraine’s “deep historical relationship” with Russia, which led him to “underestimate the risks” of the country’s pursuit of closer ties with Europe.
Unlike Bush, who never pretended to be a scholar of any kind, Obama paired his historical ignorance with a certain intellectual arrogance, exemplified by his dismissive comments about the chief architect of America’s Cold War strategy, George F Kennan. “I don’t really even need (Kennan) right now,” he said, two months before Russia annexed Crimea.
Conversely, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger was a skilled practitioner of what Allison and Ferguson call “applied history”. He drew on the past to guide present decisions, without becoming hostage to potentially misleading historical comparisons. (One would not want to treat a housecat like a tiger, or vice versa.)
The peace agreements that followed the Napoleonic Wars, for example, taught him that an international order can be stable only if all major players view it as legitimate.
A hard-nosed realist, Kissinger concerned himself with the Palestinians’ plight only to the extent that it had the potential to destabilise the Middle East; the moral aspirations or legal rights of a suppressed people were irrelevant to him. He was no fan of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), let alone the militant Hamas.
Since he did not believe that an agreement between Israel and the PLO was feasible, he advocated the formation of a Palestinian-Jordanian confederation – a vision with enduring relevance. For Kissinger, all that mattered was achieving a stable balance among the region’s major powers.
No eternal enemies
Kissinger’s bloodless realism enabled him to draw a historical lesson that political leaders, and even some historians, tend to miss: no two actors are destined to remain adversaries forever. The key is ensuring that wars do not outlast their usefulness – which for Kissinger meant their capacity to create diplomatic opportunities and enable geopolitical rebalancing.
In the 1970s, the US was forced to admit that the continued pursuit of victory in Vietnam would lead to endless volatility and bloodshed. Military surges were failing to alter the situation on the ground, partly because the setting did not permit the kinds of manoeuvre warfare to which America’s conventional military was accustomed, and partly because the enemy – motivated by deep hatred for the invader – had little to lose.
Today, a half-century after the US accepted military defeat, it can claim victory in the diplomatic and economic domain. Vietnam is practically a US ally, and China, which once aided North Vietnam in its fight against “American imperialism,” is seen as the principal threat to Vietnam’s security.
But even when “total victory” is feasible, it is likely to be short-lived. Israel’s “total victories” in the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1948 and 1967, as well as the 1956 war against Egypt, served only to intensify its enemies’ desire for revenge.
That is why Kissinger halted the 1973 Yom Kippur War before Israel’s military could starve Egypt’s Third Field Army and advance to Cairo: he knew this would likely preclude lasting peace. Thanks in no small part to his shrewdness, Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1979.
Narrative defeats
Total victory is a delusion, because, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch explains in his book The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, the “losers” never accept the narrative of defeat.
Instead, they rewrite their histories, generating “myths” that glorify their pasts and justify their losses. Military defeat becomes a symbol of cultural and moral superiority.
In wars – particularly asymmetric ones – moral assessments of the conflict can be as important to the outcome as bombs. In Vietnam, US strategists called for merciless bombings and the targeting of infrastructure.
But this strategy not only yielded diminishing military returns; it also alienated US citizens and allies. The US lost the Vietnam War on America’s university campuses and in the court of Western public opinion before it yielded on the battlefield.
Israel has been making the same mistake for almost two years now. Its military has sought to crush Hamas by seizing territory, destroying homes and hospitals, and preventing humanitarian aid – including food – from entering Gaza.
But, after a two-year onslaught, Hamas’s military power, though much diminished, has not been eliminated, and the group still resists the US and Israel’s attempt to dictate the conditions for ending the war. It has not even tempered its demands.
Netanyahu should have known. It was not just the Russian winter that doomed the Nazis’ invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941; it was also Joseph Stalin’s ability to send a seemingly endless supply of troops into battle.
Today, Hamas has proven capable of replenishing its ranks through forced recruitment or with promises of payment in food and money. These recruits do not need extensive training before they join the fight; they only need to learn how to fire an RPG at Israeli tanks before fleeing into the nearest tunnel.
If Hamas’s resilience is not enough to destroy the morale of Israeli soldiers, the global backlash against Israel surely could be. Suicides are on the rise within the IDF. Netanyahu has apparently failed to grasp that modern wars are fought on many fronts, including in global public fora and the chaotic vortex of social media.
And Israel’s losses in these arenas have been decisive: Hamas, the orchestrator of one of the most atrocious terror attacks in recent memory, has become an emblem of heroic resistance.
Israelis used to boast that their wars would be studied in military academies. But any scholarly examination of the current war in Gaza will seek to discern not what Israel did right, but rather how Hamas dragged the country into the longest war in its history.
How did the weakest link in the “ring of fire” surrounding Israel manage to inflict heavy casualties and massive economic costs on the country, secure the release of high-level Palestinian prisoners, splinter Israeli society, destroy Israel’s international reputation, and disrupt the normalisation of its ties with Saudi Arabia?
The answer might lie partly in Hamas’s status as a non-state actor. Sovereignty comes with certain limits. Even a radical regime like Iran’s must exercise some restraint, because it needs a functioning economy and some level of international legitimacy to remain in power.
Had Iran suffered hundreds of thousands of civilian and military casualties in a war – the proportional equivalent of the total in Gaza – its regime likely would have collapsed.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah is subject to many of the same constraints. Israel managed to eliminate its leadership and destroy much of its arsenal, but it defeated Hezbollah partly because Hezbollah is also a Lebanese political party, with representatives in Parliament and in the Cabinet. It could not afford to expose Lebanon to continued Israeli air strikes.
Hamas, in contrast, is free of the constraints of statehood, making it much more difficult to deter. Planners of the Oct 7 massacre surely knew that Israel would respond unforgivingly, and that Palestinian civilians would be caught in the crossfire.
But they also knew that their own fighters would remain shielded in tunnels, with ample food, and that any civilian suffering wrought by Israel would ultimately help their cause, by causing the world finally to turn against their hated occupier.
Moussa Abu Marzouk, a top Hamas official, was explicit about it. Gaza’s vast underground tunnel network is for the protection of the terror group’s members, he said, while civilians should be taken care of by the United Nations and Israel.
Out, damn spot
Even if Hamas is ultimately “defeated,” the blow it has dealt to Israel amounts to a psychological victory that will remain etched in the collective memory of the Palestinian people for a long time to come.
As long as Israel insists on maintaining its occupation of Palestinian lands, it will be forced to live by the sword. Constant vigilance – including constant, intrusive surveillance of the occupied population – will be its only option.
Conversely, an Israeli military “victory” would contain a staggering moral defeat. The ethical scars left on Israel from carrying out massive, biblical-scale attacks in Gaza, killing tens of thousands of civilians, including children, will take years or decades to fade, if they ever do.
When some Israeli government officials – albeit largely political clowns with no executive responsibility – issue calls for extermination and ethnic cleansing, these atrocities invite accusations of genocide.
Relations between Jews and Palestinians resemble those in the Balkans. These are collisions of entrenched national narratives, bitter contests over centuries-old territorial claims, and clashes between religious and ethnic communities in the same impoverished geography. As HH Munro put it, the people in these places “produce more history than they can consume locally”.
But could the people who endured the Holocaust really be committing genocide, the most heinous of crimes? For all its horrors, Gaza is not Auschwitz, a factory of death where the Nazis systematically killed thousands of Jews each day.
None of Israel’s wars – not even the current war in Gaza, which is undoubtedly marred by war crimes and crimes against humanity – compares to the industrialised extermination of European Jewry that took place during World War II.
But the modern legal definition of genocide focusses not on the number killed or the methods used, but on whether the perpetrator has demonstrated the intent to destroy a national or ethnic group.
In Srebrenica, “only” 8,000 Bosnian Muslim civilians were killed, yet the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ruled it a genocide. Whether Israel meets this standard remains up for debate. Even if the country avoids a genocide conviction at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, however, the stigma will remain.
It is painful to watch how desensitised most Israelis have become to the atrocities their military is committing in their name. While some do continue to protest their government’s actions, demanding that it shift its focus to securing the release of the remaining hostages, the response falls far short of the demonstrations in, say, the US and France following revelations of their troops’ barbarism in Vietnam, Iraq, and Algeria. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “it was not their violence, but ours turned back,” which forced the French to leave Algeria.
A key reason for this difference might be the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which, to most Israelis, appears to have outlasted every possible political solution. The result, which Oct 7 seemed to confirm, is an existential choice: us or them.
Moreover, Israelis have been loosely accused of genocide before. The British author John le Carré did so during the First Lebanon War in 1982. During the Second Intifada in 2002, the Nobel laureate novelist José Saramago compared the battle for Jenin, in the West Bank, to Auschwitz.
Arguably, no conflict generates as much international moral outrage – a reflection not only of the scale of the Palestinian tragedy, but also of the fact that Jews are its perpetrators.
For Western observers, the conflict is not some distant problem. It is not just another religious or ethnic struggle in the Middle East, like those in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Yemen. Palestine stands at the centre of the West’s collective memory; its history and holy shrines are central in the lives of hundreds of millions around the world.
The West’s attitude towards Palestine’s agony is rooted also in the unresolved dilemma – with all the associated guilt – created by the Holocaust, meaning that the Israel-Palestine conflict retains a prominent place in the West’s collective conscience. As the Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex was reported to have said, the Germans will “never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Nor would the Europeans for that matter.
This dynamic of the reversal of Holocaust roles – the idea that Israel is replicating Nazi Germany’s crimes – is now playing out again. Its recurrence helps to explain why, as journalist Joyce Karam observed in 2014: “Muslim killing Muslim or Arab killing Arab seems more acceptable than Israel killing Arabs.”
None of this justifies Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. On the contrary, the time has come for Israel to cut its strategic and moral losses.
The last colonial power
No occupation can last forever. From France to the UK, colonial powers eventually recognised that they were caught in a spiral of diminishing returns – and abandoned the project of empire.
Today, Israel stands as the last “white” power ruling over a subjugated people, eroding their rights and seizing their land, and Palestine is the last nation struggling for independence from its occupier.
But Palestine is not an overseas colony. Its geographical proximity – the historical homeland abutting the mother state – raises practical risks and fuels Jewish supremacism and Israeli theocratic fascism.
This, too, fits a historical pattern. Land empires, like those built by China, Germany, and Russia, have often been characterised by rising tyranny at home and a sense of racial superiority, fuelled by the imperial power’s fear of revolt by its subjects and invasion by its rivals.
While maritime empires, like those of Britain and France, also carried out considerable violence against the communities they colonised, this was not accompanied by the emergence of tyrannical regimes at home.
A key lesson is that ending the occupation of Palestinian lands will be impossible, unless Israel’s authoritarian government is removed. The eternal war against the Palestinians has become a “rising yield” project for Netanyahu’s regime, which may well even use the war as a pretext to postpone the next election. As long as Netanyahu remains in power, the deepening of the occupation is a foregone conclusion.
The Gaza war has served as a smokescreen behind which the West Bank has been turned into the Wild East, a place where violent settlers have been uprooting and expelling Palestinians from their fields and homes with the government’s connivance.
A new Middle East
Wars often produce unintended consequences, and as Kissinger pointed out, not all of them are negative. When Israel launched its counteroffensive in Gaza, it did not anticipate how dramatically the region would shift.
The IDF managed to break the Iranian-led “ring of fire” by bringing to bear a wide range of military capabilities, from intelligence to air power. Now, Israel and the US must choose: nudge Iran towards tactical reconciliation with the West or push the regime to accelerate its nuclear programme.
Israel did not anticipate that its rapid destruction of Hezbollah’s military capabilities would create the conditions for Lebanon to disarm the group and reclaim its sovereignty as a state with one government and one army. Nor did it foresee the fall of the Assad family’s Ba’ath regime in Syria. Israel now has an opportunity – credible, though uncertain – to advance a new peace in the Levant.
Finally, Israel did not expect that Hamas, an ideological enemy of the two-state solution, would place that solution back at the top of the global agenda. If Israel continues to eschew a political solution, Palestinians will continue to use every lever at their disposal to derail Israel’s dream of regional peace.
A more stable, peaceful Middle East is possible. But it cannot be built without an Israeli government that recognises when war has outlived its usefulness.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, is vice-president of the Toledo International Center for Peace.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.