I am not a military man, but to my uneducated eyes, Israel doesn’t seem to actually control much territory in Gaza. Instead, Israel seems to be continually discomfiting both the fighters and the population in the hope of reducing their access to weapons. In other words, the people can move from point A to point B easily, but without tunnels their weapons can’t. When Israel clear them out, Israel destroys their stockpiles and then reduces their capabilities on their return. Along the way Israel is killing something like 45 enemy combatants for each Israeli (324 Israeli troops vs. approximately 15,000 Hamas fighters). This ratio has gotten worse for Hamas – only 3 Israeli fighters have been killed in the past month. In addition, Israel’s force reserves are far higher – perhaps 300,000 available combat troops vs. 10,000.
Combining those combat realities with increasing evidence of communications breakdowns within Hamas and you can envision a remarkably challenging reality for the individual Hamas fighter.
If you can put yourselves in their shoes for just a minute, picture this:
- You are 100% convinced of the righteousness of your cause. On multiple levels. Israel has massacred your people. Jews, and especially Zionists, desecrate the land. You have a claim to that selfsame land which you must have honored. It is your mission in life, and that of your children, to see justice delivered and reality set right. This compulsion has only been strengthened by the war.
- Not only is your cause just, but All-h backs you up. You, or those who follow after you, are destined to experience ultimate victory. While there are many strands of Islam, it is not uncommon to believe in a temporal domination that is used to encourage acceptance of All-h. That temporal domination has been turned back in only two places: Palestine and Andalusia. You are destined for victory. When Hezbollah says its fighters ‘have been martyred on the road to Jerusalem’, they mean it. There are losses, but they are part of a contribution to the revelation of Islam’s ultimate victories and so those who risk martyrdom understand they are a part of something of divine importance.
- It is important to keep these reassuring trusts in mind because your temporal reality is shockingly different. The Israelis have learned how to rely on their technology to know more and see more than you can possible see – including with drone swarms. You depend on not being seen. You are basically safe so long as you are unarmed and not identifiably a Hamas fighter. If either is untrue, then you face significant challenges. Your lifespan in combat can probably be measured in minutes. You have no idea who the Israelis have in their database.
- Your command-and-control structure, which would normally reassure you by giving you at least strategic direction, is in shambles. There are suspicions that commanders are working for the Israelis and you are being manipulated into defeat. You are increasingly relying on your own situational awareness, and desire for ultimate justice, to make decisions.
- Your expectation that the world would step up hasn’t materialized. The kinetic portion of the conflict is going on far longer than you thought possible or than had happened before. Rather than a brief period of intense conflict followed by learnings and improvements in capabilities you are being ground down by continual displacement and attacks. So far, Israel has a 1300-to-1 advantage (combatant death rates of 45-1 and reserves of at least 30-1).
With all of the above in mind, the individual fighter’s willingness to continue is hanging on a thread. They won’t surrender. But with another push, they may well decide to live to fight another day. If Sinwar is captured or killed, there might be another spasm of resistance, but the chance of achieving or even contributing to historic justice within the constraints of the current conflict will appear to be near zero.
For the most part, weapons will be downed, and Gaza will enter a post-Hamas era.
This era will not be an era of peace. Instead, that Hamas fighter will change his role. Instead of trying to deliver justice, he will be on the defensive. He will be trying to prevent further injustice. Further injustice means Israeli governance or any form of normalization of an Israeli presence in Gaza or the West Bank. To this end, some effort may be aimed at security forces supporting Israeli governance. However, much more effort will be focused on Palestinian collaborators with Israeli forces. Palestinian administrators and bureaucrats will be at the top of the list. Hamas fighters, and the organization as a whole, recognize that public Palestinian cooperation with Israel will tremendously undermine their objectives and will do anything to prevent it.
There is no victory to be found for Israel in these conditions. The only reality would be endless occupation and continual suppression of violent elements. Eventually, the Israelis will get tired, and the fighter (or his children) will renew their march on Jerusalem.
So, what can Israel do? The answer is to shift from kinetic warfare to ideological warfare. Ideological warfare isn’t the warfare of arguments. You can’t win an argument when the fundamental basis of reality is not shared by the parties. Ideological warfare is warfare by which you undermine the ideological dedication of your enemy. Ideological warfare is exactly what Hamas has been engaging in since its inception. They haven’t hoped for a conventional victory, but they wanted to grind away at Israeli ideological dedication to the point where the Israelis lost the will to fight.
Ideological warfare, from the Israeli perspective, should be conducted in exactly the opposite way. Israel isn’t going to drive the population away and even if Israel did, it wouldn’t solve anything. Hezbollah is not within Israel’s borders, and neither are the Houthis and yet they cause Israel plenty of problems. The Spanish expelled the Moors (and Jews) and still ended up with a million slaves being captured by Islamic (and Jewish) pirates. The ideological warfare Israel should conduct is about weakening the bonds to the everlasting struggle for justice. It is about getting those fighters – and their children – to perpetually put off the rejuvenation of the conflict.
How can the ideological war be conducted? Some of it is about education in schools, but far more is about the reality in the post-war society. Many in Israel have argued that the Palestinians are so violently extreme because of UN support. Palestine receives more money per capita than any other society of over 100,000 people. By far. This money has meant that people are less connected to the products of their own labor. They may have the same material to lose, but not the same personal investment. A teenager’s regard for a car their parents paid for is far lower than those same parents regard for the vehicle.
Because these populations have built less with their own hands and dedication, they have less to lose. Thus, they are more likely to engage in conflict.
When looking at the situation in modern France, for example, 1st generation immigrants were until recently rarely the problem. It is the 2nd generation, seeing that the 1st generation never got the chance to get something for their immigration investment who have radicalized. This second generation hadn’t invested in anything because they looked at the reality of French society and economic organization and felt like they couldn’t.
In order to undermine the dedication to warfare and terrorism, you have to create personal investment. That investment can be something as simple as a career, a business or even to a home you’ve struggled to acquire. If you’ve worked hard, been rewarded, and created something that you own that has your blood, sweat and tears wrapped up in it – you are less likely to engage in conflict because you don’t want to lose something of intrinsic value to you. You’ll say all the right words, you might give a little cash to the cause, but when push comes to shove, you won’t give up your reality. My grandfather was a dedicated communist. He wasn’t about to sell the factory.
In dealing with fighters who are taking a break, Israel’s ultimate goal should be to get those around them (and eventually they themselves) to invest in something. And that something should be securely owned by those who made the investment. It shouldn’t be owned purely at the whim of capricious or arbitrary authority – whether Palestinian or Israeli.
This need for investment is fundamentally why the North Gaza Project (northgaza.org) isn’t aid-based. Instead, it relies on loans fixed to the per-capita GDP for rebuilding purposes. Most of those loans, for real estate or for businesses, are personal. When the home or business is acquired in the North Gaza Project economic system, the ‘owner’ starts with a small investment. As time passes, and they buy more and more of the equity of their home or business, they effectively invest more and more. Stepwise, through personal effort, they invest. They become not just owners, but almost parents of something they have worked to create. On the ‘state’ level, where individual ownership isn’t possible, major investments will be voted on. This will thus encourage a weaker, but still real, sense of collective ownership and responsibility.
One of the core weaknesses of other post-war models is that throwing cash at the rebuilding effort actually undermines rebuilding – from a cultural perspective. It undermines peace. In a broken society, those who are most corrupt and best at stealing do exactly that. They become stronger as a result. The Marshall Plan’s impact on Southern Italy was a massive increase in the power, wealth and influence of the Mafia. With aid pumped into a broken society, the vast majority of people become displaced from investment and become essentially ‘free radicals’ who contribute to chaos and conflict.
In this vein, the North Gaza Project also grows responsibilities for the local population over time. They start with widespread bottom-level judicial and other government positions. Over time, with education and with the passing of metrics around performance, those individuals can acquire higher and higher positions until the entire society is locally managed. This drawn out process isn’t done because there aren’t any qualified Palestinians from day 1 – it is done to create a sense of investment by those leaders. Through their investment, and the investment of the bureaucracy beneath them, they will become more reluctant to tear it all down in the interests of a larger concept of justice.
There is another critical effect, though. When everybody in the society is an investor by simple dint of wanting a place to live, the fighter’s targets of assassination actually become thinner on the ground. You can’t prevent normalization by targeting collaborating government bureaucrats because very few of them will be Palestinians initially. Or at least very few will be in critical positions. Those assassinations thus won’t give you the ability to undermine the project. When it comes to preventing normalization, you’d have to target anybody with a job or an apartment or anybody who is adjudicating minor neighborhood disputes. There are too many of those people and very few of them would justifiably be seen as collaborators. The target net is so wide that striking it would be a recipe for ideological defeat.
As investments of all sorts proceed, the pathway of war would become narrower and narrower until it would disappear entirely.
Of course, even in this situation, the North Gaza Project will not be immune to the need for security. Security will be the very last area handed over to local governance. In order to reinforce security, those who undermine it must face the loss of their investments. Despite this lever, there will be those who remain dedicated to violence and terrorism. They will resist the influence of investment. This won’t mean that the Project is a failure. It will just mean that it isn’t a perfect success. Nothing is.
I believe we are nearing the point where the North Gaza Project is possible. The All-Gaza Project isn’t possible; the ideological strength of Hamas remains far too strong among the general population. Nonetheless, a self-selecting subset of people could be invited to take part in a new reality – and that reality may well revolutionize their society.
It wouldn’t be too bad if it revolutionized ours as well.
