Cynical Politics, Propaganda, and Hardening Hearts

I awoke this morning to hear an article in the news about Israel’s latest actions in Gaza.  I won’t bore you with the details here.

What I did find myself thinking was that even if Israel “flattens Gaza into a pile of concrete rubble”, that won’t solve the problem.  It might save Netanyahu’s political career, if temporarily, but it won’t make Israel any more secure.  

Let’s examine that for a moment. Suppose for a moment that Israel drives every Palestinian out of Gaza, destroys every building, and fills in every inch of the tunnel networks that have been dug underneath Gaza with the rubble.  Sure, they will have deprived the Palestinian people of their homes, Hamas of its bases of operations, and perhaps even accomplished a military victory of some sort.  They might have even succeeded in making it impossible for Hamas to continue to exist in the form it has.  

The problem for Israel is that they won’t have killed off the idea of Palestine itself.  Perhaps more worryingly, they will ultimately have rendered it impossible for the people who identify as Palestinian to consider any kind of negotiated settlement arrangement with Israel.  That makes things much, much more dangerous for Israel and its citizens, because the adversary that Netanyahu has both enabled and demonized for the last 15+ years of his career suddenly has nothing to lose. 

If, things unfold as I expect will happen, most of the population of Gaza is going to end up in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, likely crushed up against the Israeli border.  This will be a return to the squalor of the refugee camps that were originally created in Gaza in the wake of Israel’s creation and the fallout of the first few Arab-Israeli wars.  Those camps will become places where the next Hamas will form, and it will have the collective memory of Israel’s actions in Gaza, as well as Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank. A more fertile place to spread propaganda, and to harden attitudes towards Israel and its peoples is hard to imagine. 

How does this make Israel less secure? Think about it.  An adversary that believes it has nothing to lose, and can easily convince the people among whom it organizes that they have nothing to lose has an indefinite supply of people willing to do horrific things.  

For the last several years, the “fight” has been mostly symbolic - Hamas lobbing rockets into Israel, and Israel’s “Iron Dome” shooting most of them down.  Prior to that, Israel experienced regular waves of violence ranging from riots to suicide bombings.  One of the things that October 7 demonstrated was that an adversary willing to be patient and to carefully plan its actions can accomplish a lot in a short amount of time.  Put that adversary in a place where they can convince the people around them that their fight is existential, and the “bad guy is just over that fence”, and they will find ways to get over those fences. 

Within Israel, I’m sure that Netanyahu’s “crush them now” approach is playing well.  It’s no secret that within Israeli politics there are those factions who see a “pure Israel” with no compromise involving the Palestinian people as some kind of fulfillment of a religious imperative.  Those people will be ecstatic for a while.

But, once the dust settles, the world needs to understand that Israel’s actions in response to October 7, 2023 will make the region much less stable, much more dangerous.  The danger for Israel is that the slow, painful process of “normalizing relations” with its neighbours may have just ended, and that leaves Israel in a much more dangerous place than it was in.