As the rockets again begin to fall on Israel after what looks like yet another Hamas-violated case-fire, the words of the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, come to mind. In his classic On War (1838), he said that the goal of war is “compulsory submission of the enemy to our will”, resulting in his complete disarmament [through surrender or destruction]. But, Clausewitz adds, for civilized States, war is never an end in itself—it is [a famous formulation] “an extension of politics by other means”, an observation he qualifies by noting that war must always be subordinate to State policy.
War itself, the realm of sheer force, may at times be necessary, and even heroic, but it is ultimately irrational and subject to unintended consequences and accidents. Its morality issues not from its own essence, which is violence, but from the purpose to which it is subordinated. Given this, it must, Clausewitz holds, never be allowed to dominate, or to replace, rational State goals [policy].
Democratic Jewish Israel, a sophisticated, modern Western state, has since its inception in 1948 sought to live in peace in its region. It has repeatedly faced, and defeated, autocratic Arab regimes seeking its destruction, and, as a result, there are today stable peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. Other ongoing state enemies, like Syria and Iraq, are no longer threats, as they are disintegrating, although Israel’s main enemy, the Islamist mullah-led, and potentially nuclear Iran, is not.
Israel has also defeated Arab state-backed Islamic terrorist movements, from the Fedayeen to Arafat’s PLO to the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah. Today, of course, it once again faces Iran-backed Sunni Hamas, this following two preceding Gaza wars, in 2009 and 2012.
To put the current Gaza-Hamas issue in perspective, we must note its context: the complete failure of the so-called Arab Spring: the overthrow of the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, with the accession of General al-Sissi as President and the suppression of the Moslem Brotherhood; the deepening Syria civil war, (approaching 200,000 dead); the dismemberment of Shiite-dominated Iraq (with the rise of the Islamic State Sunni terrorists, and the now Islamist-threatened autonomy of the Kurds); and the increasing chaos and anarchy of post-Khadafi Libya.
Strategically, Israel—the strongest economy in the M.E., a leading world high technology power—is the regional hegemon, with the most powerful [and nuclear-armed] army in the region, one of the three or four finest militaries in the world.
There are only two major flies in Israel’s M.E. ointment: the drive of genocidal Shiite fundamentalist Iran—Hamas’ key supporter–to nuclear capacity, and under Barack Hussein Obama, the withdrawal of the US, Israel’s former closest ally, from the M.E. (seen in Syria and Iraq and in the Obama Administration’s clearly negative relation to Netanyahu and Israel) and, outside the region, from Afghanistan.
(And while it is true that Turkey, Islamicized under the antisemitic Erdogan, supports hams, while Qatar, the tiny but oil-rich Gulf state (owner, note, of Al-Jazeera TV), bankrolls it, they aren’t a major threat to Israel per se. Qatar is too small, too marginal, while Sunni Turkey has hands full with Kurds, and fears Iran.
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Hamas, from a Clausewitzian perspective, is an atavistic survival, a tiny terrorist reactionary-Islamist non-State, a tribe with rockets, motivated by an unquenchable hared of Jews and of Jewish Israel. Unprovoked (Israel, after all, evacuated Gaza in 2005), it nevertheless, seeming irrationally, attacks Israel (this is the third major Gazan war, after all)
Why attack Israel, and what can it possibily hope to achieve? First, one must underline here Hamas’ sheer nihilistic hatred of “the Zionist entity”, and its “Covenant” ‘s call for the destruction of Israel. Killing Jews is its Islamist stock in trade: “you love life, we love death”, and “martyrdom”, the highest virtue, is a dearly-sought apotheosis. Hamas (like the other jihadi groups, Al-Qaeda, al-Nusra Front, Islamic State [ISIS], Boko Haram, the Taliban, etc., are essentially Jew-, US-, and West-hating Islamonazis [a useful descriptor, as it echoes the very real Nazi links forged with radical Islam in the Middle East before and during World War II].
Second, a key motivating for its rocket and tunnel attacks, which sparked the Third Gazan War, is the fact that its political-economic position in Gaza recently has been declining.
Hamas, a faction of the Palestinian Authority, came to power in Gaza after the Sharon pull-out in 2005, the ensuing American-demanded election there, which it won, and a bloody coup d’etat against the P.A. and its President, Mahmoud Abbas, in 2006).
Backed by Iran (which also controls the Shiite Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon), its fiscal support from Teheran [who also supply its long-range rockets] has been declining. Sunni Hamas supports anti-Assad Islamic fighters in Syria, where Teheran supports Assad, which has angered Teheran, reducing aid to Hamas. Hence, recently, Hamas has been unable to pay its 43,000-strong Gaza bureaucracy (the need for funds being the key factor driving Hamas’ recent pre-Gazan crisis re-alliance with the hated Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority].
Renewed violent “resistance” against the “occupation” (though, again, there’s been no “occupation” since 2005), Hzmzs hinks, revives popular Islamist support in Gaza, raises Hamas’ profile in large parts of the Arab-Muslim world, and, importantly, can secure new or additional regional funding (e.g., Qatar, Turkey, the European Union—but not, note, from post-Morsi Egypt or anti-Iranian Saudi Arabia).
But defeating Israel militarily, impossible in any case, isn’t in fact the primary goal of terrorist Hamas’ “asymmetrical warfare”. Its use of civilian human-shields, indiscriminate rocketing of Israeli towns and cities, its elaborate cross-border attack tunnels for assaulting kibbutzim and towns within Israel, and its placing of weapons in and near domestic homes and hospitals to ensure Palestinian civilian casualties, is done precisely to attract Israeli counter-attack. Despite Israel’s remarkable attempts to limit casualties, the inevitable graphic scenes of Palestinian civilian deaths and injuries are the life’s blood of Hamas’ strategy, key to attracting an only too-willing media which in turn conveys internationally its anti-Israel “narrative”.
The initial goal here is to rally its Gazan constituents, to attract Arab and Ejuropean support, and to delegitimate Israel in the “international community”.
In the current war, the tactic resulted in the immediate UN Human Rights Council’s condemnation of Israel and call for an inquiry/report; in the unbalanced, prosecutorial reportage of the BBC and the US TV networks’; and in US Secretary of State Kerry’s frenzied, inept truce efforts which, bringing pro-Hamas Turkey and Qatar into play, alienated Egypt and treated Israel and terrorist, human-shield-wielding Hamas as moral and political equals.
But a second major, and larger, goal is to put pressure on Arab regimes and other Islamic movements to intervene by stirring up the Arab “street”, thus destabilizing the regional political situation in the hope of triggering a larger conflict, one which could defeat Israel militarily and even destroy the Jewish state.
Here, however, and unlike the first two Gazan Wars, the changed regional picture does work against Hamas’ overarching strategy of destabilization. There is no possibility now of Egyptian, or of Syria-Iraqi (let alone Saudi Arabian) aid and intervention—Hezbollah in Lebanon has 60,000 rockets, yes, and like Hamas it depends on Iranian support; but Hezbollah, like its backer, Iran, has its hands full in Syria. Iran, moreover, is preoccupied by its puppet Maliki’s impending collapse in Iraq, and must also be careful insofar as the ongoing US-led 5+1 negotiations over Teheran’s nuclear drive is concerned.
Still, there remains the possibility of a two-front war should Israel respond to the current ceasefire breakdown by a push to occupy Gaza and root out Hamas once and for all. This might see Iran—as civilian casualties again mount, and counting on a newly-re-energized and “outraged” “international community”–ordering Hezbollah to attack Israel from the North.
Still, barring the unforeseen, it looks as if Hamas, isolated and badly judging the regional dynamics, has badly miscalculated this time around, is on the verge of losing the Third Gazan War, without hope of significantly recuperating its position or achieving Its major demand—lifting the “siege” by Egypt and Israel along its blockaded borders.)
If this view is correct, Hamas’ seeming miscalculation makes Clausewitz’s point—war, subject to unforeseen developments and accidents, is ultimately irrational; betting on it alone to win a political conflict can be a mug’s game. Which is why it must always be, when a state feels compelled to resort to it, a means to a rational policy end, and never the end in itself.
But for Hamas, a primitive non-state Islamist actor, motivated wholly by irrational hatred, war—the killing of Jews, the hoped-for destruction of the “Zionist entity”–is itself the primary end or purpose. Asside from nihilistic destruction, there is no larger, let alone rational, policy. And here Israel, the Jewish, Western democratic State, is qualitatively advantaged, since for it defensive war—however ultimately necessary at points vis-à-vis its Muslim enemies–remains rational, a means, not an end, a last resort subordinated to a rational policy, an overarching moral-political goal, survival and (however seemingly paradoxical at the moment) peace.
To conclude: Hamas can kill young IDF soldiers, and Israeli civilians, and this is in individual terms, tragic, but it cannot win a war defined in politically or militarily conventional terms. But in local and regional eyes and in terms of world opinion it can win a kind of victory, if is not clearly defeated, and its continued existence carries with it the possibility of again stocking up on arms and once again attacking Israel. This kind of “victory” is of course Pyrrhic, and purchased at the terrible price of its civilian casualties and shattered material integument. But again, so long as it survives to fight another day, it is a kind of victory, and importantly one always embodying the possibility of a larger, and more dangerous, conflict.
Here, it is crucial to remember Clausewitz’s key point, that success in war means the disarmament, and hence the surrender, or elimination, of one’s enemy. With the possibility now of a Hamas-sparked resumption of hostilities, to avoid a Fourth Gazan War, Israel must destroy not only the rockets and the tunnels, but Hamas itself. Here, whether Israel has the strength to resist the inevitable US/UN/Western/”international community” pressures, remains, as the fourth week of the Third Gazan War begins, the key question.
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Here I would be remiss if I left off the analysis without pointing out that the fundamental issue Israel is facing is not even Hamas per se, but rather that entity which is its enabler: There will be no real and lasting peace for Israel in the Middle East, let alone Gaza, until genocidal antisemitic Iran, Hamas’ puppeteer and the single most important force making for terrorism and instability in the region [see Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, etc.] is checked, as a would-be regional nuclear hegemon and as the actual, major state purveyor of regional and anti-Western terrorism.
But how, and whether, that can be achieved, given the U.S.’s current withdrawal from its responsibilities as the world’s leading superpower, remains an issue of fundamental importance, and ambiguity. And it goes without saying that if a Fourth Gazan War were to fall into the period of post-Iranian acquisition of nuclear capacity, Israel’s tactical position towards Hamas in Gaza, and its strategic situation in the Middle East generally, would be radically, and negatively, altered.
(Frederick Krantz is Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research [Montreal and Toronto] & Professor of History in Liberal Arts College, Concordia University)
