At first glance, the title question likely seems curious or even silly to many people. The IDF is currently flattening large parts of Gaza and they’re flooding Hamas’ tunnels. Their losses are minimal compared to the Hamas fighters, many of whom have begun surrendering. Israel has an overwhelming larger military backed by the United States. It certainly looks like they’re winning, doesn’t it? Yet that’s the question being posed this week by Daniel Levy and Tony Karon at The Nation. In fact, they go one step further in the title of their article, declaring, “Israel Is Losing this War.” So how can that be? As it turns out, the authors believe that the IDF is prevailing militarily, but the government of Israel is losing politically.
Both Israel and Hamas appear to be resetting the terms of their political contest not to the pre–October 7 status quo, but to the 1948 one. It’s not clear what comes next, but there will be no going back to the previous state of affairs.
The surprise attack neutralized Israeli military installations, breaking open the gates of the world’s largest open-air prison and leading a gruesome rampage in which some 1,200 Israelis, at least 845 of them civilians, were killed. The shocking ease with which Hamas breached Israeli lines around the Gaza Strip reminded many of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Not literally—there are vast differences between a US expeditionary war in a distant land and Israel’s war to defend an occupation at home, waged by a citizen army motivated by a sense of existential peril. Instead, the usefulness of the analogy lies in the political logic shaping an insurgent offensive.
It’s worth noting up front that the authors are definitely approaching this topic from an “anti-zionist” perspective. They repeatedly refer to Gaza as “the world’s largest open-air prison.” They speak of the “occupation” and use many of the terms we hear from the anti-Israel left these days. But even with that said, I’m hesitant to entirely dismiss their analysis or some of the potential future scenarios they suggest.
Their comparison of October 7 to the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam is not entirely off base. The Vietnamese were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned when they struck roughly 100 different targets simultaneously. They lost an ungodly number of soldiers in the process. But they also killed a lot of our people and “shattered the illusion of victory” that the Johnson administration had been promoting. The already shaky support for the war back in America collapsed and we eventually withdrew, ending with the disastrous and deadly fall of Saigon.
The Vietnamese weren’t fighting a single military battle hoping to gain territory and kill a greater number of enemy soldiers. They were fighting a political battle. The authors remind us of of an apt quote from Henry Kissinger at the time:
“We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”
That’s a chilling observation in the context of the current conflict in Gaza. The authors argue that whatever remains of Hamas is still fighting a political war. If they have goaded Israel into enough of a destructive attack on Gaza, Israel’s allies will eventually abandon her. Residents of Gaza – even those who might otherwise wish for peace – will increasingly side with Hamas and blame Israel for the wasteland they now inhabit. If they can convince enough Palestinians in the West Bank that the Palestinian Authority is little more than a puppet for the Israeli government, the people will abandon the PA as well. That would leave Hamas as the only game in town.
This is a significant concern and it could drag out the trouble in the region for a long time to come. But I will point out one key difference between the situation in Gaza and the Tet Offensive. Even after support for the war collapsed, the Americans still had a home to go back to. Israel does not. That is their home. If they cannot fully defeat Hamas and their allies abandon them, Israel will eventually fall to the Arab world and the Jewish state will be gone. And perhaps that’s been the plan of Hamas and Iran all along. We can’t let that happen, but I will repeat what I said above. This analysis is not entirely off the mark.
Read the full article here