Sechster Nahostkrieg

[Quintus Fabius]

https://www.csis.org/analysis/israel-could-lose

Two related things are paramount, and neither is wholly military.

The first is to win back global support, which Israel has seemingly surrendered to a corrupt and violent terrorist organization that seeks to slaughter innocents. This is most important in surrounding states, most of which share Israel’s hostility to Hamas. When Israel gets to the point of seeking withdrawal from Gaza—and despite recent claims it will not seek withdrawal, it will still need to—it will require the cooperation of countries like Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia to guide the rebuilding of the area. These countries will need to support the influx of supplies, provide some police protection, fund reconstruction, and make legitimate whatever governance structure emerges.

The second part, which is related, is that Israel needs to split Hamas off from the population surrounding it, and to ensure that whatever Palestinian solidarity emerges from this war centers around a strong alternative to Hamas. Israeli targeting practices play a role here, but realistically, that alternative organization or movement will need credibly to advance Palestinian aspirations for both prosperity and self-determination. If a large number of Palestinians feel that the only future they face is misery, some large fraction of them will seek to immiserate their afflicters, too. A shared project, a sense of dignity, and a sense of agency goes a long way in motivating vulnerable populations, and if violent armed groups provide the only avenue to pursue those things, those groups will enjoy uncontested primacy in Palestinian life.

Israel would be far better served by a strong Palestinian movement, and one that is at times able to stand up to Israel, not merely surrender to it. The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas has failed in this regard, and as a result Abbas’s approval ratings barely break single digits. Former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon has argued that Palestinians need a political horizon, but it is broader than that. Palestinian misery has many forms—and Palestinians share responsibility for it—but they must feel it can end.

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/28/120924694...ty-challen

Im gleichen Kontext:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/202...ategy.html

The phrase “mowing the grass” has been the bumper sticker version of Israeli strategy in Gaza for the last decade and a half.

It plays out in the following way: Palestinians, frustrated by the state of the enclave, turn to the likes of Hamas for, if nothing else, vengeance against Israel; Israel imposes restrictions such as the blockade on Gaza, citing security concerns; living conditions in Gaza deteriorate further, and discontent builds; Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and others capitalize on the discontent and attack Israel; and Israel responds by “mowing the grass”—killing the perpetrators along with some number of civilians, buying at best a few years of relative peace and fueling further long-term radicalization. And so the cycle continues ad infinitum.

“Mowing the grass” embodies more than just strategic fatalism; it also reflects a large measure of hubris. At its core lies the assumption that Israel can control the rheostat in Gaza, hitting Hamas just hard enough to deter it from attacking Israel but not so hard that Gaza implodes into chaos or explodes into a regional war. As one Israeli defense analyst said of the 2014 Gaza war, “We want to break their bones without putting them in the hospital.”

Israel's mowing-the-grass strategy finally failed spectacularly on October 7. The Hamas attack underscored just how little control Israel has over Gaza. It was not just an intelligence failure and an operational failure but also a more sweeping strategic failure. The core premise behind Israel's entire approach was proved catastrophically wrong in one morning.

But once all the killing is done, Israel will have to do something even harder if it's to have any hope of preventing the next war and the one after that: It will need to rebuild Gaza into something better than it was. That means ensuring Gaza's inhabitants have a chance at economic prosperity, potentially even at the risk of loosening the blockade. That means ensuring Gaza's inhabitants have political options apart from Hamas and the corrupt and pliant Palestinian Authority. And it means rebuilding the social fabric of Gaza, which will likely be even more tattered after what could be a devastating war that could leave the enclave that much more hostile to Israel.

That is not only a costly proposition of the sort that militaries are not particularly adept at. It would also be difficult for the Israeli public to stomach, particularly given the size and scale of Hamas's recent atrocities.

It is nevertheless what's necessary to end the cycle of mowing the grass only to watch it grow back.