What Is Israel’s Strategy Now?
Eight days into Israel’s most catastrophic war in 50 years, it is easy to imagine the death tolls soaring in Israel and Gaza and the conflict spreading across the Middle East—or a truce of sorts taking hold, though this last possibility will require delicate diplomacy and a strong desire for peace among the region’s powers.
Who knows whether this desire exists—and if it does, whether it can overcome the pressures for violent escalation.
Even for its most ardent supporters, a key question, which as yet has no clear answer, is: What is Israel’s strategy? Its goal is clear—to crush Hamas as a terrorist group and political entity so that it can never do Israel harm again. But how does Israel do this without killing thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza? How can it do that without rousing massive, possibly violent protests throughout the Middle East? And how can that happen without compelling the Sunni Arab leaders who have formed an alliance of sorts with Israel in recent years—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and others—to step back from that alliance and avoid the slightest impression of standing with Israel for any purpose?
In recent years, Middle East politics has been dominated by the Sunni-Shiite split—aggravated by mutual threats and proxy battles between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Sunni leaders have come to realize that Israel can be a powerful ally in this confrontation, and so they’ve ignored the Palestinians, whom they never really cared much about anyway. Hamas’ attack, which in one day killed 1,300 Israelis, most of them civilians, was likely an attempt to reassert the Palestinian issue into the region’s politics. If Israel kills Gazan civilians in return (and it has killed more than 2,600 so far), then Sunni Arab leaders—who still pay lip service to Palestinians, in part to avoid uprisings among their own populations—may have to step back from their alliances with Jerusalem.
This is the dilemma: How does Israel achieve its short-term aim (crushing Hamas) without setting back its long-term strategy (ensuring its security)?
The Biden administration has been trying to help Israel thread the needle. In his Oct. 10 televised speech, President Biden declared “rock-solid” support for Israel and condoned a “swift and overwhelming” Israeli response to Hamas’ terrorist attack. But he also urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “uphold the law of war” in the process.
Since then, U.S. officials have emphasized this dual-sided message repeatedly. As a result of White House pressure, Israel—which had cut off water and electricity in Gaza as part of its “complete siege”—has turned the water back on in southern Gaza, where it has urged the 1.1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza to relocate. Israel—which had given these people 24 hours to leave before its army mounted an invasion—also lifted the deadline, probably because Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, urged Israel not to invade until Egypt opened Gaza’s southern border. The White House is also pressuring officials in Cairo to open that border. (Secretary of State Antony Blinken says Egypt will open the border, but it hasn’t done so yet.)
(It is worth emphasizing, at this point, that Egypt has long placed restrictions on Gaza’s southern border, just as Israel has done so on its northern border. Cairo’s government doesn’t want Gaza’s Palestinians on its land, mainly because Hamas is aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, which Cairo regards as a mortal threat. Biden has said several times now that, though Hamas has been running Gaza since 2007, it doesn’t reflect the views of all Palestinians. Leaders in Jerusalem and Cairo seem less interested in the distinction.)
Meanwhile, Blinken has been engaged in shuttle diplomacy with an intensity not seen since Henry Kissinger helped bring about an Arab-Israeli peace after the 1973 war. His goals are to get the Arab leaders to denounce Hamas’ actions and to help prevent the war from spreading across the region. So far, he has had little luck, not even with leaders—such as Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Cairo—who hold Hamas in contempt but don’t want to be seen as endorsing Israeli offensives on Palestinians. Sisi said that Israel, in the damage it’s inflicted on Gaza, has already “gone beyond” its right to self-defense. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, formally declared that Hamas’ actions “do not represent the Palestinian people,” but the PA, which governs the West Bank, is widely viewed as ineffectual. And even he criticized Israel’s call for Palestinians to leave Gaza as “a second Nakba.” (Nakba is the term ascribed to the 1948 displacement of Palestinians by Israel’s first settlers.)
A wild card in all this is Qatar, which the U.S. has designated “a major non-NATO ally” but which is also a major supporter of Hamas. Though neither Washington nor Jerusalem will negotiate with Hamas directly, especially not after the Oct. 7 attack, they can use Qatar as an informal intermediary. Blinken has asked Qatar to use its influence to get Hamas to release the 126 hostages that the terrorists took in the course of their attack—most of them Israelis, but some visitors from other countries, including the U.S.
Israel has always placed enormous value on recovering hostages. In the most extreme case, in 2011, Israel agreed with Hamas to free 1,027 prisoners—almost all of them Palestinians—in exchange for the release of a single Israeli soldier, named Gilad Shalit, who had been captured along the Gaza Strip border five years earlier. Israel agreed to the trade, even though those 1,000-plus prisoners had been responsible, in total, for the killing of 569 Israelis.
If Qatar can get Hamas to release all the hostages today, it is possible that Israel would agree to call off the invasion. Hamas, perhaps under Qatari pressure, has said it would free all the women, children, and elderly among the hostages in exchange for the release of 36 female and teenage Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Israel has turned down that deal. Did Hamas present that as an opening bid? Will more offers be forthcoming?
On other pressure fronts, Iran sent Israel a message, through a United Nations intermediary, that it had no interest in joining the war—but that it might have no choice if Israel invaded Gaza and killed more Palestinian civilians. Was Tehran threatening to launch attacks on Israel directly or to give the green light to its Hezbollah allies to launch some of its more than 100,000 rockets in southern Lebanon?
Either way, in his speech last week, Biden warned, “Any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: don’t.” To back up his threat, he has since sent two aircraft carriers and their escort warships into the eastern Mediterranean. The ships are meant to deter Iran, Syria, or Hezbollah from intervening in the war against Israel. But part of deterrence is having the capability and the will to carry out a threat, if deterrence fails—i.e., if the adversary does what it’s been warned not to do anyway.
Is one side in this face-off bluffing? Are both sides? If Israel invades and Iran does nothing, Tehran may lose credibility as a reliable ally to Hamas and Hezbollah. If Israel invades and Iran attacks (or allows Hezbollah to attack) Israel, then Biden is on the spot. If he does nothing, the U.S. comes off as an unreliable ally to Israel. If he unleashes the firepower of two aircraft carriers on either southern Lebanon or Iran, he risks further escalation in a regionwide conflagration. (His job as a diplomat and commander in chief is to convince all observers that he’s willing to take that risk.)
Many people wonder how something like the First World War could have erupted, even though most of its combatants didn’t intend it to. Well, look at what’s going on in the Middle East now—the threats and counter-threats, the interlocking alliances, the competing pressures of domestic politics.
Back to the original question: What is Israel’s strategy? Israel cannot let Hamas get away with what it’s done—cannot allow its leaders or followers to believe that Hamas has won. But let’s say that Israel, in some real sense, crushes Hamas: kills its top leaders, the commanders who carried out the attack, and so forth. (It’s already killed a few.) Then what? Who occupies that strip of land? Who or what ensures that there won’t be more attacks from there or elsewhere?
Israelis already know that occupying Gaza is a nightmare. They tried before after recovering the land in the 1967 war, but Ariel Sharon, the hardheaded Israeli prime minister, abandoned the place in 2005, not only withdrawing all troops but evicting 8,000 Jewish settlers.* (Each family was paid, on average, $200,000 to resettle elsewhere, either in Israel proper or the West Bank.)
Much earlier, in 1982, as defense minister, Sharon invaded southern Lebanon to oust the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had taken over the territory and used it to shell northern Israel with rockets. Many Lebanese welcomed the PLO’s departure but didn’t pine for Israeli occupiers either. One story, perhaps apocryphal, has one citizen thanking an Israeli soldier, then whispering, “Don’t forget to leave.” The Israeli troops stayed for 20 years—fomenting much resentment and the creation and strengthening of Hezbollah, which is now formally allied with Iran and possesses more than 100,000 rockets within firing range of Israel.
Who controls Gaza? How does the Palestinian Authority—whose leaders say they want to live in peace with Israel (contrasted with Hamas, which has made no bones about wanting to drive all Jews into the sea)—gain political power and legitimacy? What kind of deal can be negotiated with Palestinians now that the Sunni Arabs’ attempt to ignore them has failed? How do Israel and the Sunni Arab states keep their new ties from unraveling?
Yet, contrary to the claims of nearly everyone in the region, Israel is not the only country responsible for dealing with these questions and tilting the region toward peace and harmony. Hamas is foremost to blame for the present horrors. It may be, as many charge, that the root cause of all this is Israel’s occupation; it is true that occupation has a soul-deadening effect on the occupiers and the occupied. And Israel’s blockade of Gaza has turned the tiny, densely populated strip of land into an “open-air prison.” But it’s worth recalling that Egypt has long maintained a blockade too, and the other Arab neighbors have supplied little relief. Qatar sends aid and, until last week, Israel granted work permits to 20,000 residents, who brought their salaries back home. But Hamas has spent its resources on weapons and its leaders’ relatively lavish homes, not on its people’s well-being.
Israel warned the people of northern Gaza to move south in advance of the invasion. And while this has its own set of moral horrors, Hamas urged those people to stay and, in some cases, blocked them from leaving. Why? So they can serve as human shields—to either deter Israel from invading or aggravate the anger at Israelis if and when they do invade.
Justly or not, however, this is the world Israel lives in. These are the dilemmas it faces; this is the challenge that the diplomats of all surrounding and interested countries must surmount or succumb to. It will be clear in the coming days and weeks whether it rises to the occasion or falls.
