The inevitable diminishment of Gaza -- revisited

Israel's strategy grows more apparent with each passing strike

Associated Press

Before I started writing here, I penned an article on LinkedIn where I predicted Israel’s logic in somehow diminishing Gaza to the point where it could no longer pose the same threat. I wrote of two forms this could take: “horizontal” or geographic diminishment (make it somehow smaller in size) and “vertical”/governance diminishment (leaving Gaza less independent/more directly under Israeli control than before).

At the time (17 Oct), I said it would make brutal sense to diminish Gaza along both lines — if Israel really wanted an altered threat environment and to strongly re-establish itself as the biggest bully in the region. There’s no way to go back to the pre-conflict status quo with Hamas and there are profound motivations for Israel re-establishing itself as the scariest military actor across the Middle East, particularly as the US is standing by it (for now). Here’s what I said back then about this choice:

Both vertical and horizontal diminishment: Basically, a lockdown in a smaller "open-air prison" (a frequent descriptor long applied to the Strip). This to me is the boldest and most radical move, but, if that's what you're looking for here, this is what it looks like. You slice down Gaza into something far smaller and you deny it self-rule for the foreseeable future.

Again, the most aggressive response, but, if 7 October doesn’t warrant that, then Israel is basically saying it’s willing to accept its own diminishment, and that’s a non-starter.

Now, a full month later, I think we’re starting to recognize that Israel has indeed made this maximal choice and that it is driving that outcome through a devastatingly destructive bombing strategy — the old make a desert and call it peace approach that stretches back in that region to the Roman Empire.

In effect, per this AP article, the IDF is “moonscaping” Gaza with the goal of making its recovery almost unimaginable to its inhabitants and, on that basis, forcing their departure by making it their decision in the face of Gaza’s absolute destruction.

There is a long history in Western warfare for this sort of approach. The Allied Forces did it plenty across Germany as the end neared in WWII — very much a form of Total Warfare where civilians were acceptable targets en masse. The US made the same call with nuclear weapons against both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, Nazi Germany took this to an off-the-charts level in places like Poland and Ukraine earlier in that war, reaching apogee in the industrial-scale Holocaust against European Jews (after discovering its own troops couldn’t handle this volume of killing face-to-face without mental breakdowns).

We’ve also seen the Russians employ this approach in recent years in Ukraine, Chechnya, and Syria — the last being a regime infamous for doing this to its own subjects with chemical weapons. This is, in many ways, the unconditional surrender approach that America has repeatedly employed, going back to “Sherman’s March to the Sea” at the tail-end of the Civil War. US forces employed such genocidal brutality against Native American tribes on a very frequent basis for decades on end.

My point in raising these uncomfortable comparisons is merely to recognize that (a) what Israel is doing now has plenty of precedent, (b) it rises nowhere near genocide, and (c) it clearly transgresses the world’s growing sense of what constitutes “war crimes” today. Hamas wanted to trigger exactly this response and it most certainly got what it sought in this Israeli action.

So, going with the judgment that, while this is clearly a second wrong (Israel) being added to a first (Hamas), the response still strikes me as both logical and proportional for the situation: Israel cannot abide a Gaza that poses this sort of enduring threat — not after 7 Oct, and so it is imposing both a horizontal and vertical diminishment of Gaza by bombing it to the point of unlivability and even unrecoverability (something that could be rather stealthily imposed by Israel post-bombing).

Thus, Gaza ceases to exist, primarily because Israel decides to make its further existence essentially impossible — ending a failed experiment in self-rule. Casualties will continue to mount to a disturbing degree, but, eventually, the message will register broadly with the Palestinians still there that Gaza is no longer tenable and thus must be abandoned for good (given what I expect will be Israel’s obstructionism in any sought-for recovery).

Again, this is not genocide by any means, but it is a resurrection of Total War of the sort no longer tolerated across the developed world (but still practiced by plenty). Thus, Israel will be in the doghouse, diplomatically speaking, for a good long stretch. But I think the country is quite willing to embrace that near-term cost for a long-term gain. It simply remains a useful partner for too many great powers to suffer true isolation for long.

All this makes sense to me, brutal as the logic is.

We all just have to remember that this outcome is solely triggered by Hamas’ actions on 7 October. If that doesn’t happen, none of this is conceivable. But once committed, that aggression earns a proportional response that re-establishes Israel’s “escalation dominance” — i.e., signals its ability to go beyond what any opponent could handle and survive intact. That is, after all, why Israel has nuclear weapons, and, as I have noted here before, having nukes means a great power can do what it “must” to protect itself from non-nuclear powers threatening its existence. That is essentially what nukes are for: a get-out-of-jail card for moments like this.

So, here’s what I think we are seeing:

1. Israel bombs Gaza into oblivion, or to the point of unrecoverability

2. By keeping this approach up over the long haul in the name of destroying Hamas and its miles of underground tunnels (legit by military standards), Israel will effectively empty-out Gaza by making life there simply too dangerous.

3. What will be left will remain under Israel’s direct control for quite some period of time — long enough to effectively prevent any return of refugees because recovery construction will be routinely thwarted by security requirements related to ensuring Hamas’ complete eradication there (a hunting license with no expiration date, let’s say).

4. Gazans will invariably be scattered to the winds, going to neighboring countries as they have done so many times in the past or relocating to the West Bank, which will invariably become the next battlefield.

   

Again, a brutal logic on Israel’s part but one I recognize as a legitimate response to what Hamas engineered on 7 October. Israel cannot afford to lose this counter-response under any circumstances. Its victory must be total, and thus Total War is the logical choice. I figured Israel would come up with something that made sense to me, and it appears that they have.

As I argued a month ago in the LinkedIn article, this approach of dual diminishment of Gaza should logically trigger a major “give” on Israel’s part regarding the future of the West Bank. As extraordinary as Israel’s response to Gaza becomes, a commensurately extraordinary concession must follow on the West Bank.

What we are left with is merely the uncertainty of the time required for all this to unfold.