Can Wars Be Won? Part 1: Gaza
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- Опубліковано 15 вер 2024
- A discussion of victory in warfare and whether victory in Gaza is possible.
Ye Olde Clausewitz: amzn.to/3UsNtGF
A must read about Israel/Palestine: amzn.to/3UthdDq
My substack: shurkin.substa...
michaelshurkin...
/ michaelshurkin
/ michael-shurkin-ph-d-1...
As a man far less learned than the outstanding Mr Shurkin, I would say that Israel enjoys peace with Egypt because it took enough of a beating for both sides to maintain some pride snd dignity, and the former realised it could not impose its will on Egypt by inflicting low-cost military defeats.
Convincing analysis
1. Israel has been using many of the non-combat strategies you attribute to the Palestinians. And Israel has been doing it for longer and more effectively than the Palestinians. Trying to tire out Palestinians through roadblocks, martial law, siege, bombardment, dragging out negotiations, putting off implementation of previous promises, delaying tactics (like "there are no such people as Palestinians", "there is no negotiating partner", "we must deal with Iran first" etc), arbitrary arrest, creeping land confiscation etc.
Israel is a master of propaganda, lawfare, lobbying (especially in the UK and USA), utilizing their diaspora, using the US veto in the UNSC, making bilateral deals with Arab countries that support Palestinians etc to outmanoeuvre the Palestinians. Extracting the Balfour letter from the UK government in 1917 was an early example of a Zionist non-combat strategy to outmanoeuvre.
It also tries to tire out or distract the USA and the international community, in the hope that they will eventually let Israel get away with what it has done in the past and what it wants to do in the future.
2. Applying international law to Israel isn't done solely to support Palestinians. Strange as it may seem to you, many people who don't care about Palestinians, don't like to see a population starved, don't like to see the destruction of houses and hospitals on the scale that Israel has been doing it, and don't like to see 10,000s of women and children being killed (regardless of who they are and regardless of who is killing them). They didn't like it when Russia was doing it on a much smaller scale in Ukraine and they don't like it on the much larger and more cynical scale that Israel is doing it now.
3. Israel has no more desire to negotiate than Hamas. In fact, Israel has done far more turning down negotiations with Hamas than Hamas has done with Israel both before and since 7 Oct. Even when it comes to negotiating with the PLO, it takes the US government to strong-arm Israel into negotiation and as soon as the US loosens its grip, Israel has always backed away from negotiations. This is entirely understandable. As you point out Israel is by far the more powerful party. It can get almost everything it wants without negotiations. So it rarely sees the need for negotiations, and will only play along when bribed or coerced by the USA. Does this mean Israel must be destroyed as the only way to reach a solution? This is certainly how Hamas sees it and it can point to the entire history of Israel as evidence for this point of view.
4. There is a real and present danger to Palestinians from very powerful Israeli military which is used to operating with scant regard for Palestinian lives and international law.
5. The assertion that military action must come before a political one is weird in the extreme. Most international conflicts are resolved by political solutions without any prior military action.
6. It is extremely difficult to see a solution to the Zionist-Palestinian conflict by destroying Hamas and of course the Gaza Strip. The destruction of the Gaza Strip will become an Israeli problem to solve. Israel will try external manoeuvres to try and make it someone else's problem but ultimately Israel has kept others away from the Gaza Strip since 1967 and it isn't in any other country's interest to help Israel solve a problem it created for itself (both by the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and in the destruction it has done since Oct 7). The PA doesn't have the resources to rebuild Gaza. While Fatah didn't love Hamas it would be politically suicidal for them to try and take advantage of the killing and destruction that Israel has done in Gaza. And they certainly don't want to arrive in Gaza on the back of an Israeli tank.
7. The Greater Israel side of Israeli politics was already making gains on the ground in the West Bank prior to 7 Oct with the number of Palestinians killed reaching highs prior to 7 Oct. Winning the war in Gaza (or keeping it going forever) will encourage them to put their foot on the accelerator in the West Bank. With talk now (and action later) on what they call "voluntary migration" (i.e. ethnic cleansing) in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. This is what happened after victory in the 6-Day War (an extremely important event as far as they are concerned). With Israeli politics moving in this direction, it seems to me that a political solution will be further away post-Gaza War than it was in 2022.
8. If Israel wanted to "do the job right" instead of telling the population of Gaza City to go south to Khan Yunis and then to Rafah it should have told the population to go east into Israel. Hence getting rid of the "human shields" thing that Israel keeps talking about. Making it much, much easier to provide the population with food, water, and medical help and prevent them from being killed by Israeli bombs and rifle fire. Also convincing the international community (and the Palestinians themselves) that Israel cares about their lives. The area immediately east of the Gaza Strip is relatively unpopulated. That more humanitarian way of fighting the war would leave Israel and Palestinians in a better place post war to talk.
1. It is possible for both sides to maneuver internationally, Israel also doing so doesn't mean that Hamas doesn't - in fact Hamas is almost entirely externally funded and most of its weapons inventory was stockpiled from external grants over years at the cost of domestic development, it takes a lot of resources to wage war and one would be extremely hard pressed to explain how they would have come up with all these weapons and etc by domestic means only. For example, in Israeli press releases Hamas notably doesn't discriminate between civilian and military deaths to purposefully blur the lines, they probably know at least roughly what the distribution is but it's to their benefit not to shed any light on this and keep people guessing. This plays into their entire messaging effort which you seem to have picked up on. In fact, Hamas "governs" but they are not a civil organization in the same way that Hezbollah is - they merely receive payroll and distribute it to tangentially affiliated entities without actually providing any direct services from their own organization. Some of these entities are to varying extents dual-purpose with military dimensions, some of them are entirely focused on local administration and it is often hard to distinguish between these two categories let alone degrees within them. All Hamas press releases repeat the notion that Israel is just indiscriminately bombing them for no reason and that they're entirely reasonable negotiators but this assertion quickly breaks down upon closer scrutiny. The current situation was initiated by their side with October 7th, not through some strange design of the Israeli government. This was obviously a major miscalculation on their part, but you would be hard pressed to explain this course of action as somehow expressing a desire for peace.
2. People tend singularly have a fascination with palestine and gaza that they do not extend to other populations or polities and I think Shurkin looks at things from a more holistic and quite frankly less biased perspective. There are people suffering all over the world in Sudan, Yemen, Mexico, etc. In many cases the violence is far more blatant, pervasive, and institutionalized in addition to being on a larger scale. Many of these places are also strategically more important than Gaza which has no economic value, but the Levant has developed this immense political importance since everybody repeatedly focuses on it. If the extend and scale of suffering is really so important, why does all the humanitarian aid gravitate towards Gaza? There are entire TEV containers of foreign aid and crates of privately donated goods sitting undistributed in vast warehouses in Cyprus which should be completely illogical from your supposed viewpoint. Clearly Hamas has done something correctly in the information warfare space to push their cause in the public consciousness and twist international norms to their favor. This doesn't mean the local Gazans are undeserving of foreign aid, but they also receive an overwhelmingly disproportionate share of it.
3. It is important to make distinctions in policy and not sweeping blanket judgements over all of history. Counting the number of times somebody walks away from negotiations is pointless and doesn't indicate anything. I would urge you to actually carefully study the THINKING and POLICY of ALL SIDES on the key issues at hand and then revisit this statement. It is completely illogcal from a policy standpoint for the current Israeli establishment to have some ridiculous grand vendetta against the Palestinian people - this would actively sabotage all of their foreign policy goals and impugn all their domestic priorities. This is another invention of the populist Hamas cause and has no basis in either historical dealings with the group or current realities. Think about this: how can Israel coexist relatively peacefully and in many cases collaborate with their historical enemies in the Palestinian Authority (even despite differences in their policy visions and ideas of regional statehood) and not Hamas? It is actually a very interesting case to compare the two groups and see in what ways Israeli politicians have treated both groups the same and in what ways they have been treated differently, as well as the time periods and contexts in which these policies were prosecuted.
4. The Israeli military had literally not been operating in Gaza at any scale until very recently, and why they started operations should be incredibly obvious. I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here.
5. More fallacies. Again not sure what the argument is here.
6. Did you watch the video before commenting? Shurkin literally pretty much agrees with you here aside from the odd framing of it in some weird neocolonialist reaching.
7. You are again conflating history, current reality, and your own opinions. There might be some kind of extremist zionist movement within the country but this is not a popular movement and it only gained steam in policy circles as a sort of reactionary dynamic following October 7 as super-hawks, some with odd views, took on more prominence. There were no settlers in Gaza and have been no settlers in Gaza for almost 2 decades. Settlements in the West Bank are also widely unpopular domestically and are really only used as a limited populist tool to pander to certain orthodox demographics.
8. You mean like in October 7? This is not practical. Israel asked numerous Arab states if they would be willing to take humanitarian refugees and all of them refused. They don't want to deal with the potential security implications either. The Egyptian military actually blocked refugees from crossing and forcibly deported them back.
@@markowitzen
1. ua-cam.com/video/9PzI48SXJj4/v-deo.html (6:41) I said both sides use "external manoeuvres" and Israel has been doing it longer and more than the Palestinians. The way Michael Shurkin talked about it you'd be led to think this was something that ONLY Palestinians did.
2. ua-cam.com/video/9PzI48SXJj4/v-deo.html (7:00) Accusing people standing up for international law and human rights as being pro-Hamas is certainly not looking "at things from a more holistic and quite frankly less biased perspective". Michael Shurkin has focused on this from an entirely Israeli point of view, even to the point of including debunked Israeli propaganda points about babies and rape.
I agree with your point that the Israel-Palestine conflict attracts more than its fair share of attention (especially in the English-speaking world). For instance, on 7 0ct 2023, Hamas militants crossed the border into Israel and killed 797 civilians. A few weeks later the Rapid Support Forces and Janjaweed killed between 800-1300 civilians (mostly women and children) in Ardamata, West Darfur, Sudan. The English language news media gave blanket attention to 7 Oct for days. Most of those media organisations ignored the second event and the few that covered it couldn't even agree on the date it happened on.
The reason that so much coverage was devoted to 7 Oct was not only due to strenuous efforts by the Israeli government to publicise the event and milk it for propaganda but also because there has been a long tradition in Zionism of making sure that Israel gets a lot of coverage and the "right sort" of coverage in the news media.
3. ua-cam.com/video/9PzI48SXJj4/v-deo.html (9:25) and ua-cam.com/video/9PzI48SXJj4/v-deo.html (14:07) I didn't make sweeping judgements. I focused on 3 specific points with respect to avoiding negotiations.
4. ua-cam.com/video/9PzI48SXJj4/v-deo.html (8:37) re-watch and you will see what I am talking about. He talks about real and present danger to Israel. But actually, it was Palestinians that were being killed by the IDF and hence in real and present danger both before 7 Oct and since then. The history of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict is one of Zionists being more dangerous to Palestinians than vice-versa. I am the person with the frankly less biased perspective, he is blind to anything other than the Israeli point of view.
5. ua-cam.com/video/9PzI48SXJj4/v-deo.html (8:20) re-watch and you will see what I am talking about. The fallacy is Michael Shurkin's claim that international conflicts can't be solved without military action happening first. Plenty of international conflicts are solved without any military action.
6. ua-cam.com/video/9PzI48SXJj4/v-deo.html (10:26) re-watch and you will see that Michael Shurkin claims that destroying Hamas is a necessary pre-condition to a political solution. I'm saying that destroying Hamas and Gaza will make a political solution harder to reach because it creates more problems than it solves. It creates a bigger humanitarian problem to solve. It drives the Israeli government further towards the "Greater Israel" / ethnic cleansing / genocide end of Zionism while increasing the level of fear, resentment and hate towards Israel among Palestinians. The two sides are becoming further apart politically and the financial cost of a political solution has sky rocketed.
7. The 7 year gap between 1949 and 1956 and the 10 year gap between 1957 and 1967 are the only 2 periods in Israeli history when Israel wasn't trying to expand its territory and settle occupied territory. It is an extreme stretch on your part to paint this as a minority view of a few extremist Zionists that somehow manage to dominate Israeli government for almost all (perhaps all) of Israel's history. I think you are having problems matching your fantasy image of Israel with the reality of Israel. The killings of Palestinians and village depopulations in the West Bank in the first 9 months of 2023 is one of the contributing factors to the 7 Oct attack.
8. I think you need to look at a map of Palestine / Israel and re-read what I said much more carefully.
Arab nations may object to Israel building refugee camps in Israel for the population Israel has displaced in Gaza. But they couldn't stop Israel from building refugee camps to house the population safely until Gaza is rebuilt.
You seem oddly unable to grok the pov of the Palestinians.
Proving once more education & intelligence aren't ever enough to prevent blindspottery.
You appear to assume Palestinians should be be expected to accept not only the disappearance & taking away of their country, but also be happily dying at disproportionate numbers because of israeli fear or revenge.
But Palestinian lives are just as precious as mine, or yours ,or your childrens', or the lives of any Israelis.
Oct 7 was terrible.
But while few people who support Palestine seriously support the activities of Hamas, we see an Israel that is deconstructing the moral high ground it was supposedly built on in the first place.
Who Is overwhelmingly dying, suffering & being displaced?
Israel may for the moment feel safer if they keep going the way they are, but they are sure losing friends.
This is probably the biggest issue - the Israeli diplomatic situation is actually looking increasingly like it did in for the US with the Vietnam War in the 1970s...
However, it must be considered that for the Israeli side this is literally an existential war of annihilation and some Israelis very much see this in "us or them" terms - "they are bombing our homes so if we have to do the same to protect ourselves that is what we will do". The Palestinians might not accept even a limited Israeli occupation but I think for Israel it would be inconceivable for things to just go back to the way they were before or even worse for Hamas to be rewarded with some form of political concession. These two points are probably red lines.
In the end both sides will act in their own best interests with the means they have available. I don't think pushing moral judgements is really a way to reach a resolution there - obviously the Palestinians are unhappy about things but there are realistic limits to what can be done there. The easiest option is to try and stabilize whatever order exists after the war and improve the quality of life in Gaza, there might be a little room to reach beyond that but it will obviously get increasingly harder the more one tries to fenangle.
@@markowitzen
"for the Israeli side this is literally an existential war of annihilation"
So it is for the Palestinians - and has been for the last eighty years. Palestinians are actually losing land & are being dislplaced, not the Israelis!
"some Israelis very much see this in "us or them" terms - "they are bombing our homes so if we have to do the same to protect ourselves that is what we will do". "
So do the Palestinians. And they were the ones displaced by european migrants & refugees.
"obviously the Palestinians are unhappy about things but there are realistic limits to what can be done there. "
Why not say the same to the Israelis? After all, many of them even hold more than one passport, many are actual Americans, moving there for some fundamentalist delusion, settling in territory that even now is supposed to belong to the remains of Palestine. There are american migrants forcefully displacing, at times killing the Palestinians who live there, are culturally ingrained in the region & have the claim to the land, that elsewhere in the world ALWAYS comes first: That of a native people. Palestine was Arab for millennia. Yes, there were jewish Arabs, too! But Europeans, or of all people Americans, who have no earthly need to flee their country - why are they even allowed in!?
I mean - why not at least try to see the Palestinian or the arabic take of the matter. I am not sure if I am channeling the sentiments correctly, but I guess if I can try to see the Israeli side, I can just aswell learn to understand the Palestinian & Arabic take on the matter!
13:57 "put babies in ovens", do you have independent evidence for this?
I've listen to couple if your vids and in one on Afghanistan you mentioned that your superior was lost on how come elected government isn't considered legitimate, he had a blind spot. So do you , please revisit this video
Reading from a script , subpar in all respects
Just as well since Gaza is a sideshow and neither side is going anywhere soon
Part 2 dealing with Ukraine is much, much better