Gaza war reveals limits of military power

If the fact that the war in Gaza just passed the ten-month mark this week says anything to us at all, it says that the grandiloquent proclamations by Israel about “total victory” have been all along just pie in the sky talk.

The fact also says, even more tellingly, that this chimerical, wished-for victory is not, according to sundry experts, including Kurt Campbell, Chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, “likely or possible” in this war — not now and not in the distant future.

Though in this war — a war it has launched as if propelled by forces of primeval vengeance and anarchic unreason — in annihilating Hamas, Israel has succeeded in annihilating the lives of tens of thousands of Gazan men, women and children as in annihilating Gaza itself as a place fit for human habitation, where depopulated rubble, thanks to repeated bombing strikes, keeps being turned daily into more depopulated rubble.

This kind of devastation is responsive to the unhinged rhetoric mouthed by extremist Israeli leaders and macho-messianic settlers urging their military forces to “bomb them back to the Stone Age”, a fate originally wished on the Vietnamese people by retired US Air Force General Curtis Le May in 1962.

Little room for dissent

Look, you and I may not be enamoured of Hamas, nor inclined to carry a torch for its ideology, its tactics, or its political program. The organisation is widely criticised for its oppressive governance and violent strategies that have done little to improve the lives of the people in Gaza.

As a governing authority, Hamas has often demonstrated a dismal record, focusing more on military posturing than on genuine efforts to uplift the population it claims to represent. In fact, over the years, I have written numerous columns that harshly criticise the organisation’s excesses, from its human rights violations to its authoritarian rule, which leaves little room for dissent or freedom.

Look, you and I may not be enamoured of Hamas, nor inclined to carry a torch for its ideology, its tactics, or its political program. The organisation is widely criticised for its oppressive governance and violent strategies that have done little to improve the lives of the people in Gaza.

As a governing authority, Hamas has often demonstrated a dismal record, focusing more on military posturing than on genuine efforts to uplift the population it claims to represent. In fact, over the years, I have written numerous columns that harshly criticise the organisation’s excesses, from its human rights violations to its authoritarian rule, which leaves little room for dissent or freedom.

Hamas’s handling of Gaza has been catastrophic, turning the area into a tightly controlled enclave where dissent is swiftly crushed, and political opponents are often met with imprisonment or worse. The group’s emphasis on armed resistance over diplomacy has only exacerbated tensions and suffering, leaving ordinary Gazans caught in the crossfire.

But at the end of the day, you, again like me, have to admit this: what Israel is doing in Gaza in the name of ‘self-defence’ is both outrageous and disproportionate. Israel’s military response, characterised by relentless bombings and a crippling blockade, inflicts untold suffering on the civilian population. Entire neighbourhoods in Gaza have been reduced to rubble, infrastructure obliterated, and basic human necessities like water, electricity, and medical supplies have become luxuries. The

Sad for Palestinians

A report issued as far back as February by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, known as the Annual Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, expressed doubts about Israel’s ability to fully destroy Palestinian resistance.

In it we read: “Israel will probably face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralise [Hamas’s] underground infrastructure, which will allow insurgents to hide, regain strength and surprise Israeli forces” — an assessment that recalls the observation made by French president Emanuel Macron, also early on in the conflict, when he opined at a press conference in December, held on the sidelines of the UN’s COP28 climate talks in Dubai, that achieving “the total destruction of the Palestinian group “ would mean “the war will last ten years”.

Then on April 22, the New York Times quoted Douglas London, a retired CIA officer who reportedly spent 34 years at the agency, as saying: “Palestinian resistance to Israel ... is an idea as much as it is a physical, tangible group of people. For as much damage as Israel might have inflicted on Hamas, it still has capability, resilience, funding and a long line of people most likely waiting to sign up and join after all the fighting and all the destruction and all the loss of life”.

And finally, on June 20, Israel Defense Forces spokesman, Admiral Daniel Hagari, was quoted by reporters virtually repeating London’s observation. “The business of destroying Hamas, making Hamas disappear, it’s simply throwing sand in the eyes of the public”, he said. “Anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong”.

However what makes this moment sad for Palestinians is that they have today no political leaders worthy of the name who are out there speaking for them on the world stage and, more importantly, helping them survive the strain of going through a traumatic period with no parallel in their modern history, save perhaps for the period when those catastrophic events, known collectively in Palestinian vernacular as the Nakba, took place in 1948.

But then who said that the struggle for freedom by a disenfranchised people like the Palestinians — a people with few resources at their command, armed only with their moral claim to being the injured party in the dispute — is not always akin to pushing a big rock up a steep hill?

— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile