Early on some people talked about changing algorithms and AI, but I don’t know anything about precisely how IDF calculations and behavior have changed since October 7th. My rough impression, drawn from people who know the country much better than I do, is that the IDF was usually more scrupulous before October 7th than it has often been since, that minimizing civilian deaths is now of less concern to the military, and the details of those deaths is of less concern to other Israelis. Friends who follow Israeli politics closely say that many things do concern and for that matter enrage the electorate: the failures of the IDF before the war, perhaps also during it, the possibility of their government’s strategic vacuity, its apparent cynicism, ultra-orthodox draft evasion and political extortion, also many other things, above all how this war can end with what people at first called “deterrence restored”, but Palestinian civilian casualties unintentionally inflicted while trying to destroy Hamas does not seem to make the list.
Why is this? Among people given to ugly talk, some of whom, arguably neofascists, are in the cabinet, there was some extremely ugly and generally unrebuked (although sometimes disavowed) talk, not always mere talk, e.g. a notorious government minister clearly disinhibited hilltop thugs in the West Bank, and a continuing issue with what our own government considers serial criminality by an ultra-orthodox reserve unit deployed there. But while there was also early talk, probably more serious, of siege tactics, which suggested extraordinary ruthlessness, siege tactics have not been the cause of most of the Gazan deaths to date, which have instead been collateral damage from air and artillery strikes and other fires. If the people who usually know what they are talking about are right, these civilian deaths were more easily tolerated than would once have been the case by those who inflicted them because the stakes suddenly seemed much higher, the enemy suddenly more hated and feared, and perhaps because Israel seemed to have few if any friends left to lose. Because of all these things and especially, I think, the first, the IDF’s calculus of proportionality changed—more on this term of art below.
The normal theory for why proportionality changed is because of hardened Israeli hearts in the wake of specific atrocities October 7th. This feels logical, but suggests an incomplete explanation: vengeful rage. The specific atrocities are invariably repeated by people sympathetic to the Israelis and infrequently repeated by many unsympathetic to them: the rapes followed by murders, the murders followed by rapes, the rape denial by some, the River to the Sea and Intifada chants on October 8th and ever since, other startling cruelties of October 7th, the mutilations, the burnings, some i phone selfies, intercepted chatter about taking sex slaves, some by Hamas and some not, one reported case of boasting about “I got a blonde plump one!”, etc., and at least as importantly, the sheer numbers of victims. A number of astute observers noted that the scale and nature of the atrocities made Israelis feel as if they were living in an updated1903 Kishinev, which meant the whole Zionist project felt undone, and this made almost all Israelis think any polity or organization attempting a neo-pogrom on this scale would have to know that it would not survive, because if it did, Israelis wouldn’t: “deterrence must be restored”. This last was the explanation for harder hearts in the pursuit of what they were quite certain had to be done, for in the minds of Israelis their country exists so that Jews do not live on sufferance, always at risk of the kinds of things that happened on October 7th. Like the Americans were once proclaimed to be, the Israelis are a people dedicated to a proposition, but a grimmer one than ours, and deterrence had to be restored because if it wasn’t they imagined that everything would be lost. And after all, Kishinev, a byword for helplessness, slaughter and torment, only killed 47 Jews. The first estimates for October 7th were 1400, the current one is over 1200, and Hamas has several times since vowed 10,000 October 7ths. Deterrence is not revenge: revenge is imagined, however madly, to make people psychically whole. Deterrence is intended to let the survivors imagine that they will very likely continue living, and people who do not require it are generally those who do not think themselves at much risk from armed and malevolent foreigners.
I think many Israeli hearts were and remain additionally hardened by open support for Hamas in parts of what is taken to be the Left in our country and in Europe—this support is widely reported in the Israeli press—by what is said in marches in the streets of London and other European cities every night, and by what many Israelis think shameless lies from parts of the UN and parts of Doctors without Borders (there are no weapons in or under the Gaza hospitals!) and in my local paper, the New York Times. The Israelis now lurch in and out of thinking they have no friends but increasingly heartless and mendacious enemies, so October 7th made them worse. The first foreign reaction to their worsening did not improve things, then some gross and exultant exaggeration of their worsening—most of all, perhaps, the repeated and now incessant charges of genocide, which the Israelis, like the Genocide Convention, think a crime of intent, and the charges thus a vicious and peculiarly sadistic libel, probably make them care even less about what others think about them, and I think this periodically makes them more brutal, also more artless and more stupid about making their case. It is also worth remembering that we see the CNN and PBS pictures of Gazan children every night, and apparently the Israelis never or at least rarely see that footage, so they do not see all the work of their own hands. They do hear what they know to be odious foreign lies, but they do not see some of the truths we see, and we do not always apprehend their sense of existential threat. The strategy of diabolizing Israel may eventually impose great costs on the country, but it also seems to have first imposed some terrible costs on Palestinian civilians blamelessly and haplessly near what is now assessed to be a sufficiently significant Hamas target, or mistakenly (and perhaps sometimes very carelessly) thought to be so situated.
Now, tactics, and their possible relationship to ethics: if the IDF uses roof knockers and makes robocalls to warn people to evacuate a structure, and they sometimes, maybe often do, they are still trying to observe the new laws of war (we never did this in WWII, in part because we couldn’t, also because the laws were different, although not as different as some nowadays assert, also because we came to care less), but if they do this and there is no consistently safe place to go—which those who misadvised the soon to be bombed may not have known—how much does this count as mitigation? I’m not sure. What if you drop more roof knockers, then more, then more, chivvying Palestinian civilians from place to place, until there seem to be few places you have not yet bombed, and no shelters, but that last because Hamas never built any, reserving all the relevant materials for its own military tunnels, into which civilians are not permitted? Are there UXBs in those already bombed places? Shrapnel? live submunitions (bomblets)? Probably. How many civilians are you willing to kill to get a skilled bombmaker or rocket maker or senior commander? Was it once none, then 3, and is it now 100? Perhaps sometimes 250? Is that an intolerable increase? Almost certainly yes, if it is a “commander”, undefined, certainly not in a horrible possible (even likely) future if it is an Iranian fitting a different kind of warhead onto an IRBM, and then there are hard cases in between. After all, Hamas again and again vows more, vastly more October 7ths, the Israelis believes them—they’d be fools not too—and when proportionality means averting that, the number goes up—but what does “averting” really mean?
When Hamas was much weaker one kind of risk seemed tolerable and thus required, but on October 6th of 2023 the same assumption of great weakness was wrong and the underestimate had a ghastly effect, because Hamas controlled a de facto state and was infinitely more capable than the IDF and Israeli government imagined. Now it is May 2024 and many Gazans are dead, no one knows exactly how many, and the IDF says that 14,000 of the dead had been Hamas combatants, which may or may not be right. Whatever remains of Hamas—four “brigades”? four battalions?—still vows to inflict 10, 100, 10,000 October 7ths. What is the IDF obliged to do now? What is it obliged not to do? Although it sounds very odd, even perverse, to put it this way, I think this partly depends on what it is capable of doing. Hamas no longer possess 450 miles of tunnels under densely populated urban terrain and 30,000 trained combatants committed to a genuinely genocidal death cult, but it retains some of each—no one knows how many or how much—and seems wholly undeterred by the misery and violence the IDF has and will inflict on Gazan civilians, whom Hamas has resolutely refused to protect. So what is a lawfully proportionate loss of civilians’ lives—deaths unintended but unavoidable—if the IDF can, or if it cannot, guarantee that it can destroy that threat?
Under the laws of war as both the United States and Israel have traditionally understood them, proportionality was and is determined by the urgency of the military goal one may reasonably think can be achieved. Reprisal, an older concept, meant restoring the laws of war by breaking them in a controlled way to punish their breach and thus restore their sway. It meant one only killed (approximately) equal numbers. Under the 1949 Geneva Convention—the one we signed, also the one Israel signed—proportionality is in the first instance determined by the belligerent, so destroying the Hamas described above may justify very distressing numbers of dead civilians, and the Hamas described above is very like the one described by the Hamas official who recently asserted that after its inevitable victory Hamas will kill all Israel combatants—which may mean a million—and on past form rape and torture a number of the rest before (in this current pledge) expelling them, and enslave some, for a while, as technical specialists. I can think of no reason to doubt that some in Hamas really believe this both desirable and in the long run possible, although we may very reasonably doubt the latter—but not the will to keep trying. But barring a war of extermination, which the IDF is not going to wage, it is scarcely clear how Hamas can be destroyed, or even expelled from Gaza, which means the IDF will kill more masses of civilians, Hamas will survive and rebuild, and the violence used against it, justified by proportionality only if it might reasonably have been expected to do one of these things, cannot be justified.
From one perspective the situation now looks hopeless: if Hamas cannot be totally destroyed in or expelled from Gaza without unacceptable civilian losses, or prevented from rebuilding if it remains, the Israelis have to think very hard about what can be achieved to make themselves as safe as possible from a revivified Hamas, and there is no sign that Netanyahu’s government has done this. They cannot do nothing; they owe their own citizens much more than that. But what they have a right to do in part depends on what they can do. In normal life, even in what one might in one strained and specialized sense of the word call a normal war, it’s the other way around. But Hamas is not an ordinary opponent.
Perturbingly, recent Palestinian polling has for a while shown that although Gazans do not all love Hamas, or the current consequences of its war, a very large percentage of them think that the methods used on October 7th were justified, apparently because those methods have put the cause of Palestinian statehood back on the political agenda. These polling results, too, have probably made the Israelis worse, since the Israelis think it shows that the Gazans are worse, thus even less worth trusting with a state (that unparalleled instrument for mobilizing violence), although they do not seem to be pondering the possibility that this Israeli government’s refusal of any commitment toward Palestinian statehood, and the results of their new calculus of proportionality, may have helped make the Gazans worse, since there is some evidence that Hamas’s popularity has actually risen in Gaza along with Gaza’s destruction (and also some evidence pointing the other way). So it would be a mistake to say that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have the power to affect their own fates: they can both make things worse, and have.
But if Biden succeeds in putting Palestinian statehood back on the agenda and this Israeli government falls, both of which seem quite possible, since the Saudis are being eerily flexible and Netanyahu’s government is detested by eighty percent of the electorate, a great deal may change, including the apparent wisdom of hopelessness. If the offer Biden has gotten out of Netanyahu, which includes a forty-day truce*, is accepted by Hamas, Netanyahu’s government may fall, because the war that sustains it will be in abeyance long enough for that to (possibly) happen. If the government does not fall within those forty days it may still be difficult for it to resume the war with an offensive that at likely dreadful cost (and probably no redeeming result) takes Rafah. A slow grinding and inconclusive campaign or no campaign or a continuing truce all provide more time for the very widespread Israeli disgust with this government to bring it down, and if that happens…no one knows what will then happen, but it is unlikely to be something worse than what has happened since October. Netanyahu’s vows to take Rafah come what may is possibly a negotiating tactic with his own coalition partners, or with Hamas, or with the Americans, or even with the Saudis, or maybe with all four, or maybe just bluster and stall while he waits for something to turn up—another Iranian missile barrage?—and either way, these vows won’t matter if his government falls. Biden, reliably reviled for his fecklessness, wickedness and uselessness while doing a remarkably good job, is at it again.
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*Postscript: A Lebanese newspaper has published what it says is the text of the deal Israel has agreed to, and the truce, in three stages would last 126 days, i.e., more than three times as long as previoulsy reported. An Israeli paper, which reports this, also says Hamas has rejected the deal, and is demanding more, bur Blinken is saying the onus for failure will be on Hamas. There is also an allegation that Netanyahu may not have formally accepted the deal, also in the paper (the Times of Israel), although his negotiators have, and Blinken seems to think Israel has accepted the deal.