I think this is very, very good–Aaronovitch often is.
I think one problem, not his, is that assessing what the IDF ought to do is very, very hard. It’s much easier to decide what its government ought to do–resign–but that won’t happen. Disarming vicious West Bank settlers might be possible, but it means reversing what this government just did, which probably means bringing down a government during wartime, which the Israelis have never done–but maybe they’ll start; this one is loathed by a vast majority–which was recently at war with itself, and may soon be again.
On what the IDF should do: I think Biden has it right. They must destroy Hamas’s military capacity and its terror-backed rule in Gaza while killing as few civilians as is possible, and don’t occupy Gaza. But some, maybe all of this may be impossible, when the hospitals are military bases, the biggest exposed by Amnesty (!) in 2015 as at that time also a Hamas torture chamber for both suspected informers and PA dissidents, when the hospital’s Hamas directors refuse both Israeli incubators and the fuel to run the generators to power them, and who is willing to rule Gaza, even to the point of setting up fair elections? Maybe no one. And how small a number of civilian dead is the smallest possible number given the IDF’s goals and the nature of Hamas? So Biden’s public advice to Israeli government is good, initially ignored, soon in part followed, but the advice does not say precisely how to achieve the good ends he endorses–not his fault, because no one knows.
Some possible good news: Hamas’s ability to hold its ground in and under Gaza City while inflicting catastrophic military losses may have been significantly overstated–but it’s still early days, and then the IDF says it will turn south, where there are also tunnels, and where Hamas ‘fighters’–it is hard to find exactly the right word for them–are almost certainly also moving south. I think about this almost every hour, and I’d love to talk to Michael Walzer about something something he recently wrote–that it is (or must?) always be possible to fight justly. I want to know exactly what that means in this case. If it means “according to the fourth Geneva Convention”, that means the permissible number of civilian dead (“proportionality”) is determined by the attacker. But Walzer also recently wrote that he dislikes the concept of proportionality–and I can probably guess why.
In any case, a fine piece by Aaronovitch.