Hopefully by the time this is released, it is still relevant. The war is changing and morphing all the time and it is never quite clear which events are going to dominate the narrative.
I spend a lot of time criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in this episode. I explain further why that is when I get there but just to stress from the outset, my goal here is to try to assess, as dispassionately as I can, the strategic situations faced by the key antagonists in this conflict. I have a view, of course, on what would constitute justice in this situation and I’m sure that bleeds through in places - nobody is perfect and this is just a hobby. But for the most part I am trying to avoid sweeping claims about right and wrong and trying to rationally assess things. All of which is to say, criticism of one side or the other for the choices they are making should not really be read as claims on the rightness or wrongness of their position.
As always thanks for listening or reading as the case may be.
Hamas
I am focusing here more narrowly on Hamas than the Palestinian people like I did in previous episodes because Hamas is really the actor with agency in the Gaza Strip right now. The broader Palestinian populace is caught in between Hamas and the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), the fact that some portion of that population supports Hamas notwithstanding.
In terms of Hamas’ strategic position at this juncture and where it may look to take the conflict, I think it is helpful to review what Hamas overall goal is, and the strategy it is pursuing to achieve that goal. As we discussed in a prior episode, Hamas’ stated goal is the eradication of the Israeli state. And just to make the point really clear, that’s not a reading between the lines, those are the words of the 1988 charter document which established Hamas.
So, Hamas’ goal is to eradicate Israel, but what is the grand strategy to do that? It is to draw Israel into inflicting civilian tragedy and provoke as much ill-will possible in other countries towards Israel. Hamas draws Israel in by killing Israeli civilians which triggers the Israeli survival instinct, honed over a millennia or so of massacres, pogroms and so on. As I and others have said before, the timing of October 7 appears closely tied to Israel’s prospective normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, but it nevertheless fits this overall modus operandi of killing Israeli civilians to precipitate a disproportionate response against the Palestinian civilian population.
In Hamas’ ideal conception, the Israeli reprisal attacks it triggers would lead to a broader conflict that brings in more actors against Israel. In the near region, that means creating a situation where Iran thinks Israel might destroy its valuable proxy assets which includes Hamas to some extent, but more importantly Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. It also means creating rage within the Arab nations bordering Israel especially Egpyt and Jordan that they start contemplating some kind of intervention or at least make their rhetoric more aggressive towards Israel.
Further abroad, it means curbing political support in Europe and especially the US for Israel. The hope would be that this leads to reduced defence cooperation and exports which undermine Israel’s military effectiveness in whatever broader regional conflict Hamas aimed to elicit with its October 7 attack.
Only parts of this strategy seem to be working for Hamas. Of all the countries in the Middle East willing to contemplate entering the fray, Iran was far and away at the top of the list. Honestly, it may have been the sole name on the list. But in early November, Iran’s Supreme Leader told the leader of Hamas that Iran had no plans to enter the war with Israel on Hamas’ behalf and there’s every indication that Iran is angry that it received no warning of the attack. Indeed, Iran wants Hamas to clamp down on its members who are calling for Iran to enter the war.
I suspect there are at least two reasons for Iran’s reticence to further entangle itself with Hamas. The first is that October 7 showed that Iran has little real control over Hamas the way it does Hezbollah. Hamas attacked without even notifying Iran and that shows they don’t feel any strong sense of allegiance to the Islamic Republic. Why should Iran get further involved with an organization it doesn’t think it can rely on in the future?
The second reason I suspect Iran is angry with Hamas is recall that over the past year, Iran was rocked by internal protests related to the murder of an Iranian Kurd by the country’s religious morality police. I suspect the Iranian regime feels that it is still on rocky ground, and it was hoping to improve economic conditions somewhat and consolidate its position via a partial rapprochement with the US. Hence the reason that Iran conducted a hostage swap just weeks before Hamas’ October 7 attack. Whatever goodwill that arrangement established, Hamas torched it without so much as a warning to Tehran.
In terms of drawing other Arab nations in the region into the conflict, if anything Egypt and Jordan have shifted from wary of Hamas to outright hostile. The October 7 attacks and the resulting Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip has put enormous pressure on Egypt to accept Palestinian refugees from Gaza, something both countries are absolutely loath to do. They likely fear that Israel’s goal is permanent expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the domestic challenges that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of refugees would create if they became permanently resident in their countries.
Furthermore, Egypt and Jordan turning on Israel was likely always a pipe dream. Neither country has military capabilities of any note. And given Israel’s historical success in wars against its Arab neighbors, it is easy to understand why Egypt and Jordan wouldn’t contemplate rolling the dice. Egypt in particular already harbors antipathy towards Hamas because Hamas is aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement that forms Egypt’s political opposition.
Perhaps more incredibly, none of the Arab nations that were party to the Abraham Accords have sought to change that agreement, and Saudi Arabia has even communicated to the White House that normalization of its relations with Israel is still on the table. Recall that wrecking such a pact was widely believed to be the catalyst for Hamas’ massacre on October 7.
So, in its near region, it seems that Hamas has only managed to annoy or alienate potential allies and at least for now, does not appear to have critically undermined Israel’s diplomatic position.
Outside the region, Hamas has been able to activate a huge outpouring of support for the Palestinian cause from activists in the US and Europe. In the US, there is plenty of evidence that the White House has sought to restrain Israel’s military activities with the goal of minimizing civilian casualties. And the Israeli foreign minister has admitted explicitly that Israel feels the diplomatic pressure. European nations have gone further with the Norwegian legislature passing legislation to pave the way for recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state and other states like Belgium considering doing the same.
At first glance, this all seems like a bright spot for Hamas. But I am not completely sure. Yes, governments around the world are pressing Israel to conduct its military operations in Gaza more carefully, but this is not actually what Hamas wants. Ultimately, what Hamas wants is to destroy Israel and to do that it needs Israel to kill more Palestinians, not less so that Israel comes to be seen as the rogue actor, not Hamas. So to the extent that governments are showing sympathy, they are doing so towards the Palestinian people, rather than towards Hamas’ aims.
I think it is really too early to think in any deep way about where this leaves Hamas. I have written previously that I did not think it was possible to defeat Hamas using military means. And to repeat that in different words, I do not think it is possible to eradicate the constituency within the Palestinian populace that wants to destroy Israel using military means alone.
I still think that is true. A poll taken by the Arab World for Research and Development taken on November 14 found that 46% of Gazans “extremely supported” the October 7 attacks. So, despite all of the humanitarian suffering inflicted on Gaza as a result of Israel’s blockade and military operations, nearly half of Gazans still basically think October 7 was worth it.
That’s the recruiting pool for Hamas, right there. Roughly a million people. So Israel can kill thousands of Hamas fighters without seriously denting the organization’s ability to reconstitute itself once hostilities come to an end. Or more likely, the ability of a successor organization to fill the void.
I have heard some commentators push back on this line of thinking by citing al-Qaeda and pointing out that the US ultimately destroyed al-Qaeda and killed all of its top leaders. This is true, but I think there are some problems with this argument. First, even if you decide that al-Qaeda is comparable to Hamas, it is hardly clear that the US needed to invade Iraq and Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaeda. Second, al-Qaeda was a pure terror group operating under the protection of the Taliban. Hamas is a bit different. It is mostly a terror group, but it is also responsible for governance in the Gaza Strip. It has an entire non-military bureaucracy for administration purposes that al-Qaeda did not have, so I am not sure you can infer from the al-Qaeda story that Hamas can be eliminated in the same way. Indeed, maybe the Taliban is the better comparison, and we know how that ended.
One other point to note about that poll I just cited is that support for October 7 was about 20 points higher in the West Bank than in Gaza. There’s at least two ways to read that. One is that it is Gazans, not those in the West Bank who are experiencing the worst of Israel’s retaliation and so people there are less likely to see October 7 as having been worthwhile. Another reading is that Israel departed Gaza over a decade ago, but its occupation of the West Bank continues as does settler violence against Palestinians, and so those in the West Bank were already more animated against Israel prior to October 7, hence their greater likelihood to be supportive.
What does Hamas do next, you ask? I think it is just more of the same. Kill Israeli soldiers operating in the Gaza Strip. Embed themselves among high profile civilian targets, and wait for the international community to restrain Israel and for Israel to simultaneously incinerate whatever political capital it may have had to negotiate with.
So, that is all I have for Hamas, which feels like plenty.
Netanyahu
Sometimes, without warning, the thought will strike me that Israel is just incredibly unlucky to have been dudded with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in this conflict. Sure, to some extent Israelis have to look to themselves for this given they voted to bring him and his far right coalition government to power.
Even still, Netanyahu’s incompetence leading up to October 7 and since bursts through whatever lower bound Israeli voters could have had for his abilities. To fully understand my point we have to rewind in history a little.
From 2000-2005, Israel and Palestinian militant groups engaged in what is referred to as the Second Intifada. This was a Palestinian uprising which involved, among other things, the widespread use of suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets. Buses, malls, train stations. Public gathering places were a favorite target of Palestinian suicide bombers.
One of the effects of the Second Intifada was to destroy the Israeli left wing in domestic politics. The left had traditionally been the home of those advocating for a negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestinians. Instead, after the Intifada, physical safety became the country’s overriding concern and Netanyahu has capitalized on that for much of the past two decades, promising that he could deliver safety to Israelis and Jews through a tough security approach towards Palestinians.
At some level, you can understand the voting dynamics of the Israeli public here. They undergo this total disruption of daily life, constantly fearful for themselves and their children and then along comes a politician willing to write ironclad guarantees for Israel’s safety and security, so they vote for him.
And man were they sold a lemon. For a start, Netanyahu has turned out to be deeply corrupt. He’s currently part of an ongoing trial in which he’s accused of accepting bribes in three separate circumstances. And prior to October 7, these corruption charges had been a crisis point for Israeli politics, causing Israel to hold elections five times in just four years.
To maintain his grip on power, Netanyahu has had to align himself with the most rightwing elements of Israeli politics, parties that previously sat out on the fringe. To highlight the problems this causes for Netanyahu, and more importantly, for Israel, we can look at the case of Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu. In the weeks following October 7, Eliyahu said one of the options available to Israel in its war in Gaza was to drop a nuclear weapon on it. That’s the kind of thing that massively undermines American and European support for Israel. So Netanyahu wanted to fire him. But he couldn’t due to opposition from the far right party of which Eliyahu is a member, and whose support Netanyahu needs to retain control as prime minister. And, of course, being prime minister is extremely helpful in fighting off these corruption charges that he continues to face.
So that’s the first way in which Netanyahu has been a disappointment for Israelis: his lack of integrity has created a situation where he is beholden to some of the most extreme elements in Israeli politics whose policies are largely intolerable to Israel’s crucial Western allies.
The second way is that, it turns out he couldn’t actually guarantee Israel’s safety? Like that was his core political promise and instead he oversaw the worst massacre of Jews on Israeli soil in the country’s history? And, incredibly, the guy is so deeply lacking in a personal sense of accountability that he’s been trying to blame the military for what happened that day.
Why, you may ask, am I so adamant that Netanyahu bears some responsibility? There is now clear reporting that in the lead up to October 7, Israel’s generals were trying to warn Netanyahu about the possibility of an attack by Hamas. But, incredibly, the reason Netanyahu refused to meet with them was he was busy handling the political fallout from his attempts to undermine the independence of Israel’s judiciary which had brought millions of Israelis into the streets to protest against his government.
Now, because I’m the one doing the reading here, I get to take you on a little narcissitic sidequest here. You may recall in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, I defended the Israeli intelligence and security apparatus pointing out that it was too early to tell what had happened, and that often what happens in these situations is a failure of politics rather than intelligence. Well dear listeners, what do we have here?
It wasn’t that Israel lacked intelligence that might indicate an elevated threat from Hamas, the problem was a political leadership that was focused elsewhere and had other priorities.
This leads me to the third way in which Netanyahu has failed Israelis which is that it is now pretty clear, I think, that his prioritization of expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank overtook his priority to keep Israel and its citizens safe.
For those unfamiliar with the settlements, they are in some ways exactly what they sound like. Small villages or sometimes just a collection of homes that are built by Jewish settlers, often from extremely conservative wings of the faith, in the West Bank which sits between Israel and the country of Jordan.
These settlements are hugely controversial because they are seen as eroding the path to a negotiated peace. And the way they do that is by raising the cost in domestic Israeli politics of agreeing to any deal that creates a Palestinian state because such a deal would almost certainly involve the massive forced relocation of Israeli settlers. In other words, the settlements are a way that Israel’s rightwing binds the country into a position where it cannot negotiate a deal that would create a Palestinian state, because it would involve the forced removal of too many Jewish settlers.
I’m providing a link here to a map that highlights the problem. This map was the Israeli proposal at the 2000 Camp David Summit mediated by then President Bill Clinton between Israel and Palestinian leaders. The deep blue segments piercing into the West Bank are there to provide geographic connections between larger Jewish settlements and the main Israeli state. But you can see how they deform any potential Palestinian state.
Netanyahu’s fixation on the West Bank and on settlement expansion, combined with the completion of a barrier fence around Gaza, led to Israel reducing troop deployments near the Strip. Those troops were instead needed in the West Bank to protect settlers encroaching further on land that might be used to form a Palestinian state.
So Netanyahu took bribes, failed to keep his promise to protect Israel, and failed in that promise because he was too busy sabotaging what is clearly the only route to long-term peace in the region. I think it would have been hard for the average Israeli voter to think Netanyahu would plumb these kinds of depths of poor leadership unless they had experienced it for themselves.
Catastrophically, Netanyahu is still in charge, and rapidly digging an ever deeper hole for his country. When I compiled this, we were six weeks into Israel’s war on Gaza with 11,000 Palestinians dead, still more than 200 hostages in Hamas captivity, all the major leaders of Hamas alive, and support from key allies for Israel dissolving before our eyes. Let’s go deeper on the the last of those because there’s some complexity there.
In a recent Washington Post op-ed, President Biden threatened to issue visa sanctions against extremist Israeli settlers committing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. This is the clearest sign yet of the US running out of patience with the conduct of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. There are some definite teeth in this threat. Many Israeli settlers have ties back to the US, often because they were born into Orthodox Jewish communities there. And the messaging couldn’t be clearer, by targeting settlers, Biden is going after what we just discussed is Netanyahu’s number one political priority and conveying that he wants no more violence in the West Bank and no more expansion of settlements.
I also think you can actually see Netanyahu’s fingerprints, at least indirectly, on the sometimes questionable job the IDF is doing in terms of communicating with the outside world. The al-Shifa hospital is a perfect example of this. For weeks, the IDF has claimed that underneath al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, is a huge Hamas command and control center, the revealing of which would show the full depth of Hamas’ cynical exploitation of civilian targets.
This is not actually a new allegation, reporting suggesting al-Shifa’s role as an important coordinating point for Hamas goes back nearly a decade. But given the massive humanitarian toll of Israel’s war in Gaza, re-establishing its role with current evidence was an important milestone in proving out the argument that Hamas puts Palestinians at unavoidable risk by situating themselves among highly sensitive civilian targets.
And just to make clear why the standard was and continues to be very high for proving this, Reuters released a photo this week from inside al-Shifa showing half a dozen infants taken out of incubators because they were no longer working due to the hospital’s power running out. I mean this here is the definition of innocence: these are newborns, and some of them appear premature.
Initially, the evidence presented by the IDF fell far short of the standard any reasonable person would require to allocate meaningful blame to Hamas. Yes, they found some weapons, a laptop and some other pieces of equipment but nothing like the huge network of underground tunnels they had suggested they would find.
However, two days later, the IDF finally started to turn up evidence of a tunnel 10 meters deep and 55 meters long underneath al-Shifa. They also found surveillance footage showing Hamas using the hospital to seek medical assistance for hostages taken on October 7 and bringing vehicles to the hospital that they commandeered that day as well.
While compelling, by the time the IDF released this evidence it had already lost this battle in the information war. By rushing its initial findings and putting out incomplete evidence, the IDF gave all the space its detractors needed to paint the organization as untrustworthy.
The reason I see Netanyahu’s fingerprints on this is it smacks of the kind of desperate, pressured approach to these issues that you’d expect from a politician focused solely on retaining their grip on power. I admit, this is all conjecture, but if reporting comes out indicating Netanyahu put undue pressure on the military to “find something”, you better believe I’ll be dropping a few I told you sos.
Now you may reasonably ask ok, I have been very critical here of Netanyahu and his staff, but what were they to do? You aren’t going to like my answer and that’s fine, but they could have waited. They could have done literally nothing from a military perspective, at least initially. Instead, they could have seen what the value of the moral sympathy created by October 7 was worth.
What better time to get normalization with Saudi Arabia than after the attack by pointing out how reasonable a partner Israel could be? Could Israel have convinced Qatar to boot the Hamas leaders it hosts? Maybe. If Israel had called on Hamas to surrender and release the hostages before firing a shot, would pressure from Arab nations, already furious at Hamas, have been enough to get a result? Again, maybe.
The counter response to these points is obvious. The first is that none of these things would have happened. Fine, but at least Israel could have pointed to its attempts at diplomacy once it engaged in a subsequent military campaign. The second is that Israel has a right to defend itself. Agreed! I am simply saying Netanyahu could have tried to defend Israel for the long-term using diplomacy to extract concessions based on the October 7 attacks, and if those efforts failed he would not have lost the military option. The third objection is that Israel had to respond immediately to prevent Hamas from preparing its defenses, or something to that effect. This is definitely wrong. Hamas was so obviously prepared for the Israeli response already and waiting a week and seeing what was on the table from a diplomatic perspective would’ve done nothing to reduce Israel’s military options. The ground invasion didn’t start for weeks and Israel has complete control of what goes in and out of Gaza - they could’ve waited as long as they wanted before commencing military operations.
All of this leads me to repeat my view that Israel is basically in a place of guaranteed loss now. Netanyahu has walked the country directly into every single trap Hamas has laid. He’s validated Israel’s critics abroad, he’s failed to shape an operation that is delivering actual negative effects on Hamas, and he’s rapidly shrinking Israel’s post-war options for any kind of long-term peace. Maybe he’s already burned all of those.
I’ve spent the vast majority of this episode on Netanyahu and what I see as his specific failings. That is in part because I think he shares responsibility with Hamas for the needless deaths of Palestinian children. But equally, I think he carries a lot of responsibility for the needless deaths of Israeli children in the future.
I think another reason why Netanyahu has consumed a lot of this episode is that he operates in a political structure that is much closer to a liberal democracy than Hamas does, which necessarily makes the various currents affecting him more complex. Hamas and its leaders are simpler to analyze: they are a terrorist group primarily focused on killing Jews and destroying Israel, and they’ll spend any number of Palestinian lives to do it. That is just a more straightforward strategic outlook to analyze and understand.
Before wrapping on Gaza generally, we should touch briefly on the cease fire brokered by the US and Qatar to enable an exchange of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Israel will also allow several hundred trucks with humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip as part of the cease fire. Full disclosure, I don’t have a ton of thoughts on this because it happened right as I was getting ready to record but let’s see what I’ve got.
This is obviously a positive development for the families of the hostages along with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza lacking food, water and medical supplies. Some will argue that it does not change the broader strategic picture as Hamas will just use the time to reposition its forces and Israel will similarly use the time to prepare for its offensive on southern Gaza.
I think that is not quite right on several fronts. The first is that the exchange will show that negotiation is possible. Recall that just six weeks ago, Hamas murdered Israeli children in their beds notionally on behalf of the Palestinian cause, the notional being that Hamas goal is actually to kill Israeli children in their beds. And over the last six weeks Israel has killed some 10,000+ Palestinians in air and artillery strikes and now the two sides are engaging in what is fundamentally a humanitarian exchange that aims to preserve life. Pretty remarkable in some respects.
I think a second way in which it will change the strategic picture is as it regards the information war. And to put it crudely I think this will resolve to the advantage of the Palestinian side for a couple of reasons. One is that there’s an asymmetry which is that the Israeli suffering happened and it was fast. The murders and rapes all took place on October 7 and so there is some level of discounting that is taking place in the minds of outside observers. But the Palestinian suffering is ongoing. People are starving today. People are dying without medical attention today. I am not passing a judgment on whether this is the right way to see things or not, I am just describing how I think people will see things.
So you have this structural imbalance. And with fighting halted, at least temporarily, there is going to be a huge desire on the part of international media to get into Gaza and get as much reporting as they can on the situation in the Strip. In parallel, even if the IDF were to suddenly develop masterful storytelling abilities, their stories right now are going to be mostly about tunnels underground and weapons caches which I think the median consumer of news is not going to find as compelling as ongoing human tragedy.
A third dynamic I can see coming into play is that with no active fighting, it is going to be clearer that Netanyahu’s government does not actually have a plan for governance in the Strip at the conclusion of the war. Between the widening of insight into conditions in Gaza along with the lack of a plan forward, I think the pressure on Israel to maintain the ceasefire or to negotiate further ceasefires will be very high.
Finally, and this is perhaps one of the most anodyne things you will ever hear me say, I think the general publics on both sides of the conflict are going to have conflicting internal reactions. In Israel, obviously the families of the hostages will be pleased, but I can imagine a countervailing view which is why is Hamas being rewarded with a pause in the pressure being applied by the IDF for doing the fundamentally humane thing and releasing these hostages it should never have taken in the first place?
How Palestinians respond to the pause in fighting will be similarly complex I’d expect. As I’ve said before, both here and in prior episodes, I think it is clear now that Hamas priority is not the welfare of the Palestinian people. But with more than 11,000 Palestinians killed by the war thus far, many Palestinians may choose to ignore that and look to Hamas as their only instrument for revenge. Alternatively, some may see Hamas’s cynical exploitation of the Palestinian people as a platform for attacks on Israel as no longer tolerable given the destruction it has brought them, and what resistance exists to Hamas’s rule may start to coalesce. Crazier things have happened in the Middle East.
That is everything I have on the situation in Gaza for now. Let’s move on briefly to China and President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States.
China
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, visited the US recently to meet President Joe Biden and discuss a host of issues between the two countries. From my perspective, the outcomes of the meeting were highly positive from a US perspective.
China agreed to greater cooperation tackling the US’s fentanyl crisis and I cannot stress enough how big a deal this is. Fentanyl kills about 70,000 Americans a year and is a huge factor in the life expectancy gap between Americans and the citizens of other developed democracies. It also disproportionately lands on the kinds of working class communities where Biden and Democrats will be hoping to make inroads in the 2024 elections.
China also agreed to restore military-to-military communications which have broken down leading to all kinds of near misses between Chinese and US military assets in the South China Sea. Xi is also supposed to have told Biden in private that he no plans to invade Taiwan. Of course, he could change his mind or be lying, but that’s nevertheless an indication of Xi’s genuine desire for better relations with the US.
The main benefit, as far as I can tell, that China got from the meeting was the chance to woo US investors and reassure Western capital that China remains open for business.
We have talked before about the problems China faces. Its economic growth has slowed rapidly first due to COVID and then due to the shadow cast over various sectors by the high handed policy making of the Communist Party that rules the country. Economic growth is so anemic that sectors of the Chinese economy are actually experiencing deflation: falling prices. That may sound like a good thing but Japan’s lost economic decades from the early 90s to today show that deflation can be a signal of economic stagnation as price setters expect customers’ incomes to remain stagnant.
Speaking of parallels to Japan, China’s population is greying at an astonishing rate and this is something we’ve talked about multiple times in previous episodes. This is a long-term, structural barrier to China’s economic growth for which the country does not yet have a solution. On top of all of this, China is carrying a much higher debt load than most countries at this level of development, a legacy of decades of property-fuelled economic growth.
So bringing back outside investors, who have been scared off by what they see as capricious policy making by the CCP, was an important goal for Xi during this meeting. Capital flows into China in 2024 will tell us whether he was successful or not.
That brings us to the end of this particular episode. We have not talked about Ukraine for quite a while so expect to hear more about that conflict feature next time we speak. As always, thanks for listening.
CWI #35 - Hamas, Netanyahu and China