Israel’s war in Gaza has become a Rorschach test for elites to examine their strategic assumptions and vision. While not a monumental war across several continents, the Gaza war has become a watershed in the evolution since World War II of how we think about war.
World War II was a defining event of the 20th century. It also was a seminal moment in the history of war. It was a dramatic total war. It ended with the delivery of absolute victory by the allies and vast destruction of our enemies, including widespread suffering. And it resulted in the annihilation and eclipsing stigmatization of the underlying ideologies of evil that caused the war.
The successful prosecution of that war provided at first a template for understanding war and strategy going forward – a set of understandings Paul Nitze captured in crafting the national security strategy of the United States which was codified in the NSC-68 document in 1948. The strategy assumed a twilight struggle with the Soviets, the strong possibility of an eventual total war, and an aggressive plan to win and ultimately to collapse and annihilate the underlying idea of communism. Even containment at first was an aggressive strategy that sought victory, not by invasion but by forcing the implosion of communism onto itself to eliminate it.
Although World War marked the greatest moment of American power, success and purpose – as well as the solidifying of its moral standing — ironically, within a decade, despite the precedent of World War II, elites in the West abandoned the basic template forged from World War II and have ever since rejected their own legacy and instead confidently concluded that total war is an immoral affair. They concluded as well that victory itself is no longer a valid objective in war. Moreover, despite the utter disrepute in which Nazism and Mikadoism had been relegated, war nonetheless began to be seen as futile as an instrument to defeat evil ideas, or even that ideas themselves can be evil and cause war.
Indeed, the conclusion that ideas cannot be vanquished in war underpins a conclusion that the aim of war is no longer to vanquish your enemy. Instead, war is part of a negotiation to moderate the enemy’s ideas enough to come to an accommodation.
Behind this shift is the idea that nations, especially their populations, do not go to war. Governments, or even sub-cliques in governments, do. Of course, this places a bloated emphasis on employing force so surgically that it guarantees “zero civilian causalities” — the standard indignantly demanded of Israel last month by Secretary of State Blinken. This is a truly impossible standard that gives overwhelming moral and tactical advantage to immoral, cynical and grotesque enemies, such as Hamas. Indeed, it makes the intentional slaughter of their own population a highly effective strategic imperative of such ideologies anchored to martyrdom and its cult of death.
Of course, if one needs in the end to defeat not even a government, let alone entire population, but only a sub-clique within the government, then war must be sharply harnessed and calibrated to allow for some sort of accommodation with your enemy to end the conflict. Undoubtedly it is generally advisable and moral to desist from debasing one’s adversary in ways to the point that it diminishes them as humans. There are many cases in which seeking such a humiliating victory – or seeking deliberately disgracing terms of victory over the defeated — indeed can dishonor a nation culturally to such an extent that it strips it of the confidence to reconcile to its defeat peacefully. Largesse in victory has its role.
And yet, the idea that war has evolved to such a surgical and refined point and demanding that absolute standard is both unrealistic and indeed often unhelpful. Moreover, to apply an antiseptic standard that rejects as valid the aim of defeating a nation and extend it even to a prohibition on inflicting a stunning defeat in war to its government as well, becomes highly problematic.
The idea of displaying largesse in victory and rejecting total dehumanization in his defeat has mutated in the last six decades into a prohibition altogether of victory as a valid goal and discarding entirely the subjecting of an enemy to obvious defeat. This evolution emerges from the idea that seeking victory and imposing defeat undermines those among our enemy who seek to moderate the offending ideology while at the same time vindicates those hardliners – the sub-clique within government which is ultimately guilty for causing or prolonging the war and who see the conflict in Manichean terms within which only one side can emerge as survivor. The world then is divided not between our nation and its ideas against its enemy population or even an enemy government and the ideas or cultural attributes that animate it, but between the sub-cliquish “hardline” advocates of a Manichean struggle to the death on both sides (ourselves and the enemy) against the “moderates” on both sides (ourselves and the enemy) who seek to reform their respective ideas to reach accommodation. In these terms, the goals of victory and the aim of defeat are then viewed not only as inappropriate, nor even just as irresponsible, but as dangerous, immoral and bloodthirsty. The battlelines thus are drawn between moderates and hardliners, not between ideas, government and nations.
The drift in strategic imagery among Western elites — which stands in stark contrast to the experience of World War II – proceeded until October 6, 2023, inexorably toward a universally (among Western elites) refined view of the world.
But then came October 7.
For Israelis, October 7, however, represented a collapse of the accumulated ideas of the last half century. An evil erupted in reality that had lived only in memory and generationally bequeathed trauma – or so the Israelis had thought. All attempts to moderate Palestinian nationalist ideology had failed. Israeli peace activists and those who reached out to Palestinians and railed against their own countrymen’s nationalism (against the hardliners) were butchered, raped and kidnapped without mercy. The savagery was cheered on by the very “moderates” on the Palestinian side that were imagined to be the partners in peace and accommodation. Nor was it just the Israeli memory and generational trauma bequeathed that was suddenly a reality. Internationally, the global left peace movements and camp – the progressive left which so many Jews imagined was their ally — turned on the Jews with animated hatred that confirmed that Hitler’s ghost had suddenly sprung back to life. Frenzied Jew-hatred became fashionable, and it was led not by an uniformed mass, but by elites and elite institutions. And left-leaning governments wholesale failed their Jews, leaving them unprotected in their streets against the raging mobs.
The Israelis and the Jews, thus, suddenly found themselves not in a conflict that resembled any affecting Western countries in the last eight decades, but in a conflict that resembled 1935-1945. Every horror a Jewish parent and grandparent had told their decedents about which we all were warned but nonetheless believed modern Western society had finally transcended were suddenly alive, insatiable and rampaging.
And the idea of the enemy, of Hamas, of Palestinian nationalism itself, was irreconcilable. Hades himself had emerged from his tunneled netherworld. Every action taken not only by those whom Israelis imagined as hardliners, but by those whom they regarded as moderates, and in fact the entire population, proved to be part of a carefully laid incremental strategy vectoring toward the final goal of destroying the Jewish state. Every attempt at moderating the idea of Palestinian nationalism had resulted in deepening violence, radicalization and finally unimaginable wholesale slaughter. If in the 1980s, Western elites contemplated the practical solutions that might allow Arab populations under Israeli control to exercise self-governance or even freedom, the Palestinian Arabs had now birthed an age in which Western elites rejected the very validity of the continued existence of the Jewish state itself, and implied – and increasingly overtly screamed for — the acceptability of a second Holocaust of its Jewish inhabitants.
In short, Israel found itself in total war, engaged in a twilight struggle to the death, with an enemy animated by an implacable ideology and supported by an entire population that was mentally and materially mobilized, as well as obsessively and entirely focused on the Jewish people’s destruction. Israel was fighting its modern World War II, and not an American war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or even a French war in Algeria. It was not fighting a Soviet-inspired proxy army or an insurgency seeking some sort of exit from a colonial structure. It was fighting to survive a total onslaught by a whole people animated by a genocidal cult of death and martyrdom.
In this moment, the sanitized rules of war, the very playbook of war, that had informed elites in the West thus since World War II was rendered vastly unaligned with the realities of the war Israel faced.
But Israel was torn.
On one side, it knew the war it had to fight, and it mentally transitioned (almost instantly) to an outlook akin to the allies’ image of their mission in World War II. Israel understood it had to restore its regional image of power, eliminate Hamas from controlling any part of Gaza and avoid any path to its reconstitution by controlling the Gaza border with Egypt, and to weaken and distance Hizballah a dozen kilometers or more form the northern border to reestablish a demilitarized buffer zone in Lebanon rather than the current de facto evacuation of norther Israel as a buffer zone so that Hizballah cannot launch a surprise attack. It knew it was in total war with not only Hamas, but the majority of the Palestinian population. It knew that war was not only necessary, but that unequivocal victory in it was the only path to peace and security.
But on the other, Israel labored under the refined and antiseptic standard that Western elites demanded. It was still dependent on US arms supply, so it had to pay homage to the consensus of Western elites detached from the strategic realities and determined to secure a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in control of at least a substantial portion of Gaza and Hizballah still tactically positioned to conduct of much larger and more deadly October 7-like attack at will. In short, Israel was not allowed to seek victory, let alone seek total defeat of the idea animating its adversary – an adversary that was both the majority of Palestinian Arab people and the government of Iran.
Israel in its war with Iran – fought through the arena of the Gaza strip and likely Lebanon too – has had to navigate a narrow, even a knife’s-edge width, path.
Essentially, Israel found itself having to seek the sort of victory, the validity, wisdom and justness of which Western elites reject. It must destroy Hamas in its entirety, leaving nobody within Hamas with whom to negotiate, but only to accept terms of unconditional surrender. It must inflict a generational realization among Palestinian Arabs of the self-destructive insanity of fighting to destroy the Jewish people and the futility of ongoing questioning of the permanence of Israel. It must fight to the point at which the very ideas underpinning Hamas, and indeed the ideas of its mentors in Iran, are seen as so suicidal and disgraced that they are taboo, as were Mikadoism and Nazism discredited and taboo after World War II.
Thus, Israel must achieve so total, decisive and absolute victory that it destroys Hamas as an organization and fatally wounds the idea animating it, while the West insists on its impossibility. Israel must deliver such an unrestrained blow to its enemies that even the population of its opponents realize that Israel is so strong that it is futile to attack it and thus discredit radical voices, while the West believes radical voices are defeated only by restraint and compromise.
In short, the very concept of war and conflict informing the West for the last half century is on trial by this war. If Israel actually does emerge victorious wherein Hamas collapses entirely, Hizballah is forced to retreat and Iran is left reeling and ripe for a “1982 Falklands-like meltdown for the Junta” scenario, it disproves so much of what Western elites so firmly believe.
Which is why so many elites in the West — even those elites in Israel who identify with these global elites — cannot fathom, let alone countenance, a total Israeli victory over Hamas in Gaza, cannot accept that Israel is at war with a people at this point (all polls confirm this) nor can tolerate even slightly the means or results that would deliver it.
But Israel does not live in the world of theories. The war it is fighting and the threat of destruction it faces is very real.
So the world is divided between elites who received and internalize the warning, wake-up call and sobering lesson of Israel’s agony, and those who retreat yet deeper and with more determination to preserve the paradigm of war that had defined in the last half century the West’s elites.
The war in Gaza – and how one relates to the idea of Israel’s quest for victory — has laid bare onto which side one falls.