Brighton, England
Tuesday, November 28th, 2023
https://adamkhan.net/rambles/israel-iran-proxy-war-day-50
Mid-hostage deal and subsequent ceasefire, the overwhelming determinant of the war since the casus bellum itself, the savagery of the original October 7th invasion, is the force of Israel’s military success. Here multiple force multipliers apply:
- sky-high morale stemming from the military’s mortification at its initial failure to secure the border and subsequent determination to redeem itself
- wall-to-wall support from society for preventing further such attacks and establishing ongoing homeland security
- military superiority including numerical and technological superiority on the ground, control of the air above and the sea to the west, and new levels of communication enabling unprecedented coordination among these forces
- coordination with the United States superpower to keep other threats at bay and contain the theater.
Though the Gaza war is obviously not a duck shoot and the fighting is fierce — Hamas has had over a decade to focus singlemindedly on its military capabilities, and confronting Israel is what it exists to do — it is nonetheless to date a shattering and overwhelming Israeli military success.
Against this is the international reaction — from the Vatican to Berkeley to the Chinese Politburo — that war is itself a war crime regardless of the intensity of the provocation or the direness of the existential necessity. Such opposition movements have however always existed and roll off the foothills of the implacability of a powerful endangered nation. Moreover the thuggery and intellectual dishonesty with which they are carried out probably gains at least as many to Israel’s cause as it garners support for what can be most generously described as moral vacuity.
Two things however currently give pause: first, the worry about the pause itself. Israel has in the past benefitted greatly from pauses in fighting — the War of Independence especially comes to mind. Yet Israelis worry about the ceasefire not mainly because it allows Hamas to regroup and plan some attacks and surprises, but due to concern that the morale force multiplier that is wrath is fading. Whilst Israel may indeed still be reliving October 7th — today Netanyahu took Elon Musk on a tour of the ravaged kibbutzim — Israelis are now now also daily experiencing the near-jubilance of hostages returning. Some Israelis seem worried about their compatriots’ staying power. My tentative conclusion is: Israel’s very fear of being lulled back into complacency is a marker that it will not do so and restart the war with ferocity.
The second concern is the foundation of the US support for the war: on what does it rest? Sympathy is insufficient; everyone is sympathetic until the hard power response arrives. The Biden Administration’s policies of weakness to Russia and Iran are what encouraged the invasions of Ukraine and southern Israel in the first place; but once the invited aggressions did take place, the Biden Administration has been pretty steadfast in standing by the victims. What are the motivations? Are they merely the emotional biases of a man old enough to be fundamentally a cold warrior? Or does the support rest on more solid footing, and America in fact needs this win almost as much as Israel? I’ve read and heard commentators say this, but is it true? Americans have, after all, accepted plenty of defeats in the Middle East recently, from Assad in Syria to Iran in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, many of them in the name of their ongoing quixotic quest towards reaching a rapprochement with the Iranian regime. Would an ascendant Hamas in Gaza be such an overwhelming problem given all these other calamities?
Biden’s approach is almost inverse to Reagan’s successful formulation of peace through strength. And far from a policy of showing no daylight between the USA and Israel, until the attack happened Biden wouldn’t even meet with Netanyahu in daylight. Nonetheless, given all this, my second tentative conclusion is that American support will continue for reasons both strategic — Israel is a bulwark against the march of illiberal regimes — and moral — to avoid slaughter of innocents at a scale not seen since the Nazis and before then the Romans.
Moreover, when strategy and morality both pull in the same direction, each serves as boundless force multiplier to the other.
