‘It’s Almost as If They Support a Hypothetical War’

“This is our 9/11,” an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson said a few days after the rape, torture, kidnapping, and mass murder of Israelis on October 7. Or it was worse than 9/11. “Twenty 9/11s,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a few weeks later, once the scale of the devastation was evident. As for the current military campaign in Gaza? Earlier this month, Netanyahu told new IDF cadets, “We are preventing the next 9/11.”

I’m a New Yorker. For me, 9/11 was the unbearable loss of thousands of lives. But I’m also a veteran of America’s War on Terror, so for me, 9/11 was also the pretext for disastrous, poorly conceived wars that spread death and destruction, destabilized the Middle East, created new enemies, and empowered Iran.

[George Packer: Israel must not react stupidly]

Finally, I’m an American. My country is supporting Israel militarily and diplomatically, and so I have a stake in answering this question: Is the United States enabling Israel to make the same terrible mistakes we did after 9/11?

In principle, Israel has a case for military action in Gaza, and it goes something like this. Across its border sat an army of tens of thousands of men intent on massacring civilians. Ghazi Hamad, from Hamas’s political bureau, declared that the atrocities of October 7 were “just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” Yes, rooting out Hamas would be brutal—the group welcomes civilian collateral damage and has entrenched itself in hundreds of miles of tunnels honeycombed through civilian infrastructure. But peace is illusory as long as Hamas remains in power.

Perhaps, in an alternate world, Israel could have fought such a war with restraint, in order to degrade Hamas’s military power without playing into its hands by causing unnecessary civilian suffering. Israel would have helped, rather than hindered, the efforts of outside states to funnel humanitarian aid into Gaza—showing that it distinguished the Palestinian people from Hamas battalions and valued their lives. If Israel had very different internal politics, it might even have signaled a positive vision for the war’s end—one premised on rebuilding a Gazan government led by Palestinians not committed to Israel’s destruction but to a fair-minded two-state solution that would ensure full political rights for Gazans. But this is not the war that Israel has fought.

“Sometimes it sounds like certain officials, it’s almost as if they support a hypothetical war, instead of the actual war that Israel is fighting,” Adil Haque, an executive editor at Just Security and an international-law professor at Rutgers University, told me.

Friends of mine who support Israel have compared the Gaza campaign to the American and Iraqi fight against the Islamic State in Mosul, another large urban area of about 2 million people defended by an entrenched enemy hiding among civilians. At least 9,000 innocents died, many from American air strikes.

I walked through the devastation in Mosul two years after the battle, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. Blocks of rubble, the skeletal remains of homes and shops, survivors living in the shatters who spoke of starvation and horror, collecting rainwater or risking their lives to go to the river, where soldiers shot at them. “It’s like Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” one man told me in the ruins of his home. But he also said that ISIS was gone from Mosul forever. “Even if all I have is a piece of wood,” he said, “I would fight them rather than let them return.”

The war Israel is actually fighting in Gaza bears little resemblance to that brutal and far from perfect, but necessary, campaign. Rather, in Gaza, Israel has shown itself willing to cause heavy civilian casualties and unwilling to care for a population left without basic necessities for survival. It has offered no realistic plan for an eventual political settlement. Far from the hypothetical war for Israeli security, this looks like a war of revenge.  

Israel’s approach to civilian lives and infrastructure is the first and most obvious problem. John Spencer, the chair of urban-warfare studies at West Point, told The Wall Street Journal this month that Israel sets the “gold standard” for avoiding civilian casualties. Defenders of Israel cite its use of precision munitions and its distribution of leaflets and phone calls warning civilians to evacuate combat areas.

But evacuation orders can only do so much for a trapped population facing destroyed infrastructure, dangerous exit routes, and unrealistic time frames. Israel’s original evacuation order for northern Gaza gave 1.1 million people just 24 hours to leave. As Paula Gaviria Betancur, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, noted at the time, “It is inconceivable that more than half of Gaza’s population could traverse an active war zone, without devastating humanitarian consequences, particularly while deprived of essential supplies and basic services.”

And precision munitions are good only when used precisely. Senior Israeli officials complained even before the war that the list of possible military targets in Gaza was “very problematic.” Then Israel dropped a massive amount of ordnance on Gazan neighborhoods—6,000 bombs in the first six days of the war alone. For comparison, the international coalition fighting ISIS dropped an average of 2,500 bombs a month across all of Syria and Iraq. To think that Israel was precisely targeting 1,000 strikes a day strains credulity. Satellite images do not show pinpoint strikes but whole flattened neighborhoods. From October 7 to November 26, Israel damaged or destroyed more than 37,000 structures, and as CNN reported in December, about 40 to 45 percent of the air-to-ground munitions used at that point were unguided missiles. Certainly Hamas’s practice of building its tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure means that destroying the tunnels will cause widespread damage, but the scale of this bombing campaign goes well beyond that.

What does this mean for death tolls? Larry Lewis, the director of the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Naval Analyses, found that even if we accept the IDF’s claim that 12,000 of the roughly 29,000 Gazans reported dead by February 20 were enemy fighters, that would still mean that for every 100 Israeli air strikes, the IDF killed an average of 54 civilians. In the U.S. campaign in Raqqa, the American military caused an estimated 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 strikes.

Israel’s lack of concern for civilian casualties is clear from well-documented individual strikes. On October 31, Israel struck the Jabaliya refugee camp with what appears to have been at least two 2,000-pound bombs, destroying entire housing blocks. News footage soon after showed at least 47 bodies, including children, pulled from the rubble in the refugee camp. Eventually the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry would claim 195 dead and hundreds more injured. The target of the strike was Ibrahim Biari, a Hamas commander who helped plan October 7, as well as a tunnel network and other Hamas fighters.

[Read: Is the destruction of Gaza making Israel any safer?]

During the Battle of Mosul, strikes that could be anticipated to kill 10 civilians or more required sign-off from the commanding general of Central Command, which oversees all American military activity across the greater Middle East. Deliberate strikes might have been analyzed by multiple working groups, and precautions taken to limit civilian casualties by using a more precise weapon with a smaller blast radius. A strike might have been canceled if the harm to civilians outweighed the possible battlefield advantage. In the Jabaliya strike, Israel caused foreseeable civilian casualties an order of magnitude greater than anything America would have signed off on during the past decades of war. And yes, 2,000-pound bombs are among the munitions that the United States has been sending to Israel, and which Israel has been using for strikes that American commanders would never permit from their own armed forces.

Even more troubling has been Israel’s failure to allow humanitarian relief to reach the civilian population it has put at risk. On October 9, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, declared a “complete siege” of Gaza, stating, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Since then, the Israeli bombing campaign has destroyed Gaza’s agriculture and infrastructure, and Israel has restricted aid coming from outside the Strip.

The United States has played a game of push and pull, providing weapons but telling Israeli authorities that they must allow humanitarian aid into Gaza; Israel fails to sufficiently comply, and Gazans starve. In February, the deputy executive director of the World Food Programme, Carl Skau, announced that one out of every six Gazan children under the age of 2 was acutely malnourished. “Hundreds of trucks are waiting to enter, and it is absolutely imperative to make crossing points work effectively and open additional crossing points,” the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, said on March 18. “It is just a matter of political will. Israel has to do it.”

A UN Security Council resolution noted on December 22 that under international law, all parties must “allow, facilitate, and enable the immediate, safe, and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale directly to the Palestinian civilian population.” That Israel lets some aid through is not a defense. As Tom Dannenbaum, an associate professor of international law at Tufts University, pointed out at the beginning of the conflict, even when starvation is being used as a weapon of war, “often there can be a trickle of humanitarian relief or a stop-start permission of essentials into a territory that is besieged.” In Gaza, starving children fill desperately strained hospital wards. Israel can make no plausible argument that it’s meeting its obligations here.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of Israel’s conduct is that it is fighting this war without any realistic vision of its outcome, other than the military defeat of Hamas. The “day after” plan that Netanyahu released in February suggests an indefinite Israeli military occupation of Gaza, rejects international negotiations toward a permanent settlement with the Palestinian people, and gives only a vague nod toward a reconstruction plan “financed and led by countries acceptable to Israel.” On March 14, Ophir Falk, one of Netanyahu’s advisers, declared in The Wall Street Journal that the military campaign was “guaranteeing that Gaza will never pose a threat to Israel again.” This is delusional.

Violent repression can backfire or produce Pyrrhic victories. Look at my war. Toppling Saddam Hussein created a fertile chaos for insurgent groups of all types. When I deployed to Iraq as part of the American surge of troops in 2007, we successfully worked with Sunni leaders to bring down the level of violence, only for ISIS to rise from the country’s unstable politics over the decade that followed.

Repression rarely completely eradicates terrorist groups. Even Israeli intelligence admits that Hamas will survive this war. And as the terrorism expert Audrey Kurth Cronin has noted, repression is difficult for democracies to sustain, because it “exacts an enormous cost in money, casualties, and individual rights, and works best in places where the members of terrorist groups can be separated from the broader population.” The latter is manifestly not the case in Gaza.

Sheer force cannot make Palestinians accept the violence done to them, the destruction wrought on their homes, and their fate as a subject population, deprived of self-determination. Recent polls show two-thirds of Gazans blaming Israel for their suffering, and most of the rest blaming the United States, while in the West Bank support for armed struggle has risen. Defenders of Israel will often reference a quote attributed to Golda Meir: “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.” But that’s not how Palestinians experience it. Even before October 7, the rate of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank was on track to reach an all-time high in 2023. More attacks followed.

Making this combustible situation still worse are international actors who benefit from stoking conflict. Iran has long helped train, supply, and fund armed Palestinian groups, offering a reported $350 million in 2023 alone. More arms, training, and funding will flow in the future, not only to Gaza but around the region. Netanyahu has suggested that Israel will maintain military control of Gaza, operating a security buffer zone inside Gaza and closing the border with Egypt. From a military perspective alone, such an expensive commitment to endless repression within Gaza would be shortsighted. As Cronin points out, historically, “using overwhelming force tends to disperse the threat to neighboring regions.”

A good pretext for a war does not make a war just. War needs to be carried out without brutality and drive at a just political end. Israel is failing on both counts. Hamas may be horrific, but just because you’ve diagnosed a malignant tumor doesn’t mean you hand a rusty scalpel to a drunk and tell him to cut away while the patient screams in terror.

[Graeme Wood: Pressuring Israel works]

All of which calls into question America’s support for this war. Washington never even tried to make its aid conditional on Israel’s abiding by the standards of wartime conduct that Americans have come to expect. The Biden administration has twice bypassed congressional review in order to provide weapons to Israel. Senator Bernie Sanders proposed having the State Department investigate possible Israeli human-rights violations, but the Senate rejected the bid. Any policy relying on less debate and greater ignorance should raise alarms in a democracy. The administration’s policy has already hurt America’s standing globally.

“All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost,” a senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times in October. “Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”

Defenders of the war often ask: If not this, what should Israel be doing? Some of the answers to that question are fairly easy. Israel should not approve strikes that will predictably kill more than 100 civilians for limited military gain. It should not bomb entire neighborhoods to rubble. And it must make an aggressive commitment to providing humanitarian relief, rather than being a stumbling block to groups trying to save lives in the midst of starvation.

Other answers are more difficult, because to imagine a postwar Gaza that might lead to peace, or at least to the weakening of violent forces around the region, would be to imagine a very different Israeli government—one that could credibly commit to helping facilitate the rebuilding of a Palestinian government in Gaza and the provision of full political rights to the people there. Instead, Israel has a government that just announced the largest West Bank land seizure in decades, and whose prime minister offers nothing to Palestinians but “full Israeli security control of all the territory west of the Jordan.”

The Biden administration has assured its critics that it is pressuring Israel to do better. It recently allowed a UN Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire to pass, even as it abstained and criticized the resolution for failing to condemn Hamas. But this will hardly repair the damage to America’s international reputation. Washington needs to address the war that is, not the hypothetical war U.S. officials would like to see. As Adil Haque told me, “It’s been five and a half months now, and there’s no indication that Israel will ever change its tactics in a significant way, so you either support the way it fights, or you can’t support it at all.” Washington needs to stop making excuses for Israel and stop supporting this war.

So perhaps October 7 will be Israel’s 9/11, or 20 9/11s—not just because of the scale of the losses, but because of the foolishness and cruelty of the response. And a few years from now, if I talk with a survivor of this devastating war, will he blame Hamas for provoking it? I would guess that he’ll blame the country that bombed him without mercy and restricted the delivery of food while his family starved to death. And he’ll blame America for enabling it. And so will the rest of the world. And they’ll be right.