In response to Israel Is Winning

By John Spencer

By Noura Erakat, Josh Paul, Charles O. Blaha, and Luigi Daniele

Noura Erakat, Josh Paul, Charles O. Blaha, and Luigi Daniele

The current war in Gaza is not an isolated conflict that began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants launched an attack inside Israel. Framing the war this way, as John Spencer does in a recent article in Foreign Affairs (“Israel Is Winning,” August 21, 2024), invites many dubious assertions about Israel’s purported progress toward its war aims and its supposed efforts to protect civilians. And it accepts without question the Israeli government’s official position that “Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population,” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in a speech in January. To simplify the conflict to a fight between Israel and Hamas is to ignore the on-the-ground realities that indicate Israel is waging an indiscriminate war on all Palestinians.

A more accurate understanding of the war must take its broader context into account. What is happening now in Gaza is one battle within the larger conflict that has shaped the Israeli-Palestinian relationship since the founding of Israel and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the new state’s territory in 1948. Today’s fight cannot be removed from that history and geography; gaining the upper hand in the current battle is not the same as winning the wider war. Spencer falls into this trap, miscasting Israel’s temporary tactical achievements as strategic victory and underestimating how Israel’s unwillingness to pursue a political resolution that recognizes the Palestinians’ right to self-determination will in the end diminish its chances of success.

In the war Spencer describes, Israel has three aims: “to recover all hostages, secure its borders, and destroy Hamas.” To win such a war, Israel would have had to focus on taking out Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. One might expect Israeli forces to launch precise strikes on Hamas military targets while Israeli diplomats lead an effort to isolate Hamas politically. Instead, Israel has conducted a campaign of broad devastation in Gaza, attacking the territory’s civilian population; demolishing its health, educational, and social infrastructure; and destroying its food production, shelter, and sources of potable water. There is a disconnect between these indiscriminate tactics and the discrete goals that Spencer identifies.

Israel’s actions suggest that its true goal is to terminate Palestinian aspirations for self-determination. As the fighting rages in Gaza, members of Israel’s far-right government, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have vowed to resettle the territory with Jewish Israelis. The minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has cleared the way for Israeli settlers to rampage through Palestinian villages across the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself has denied any possibility of Palestinian statehood, signaling that there is no Palestinian future, with or without Hamas. The Basic Law passed in 2018 by the Israeli legislature made this much clear, affirming that only Jews have a right to self-determination in the territory that includes the West Bank and Gaza. Most recently, the Knesset’s ban on the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA’s operations in the West Bank and Gaza not only ensures a deepening humanitarian crisis but also aims to delegitimize Palestinians’ refugee status and claims to their original homes and lands. Although it insists otherwise, the Israeli government has demonstrated over the past year that its ultimate target is not Hamas but the Palestinian will to resist occupation and subjugation. It is, in effect, applying a military solution to a political problem. Far from moving toward victory, Israel is becoming less secure in the region, less stable at home, and less likely to find a durable solution with the Palestinians.

Even by the measures of success that Spencer and the Israeli government rely on, the war is not going well. On all three objectives—recovery of hostages, border security, and eliminating Hamas—Israel claims to have made significant progress, but the evidence........

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