Is the Destruction of Gaza Making Israel Any Safer?

Israeli forces are killing thousands of innocent civilians and badly damaging their country’s standing with its most important partners, including the United States. Israel has also no doubt severely degraded Hamas’s military capabilities, but the question needs to be asked: Is the country’s furious response to the Hamas invasion of October 7 making Israel any safer? At best, it’s still too soon to say—but on balance, what I see worries me.

It sometimes takes years to fully appreciate the strategic significance of a conflict. Great victories look more ambiguous in hindsight, and catastrophic defeats sometimes have silver linings. That seems especially true for Israel.

In 2006, Israel fought a 34-day war with Hezbollah that most observers at the time classed as a decisive victory for the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese militant group. Eighteen years later, that conflict looks instead like the moment when Israel reestablished a measure of cross-border deterrence that it had lost when it withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. The Israeli ground onslaught in 2006 may have been disjointed and underwhelming, but the aerial campaign was ferocious; memory of it has almost certainly contributed to the halfheartedness of Hezbollah’s commitment of resources to the current conflict, as well as to the years of relative peace in between.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: It’s not too late to give Gaza a better future]

Conversely, Israel’s greatest military victory—the Six-Day War of 1967, in which the country shocked itself and the world by rapidly triumphing over its three most dangerous state adversaries—also enabled the West Bank settlement enterprise, which now threatens Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish-majority democracy and makes a clean separation from the Palestinian people almost impossible.

In focusing on the question of Israeli security, I don’t mean to minimize the horrific human suffering this war has caused for Palestinians, many Israelis, and countless Lebanese. Indeed, that suffering, especially the destruction of Palestinian lives and infrastructure, could directly and negatively affect Israel’s security in the future. But the United States has made a commitment, going back at least 50 years, to safeguard Israeli security—a commitment that I, as a former U.S. policy maker, was once charged with upholding. And so it seems worth asking whether this war is actually advancing that goal or hurting it.

The good news for Israel and its remaining international partners is that the Israel Defense Forces still have a serious, competent officer corps—one that has fought its way through some very challenging urban terrain in Gaza with relatively minimal friendly casualties. At the beginning of this conflict, I anticipated that the IDF would struggle to design and execute such a campaign. Fighting in dense areas is very difficult for even the best-drilled units—ask a U.S. Marine what Fallujah was like in 2004—and Israel relies heavily on part-time soldiers and conscripts. But the IDF has worked its way through the territory slowly and deliberately, while preserving combat power in case Hezbollah decides to launch a full-scale attack on Israel’s north.

The bad news, however, is that the IDF has made clear—repeatedly—that it does not prioritize preserving the lives of noncombatants relative to other aims. This indifference has strategic as well as moral repercussions. Biden-administration officials were reportedly horrified by the disregard that Israeli leaders showed for the deaths of more than 100 Palestinians trying to reach humanitarian aid a few weeks ago. Now Washington finds itself in the supremely embarrassing position of having to build a pier to deliver aid to Gaza, because its principal ally in the region—which receives more than $3.8 billion in U.S. taxpayer money each year—is apparently slow-rolling the delivery of humanitarian necessities to a population on the brink of famine.

As a largely conscript force augmented by reservists, the IDF lacks a strong noncommissioned-officer corps—the more experienced junior leaders who provide tactical direction in many Western armies and, crucially, help instill order and discipline. Gaza has revealed the best and the worst of this structure: the best, in that the IDF has shown itself to be a truly cohesive national institution, capable of fighting together as citizen-soldiers despite the bitter political and religious divisions in Israel; the worst, because the IDF has shown itself to be undisciplined, reckless, and willing to use large amounts of artillery and white-phosphorus rounds in urban areas, tendencies that undermine the credibility of Israel’s public claims that it is doing its best to minimize civilian casualties.

Israel complains that it is fighting in challenging and often subterranean conditions in Gaza, which is true. Israel also complains that it is held to a higher standard than other regional militaries, which is also true. Few in the international community spoke out, for example, when the Iraqi army leveled half of Mosul in its effort to expel the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017. But as a democracy that claims to adhere to the international conventions that protect civilians in combat, Israel must realize—as the United States realized during its own wars in the region—that its actions will be measured against those commitments.

The IDF’s history of being deployed as an occupation force, particularly in southern Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, has coarsened it and led to strikingly callous and deadly applications of force. Some of its soldiers engage in crimes and abuses that may be commonplace in wartime, but whose public exposure understandably erodes international support. Pictures on social media show Israeli soldiers laughing and joking while destroying the belongings of Palestinian civilians. Those videos and images are copied, pasted, and widely broadcast across the world, giving further fuel to Israel’s opponents, embarrassing Israel’s few remaining allies, and leaving Israel ever more isolated internationally. These soldiers are no doubt operating under high levels of stress. No doubt they are also, like all Israelis, traumatized by the many acts of sadistic cruelty inflicted on the elderly, women, and children by Hamas. But understanding these pressures is not the same as excusing them. A professional army that says it holds itself to Western legal standards must not be governed by the atavistic desire for revenge.

[Photos: Gaza on the brink of famine]

Meanwhile, the physical destruction of Gaza—including housing, schools, and hospitals serving the population there—will make governing the Strip very difficult for whoever attempts it after the shooting stops. I don’t see Palestinians or other Arabs stepping up to take that burden off Israel’s shoulders, so most likely, Israel is making its own life harder by damaging so much necessary infrastructure. For all that Israel appears to be waging a punitive campaign against the people of Gaza, this campaign looks likely to end up punishing Israel as well.

Finally, wars are fought for political ends and are therefore most often judged by their ability to achieve those ends. One week after October 7, the military strategist Lawrence Freedman wrote in the Financial Times: “Israel is trying to develop a military strategy to deal with the Hamas threat while it lacks a political strategy. For the moment it is impossible to identify a future modus vivendi with Gaza. No deals with Hamas will be trusted but nor is there a certain route to eliminate Hamas.”

Five months later, the problem is the same: Israel has neither a military strategy for eliminating Hamas nor a political strategy for living with Gaza. A long-term agreement with the Palestinians is hard to imagine at a time when Israel’s left camp—already decimated by the Second Intifada two decades ago, in which Hamas and other groups launched a series of suicide bombings against civilian targets in order to undermine the possibility of a two-state solution—has seen its remaining domestic credibility shattered by the Hamas attacks. And Hamas, of course, has promised, again and again, to keep fighting until Israel is destroyed.

The picture here is bleak, but this conflict could conceivably create opportunities for Israel. For example, Saudi Arabia has floated the prospect of diplomatic recognition in exchange for a Palestinian state. But Israeli domestic politics are fractious, particularly regarding the question of Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank—a crucial point for any prime minister seeking to take advantage of such opportunities.

Israel is in fact headed in the opposite direction at the moment: It will need years, perhaps even decades, to recover from the traumas of October 7 before its leaders will be able to show the same courage in confronting the political right as the IDF has shown in confronting Hamas. Israeli politics are especially febrile and plastic at the moment, but the right seems unlikely to be disempowered in the near future, even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is somehow dethroned. By the time realistic politics take hold, whatever opportunities this horrible war creates for Israel may have been lost.