Here’s The Thing About Israel’s Grand Strategy

Israel wants to restore its deterrent capability, and the only way it can do that requires a lot of norm violations.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been spending far too much time trying to separate the analytical wheat from the chaff regarding the Israel-Hamas war. The staff is wary of adding any more chaff to that already big pile. But here goes: 

I am coming to the conclusion Israel has a purpose in Gaza that goes beyond the elimination of Hamas. The Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces really want to restore their deterrent capabilities against any Palestinians or Arabs contemplating the elimination of the Jewish state. The problem is that the attack of October 7th caused such an erosion of that deterrent that it has led Israel to make some dangerous strategic choices. 

Let me explain my thinking further. 

First of all, after reading Politico’s Nahal Toosi, Alexander Ward, and Lara Seligman, it’s easy to believe that Israel, the United States, and an awful lot of Arab states would be just fine with the elimination of Hamas: 

The U.S. agrees with Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas, a Palestinian network designated by Washington as a terrorist organization, even if it’s not entirely clear what that will ultimately look like….

Hamas is a proxy of Iran, a major U.S. adversary, so dismantling it undercuts Tehran. Hamas is a destabilizing force in a region that remains critical to U.S. economic and security interests. The militant group also does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, making it a major barrier to a two-state solution….

Many Arab leaders despise Hamas, not least because of its Islamist roots and Iranian ties. So they wouldn’t mind seeing the group degraded.

“There has been a big difference between Arab countries’ public and private reactions,” a senior Israeli official told reporters in Washington last month. Most Arab countries regard Hamas “as enemies and want them deterred.”

“Deterred.” There’s that word again! If it’s not entirely clear what the elimination of Hamas looks like, it’s only slightly more clear what deterring Hamas looks like now. That is because the abhorrent October 7th attacks succeeded way beyond anyone’s expectations — so much so that the IDF’s reputation for competence has been badly eroded.1

This leads to an important question: how can a state and a military with an eroding reputation for deterrent capabilities restore that reputation? In the specific case of Israel, there’s the added challenge of trying to eliminate Hamas on its home turf when that entity has no doubt anticipated an IDF incursion. I don’t know a ton about warfighting but I do know that urban warfare is real, real bad. A long, drawn-out urban campaign might succeed in eliminating Hamas. Or it might be a reprise of past Israeli incursions into Lebanon, all of which ended badly for Israel. 

So what is the IDF actually doing? Well, they are killing a lot of Palestinians. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry claims that more than 10,000 people have been killed since Israel launched its retaliatory strikes. One can acknowledge that Hamas has an incentive to exaggerate those figures while still recognizing that it’s probably close to that number. This includes those killed at the Jabalya refugee camp, in an effort to strike at Hamas’ leadership. 

The Washington Post’s Louisa Loveluck, Susannah George, and Michael Birnbaum explained the murkiness behind Israel’s targeting strategy a few days ago: 

Since the conflict began, nearly 10,000 Palestinians have already been killed, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, as the IDF presses for the destruction of the Hamas militant group that rules the enclave. Although Israeli officials insist that each strike is subject to legal approval, experts say the rules of engagement, which are classified, appear to include a higher threshold for civilian casualties than in previous rounds of fighting.

International law requires militaries to make clear distinctions between civilians and militants, and to take all possible precautions to prevent civilian harm. The principle of proportionality prohibits armies from inflicting civilian casualties that are “excessive” in relation to the direct military advantage anticipated at the time of the strike.

It is an inexact standard that requires a full investigation, a difficult task in an active war zone. How Israel is selecting its targets is shrouded in secrecy, making it extremely hard for experts to judge their legality. U.S. officials say they do not know exactly how IDF commanders are assessing the threshold for civilian casualties — even as they publicly urge Israel to minimize the death of innocents. 

The Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor recently summarized the state of play:

Hamas is responsible for the single deadliest day in the history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust after it carried out its Oct. 7 strike on towns and kibbutzim in southern Israel — a hideous rampage that saw whole families butchered, civilians burned in their homes and more than 240 hostages abducted. For the Israeli leadership, as well as the Israeli public, the unprecedented carnage required an unprecedented response. Prominent Israeli officials have called not simply for the defeat of Hamas but for the annihilation of Gaza, the starving of its population, and the removal of Palestinians from some or all of its territory. The Israeli president suggested that civilians in the Hamas-controlled territory are not “innocent.”

Such rhetoric has alarmed myriad international experts, many of whom contend that Israel is already potentially guilty of war crimes in its collective punishment of the Palestinians living in Gaza and the bombing of civilian homes. “We remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide,” a group of current U.N. special rapporteurs on human rights wrote in a statement last weekthat called for a cease-fire. “The time for action is now. Israel’s allies also bear responsibility and must act now to prevent its disastrous course of action.”….

Even White House officials acknowledge that there’s a looseness in Israel’s approach. “We have seen some indications that there are there are efforts being applied in certain scenarios to try to minimize, but I don’t want to overstate that,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Monday.

A draft State Department dissent channel memo makes a similar observation about the looseness in Israeli targeting: “We must publicly criticize Israel’s violations of international norms such as failure to limit offensive operations to legitimate military targets.”

Now, a significant amount of the blame for this lies with Hamas. The group purposefully caches its weapons and fighters in the civilian population in order to make it impossible for Israel to target them without causing massive collateral damage — which would be a violation of the laws of armed combat due to the lack of proportionality. That said, the whole point of these laws of war is that a civilized country adheres to them even if the other side does not. 

In choosing to relax these norms, Israel might be hoping that it can cause Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and any Hamas successor group to adjust their expectations. If Israel demonstrates a willingness to be unconcerned with collateral damage, then these groups might conclude that previous survival tactics are no longer operable. In other words, it is possible that Israel believes it can restore its ability to deter by signaling its willingness to violate the laws and norms of warfighting.2

In other words, my concern is that for Israel, the indifference to civilian casualties is the point. 

I want to stress that this is merely informed speculation on my part. I could very well be wrong. If I am right, however, I have my doubts that this gambit will work. The brutality of the Hamas attack suggests that they do not care one whit about the lives of civilians. 

Equally problematic is that the erosion of the laws of armed combat will only deepen divisions between Israelis and Palestinians. Charli Carpenter made this point in an eloquent World Politics Review column: 

Lip-service to the rules of war is actually most important when it least appears as if the rules are effectively constraining combatants. It empowers societies to hold their own warriors to account, rather than simply pointing fingers at the enemy. It allows conflict-affected societies to direct tools of international justice at specific perpetrators, rather than punishing whole societies for their fighters’ crimes. It disrupts black-and-white thinking in multiple ways, allowing moderates and peace activists on both sides to point to international standards in their calls that atrocity not be carried out in their name, while inviting political conversations that navigate the gray areas so easily obscured by war rhetoric. It creates a framework for agreeing to disagree on whose cause is more just or whose people is more victimized, while agreeing to agree on a basic fundamental tenet: that no matter what happens, no one will murder—or justify murdering—children and adult civilians.

If the laws of war were more widely understood, discourse surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, in the U.S. and around the world, might be less polarized, as it would be clearer to everybody that both sides have legitimate grievances, that both have violated the laws of war—and that the one can never excuse the other….

In short, the laws of war do much more than provide combatants and political leaders with a set of guidelines for restraint. They are a conceptual guardrail against cognitive dehumanization, a thin red line to help ordinary people distinguish between “civilized” violence and outright barbarity. That does not always mean the rules will be followed. But they do provide a roadmap for how to react and how to talk to and about one another when they are broken, as much as they are guidelines for combatant restraint. For this reason, they are worth preserving, strengthening and invoking in civilian conversations about and across conflicts—especially when it seems they matter least on the battlefield itself.

I think I can see what Israel is trying to do in Gaza. Given how much everyone in the region dislikes Hamas, it might not lead to as much blowback as observers fear. But it is hard to believe it will actually work.

1 As noted elsewhere, some of the blame for this falls squarely on Netanyahu. But the attack was devastating enough for there to be plenty of blame to spread around the whole of Israeli government. 

2 Israel ignoring calls by its allies to agree to a humanitarian cease-fire would send a similar signal.

(This post is republished from Drezner’s World.)