Israel is a borderline failed state

Maybe worse than that

I wanted to write a lot of articles this summer, but Mrs NonZionism had a baby. No doubt, that’s the kind of thing one is supposed to prepare for in advance, but I guess I just have unrealistic expectations. So, in truth, this is really a blog comment, not an article, specifically responding to this post here by Scott Kahn. OTOH, this whole blog started as a way to monetize time wasted on Substack comments, so maybe this is just going back to my roots. Anyway…

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1. Many IDF soldiers on the ground believe that the goal of the Gaza war is to destroy as much stuff as possible so that the population has to leave and it can be annexed and settled. This is a minority position among Israelis overall, but not a tiny minority, and it is the majority position among religious Zionists, who are disproportionately represented among those still showing up for miluim combat roles. We do not need to speculate as to how they got this idea into their head because it has been repeatedly stated by government ministers, including last week.

2. The IDF cannot enforce discipline violations by its soldiers or junior generals. The purpose of the riot at Sdei Teiman - which included coalition MKs as participants - was to raise the costs of army discipline to the degree that no enforcement of IDF rules will happen even under the most extreme circumstances. Therefore, de facto the IDF is no longer even an army in the commonly accepted use of the term in modern times, but a collection of militias, analogous to (though not as far gone as) the Syrian army. If units in Gaza think their job is to depopulate Gaza, that is what they are going to do.

3. The Religious Zionists in the government are not per se running military strategy, but they are able to do two things. The first is to block any alternative military strategy in Gaza by threatening to bolt the coalition. The second is to push for ‘more’ or ‘stronger’ military action. In combination, this allows them to effectively drive policy by default, and the simplest explanation for their repeated statements that they are in the process of emptying out Gaza is that they believe they are successfully doing so.

4. On the very first day that Gazans died while trying to receive food at GHF aid-distribution sites, it was very obvious that - even completely ignoring all moral considerations whatsoever - Israel had an urgent and overriding strategic interest in finding out what happened and preventing it. There has now been more than a month of almost daily incidents, if anything increasing in their awfulness. It may be that there is still some kind of explanation that exonerates IDF generals of war crimes that would justifiably incur the death penalty, but there is no theoretically possible explanation that could exonerate the Israeli state as a whole of complete dysfunctionality.

5. The centre-Left IDF leadership has consistently refused to present a coherent military strategy of its own. Instead, they have spent two years trying to shirk as much responsibility as possible while half-heartedly implementing policies they know make no sense. We can understand their predicament, but if they believe they have been placed in an impossible situation, the morally responsible thing for them to do is resign.

6. The only part of the Israeli army that really works is the airforce.¹ In addition, use of airpower is far less likely to lead to military casualties than any other form of military action. These two factors leads to extreme over-reliance on the IAF to achieve tactical and strategic objectives. This is all understandable, but it doesn’t change the reality that the range of military goals that can be achieved by airpower is actually very limited. This was evident even in Iran after a week, but it is far more so the case in Gaza. What over-reliance on airpower does guarantee is a constant stream of mass-casualty events. These are accidental when divided up into each individual case, but they are deliberate when considered in the aggregate because there is no way that you can do so many airstrikes without it happening. If Israel wants to enforce a successful military occupation of Gaza, planes would play a very small role in that. What it needs is a well-disciplined army with lots of fluent Arabic speakers, and good local intelligence.

7. The military goal of eliminating Hamas can only happen if there is a replacement regime to take over. Israel has consistently refused to identify such a regime, and so the military goal is in a basic sense unachievable. Israel lacks not only the military capabilities to enforce regime change on Gaza, but even the desire to do so. At earlier stages in the war, there were other comprehensible military goals, namely deterrence, and degradation of Hamas’ military capacity to strike Israel. Presently, though, Israel is doing whatever it is doing for no purpose that can be articulated. In fact, it doesn’t even make sense from the perspective of driving Palestinians out of Gaza, since the obstacle to that now is not that they have yet to be sufficiently immiserated, but that no-one is willing to take them. Israel is flooding the world media with images of malnourished children for no reason at all, just as a result of systemic state malfunction.

8. Hamas has employed for much of its history a human shield policy and a human sacrifice policy. In this war, the human shield part is basically irrelevant: except in very extreme circumstances, Israel decided to shoot through them. However, the human sacrifice policy is very much in effect. Hamas’ goal is to provoke and manoeuvre Israel into committing atrocities that halt or reverse regional normalisation, undermine international support, and incur diplomatic and economic sanctions. The IDF today, instead of being an instrument for the Israeli state to pursue its long-term strategic goals, has effectively become an instrument for Hamas to pursue its strategic goals. Hamas is not purely an ideological organisation - it has many leaders and employees who want to live and live comfortably - but, in so far as it can be modelled ideologically, it is now directing large parts of the Israeli state to do its bidding.

Gaza is a big pile of rubble; its people live in tents, with lives of relentless misery, periodically punctuated by mortars or airstrikes. They live this way because they allowed (or, in many cases, eagerly assisted) the absolute worst, most loathsome and vile elements of their society to take command and steer them towards disaster in the service of ethnic narcissism, wounded pride, pathological brooding over historical grievances, revenge, and bullshit counterfeit religion. In as much as collective responsibility can ever make sense as a moral doctrine, they have merited what has happened to them. And so will we.

1. Strictly speaking, there is also the navy and some other strategically irrelevant sections.