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legendary prussians Military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, whose writings still influence U.S. military officers today, wrote in his famous 19th-century essay “On War” that “war is simply the continuation of politics by other means. “It’s just a matter of time,” he wrote. Although Clausewitz himself was a military general advising on the best way to conduct armed conflicts, he believed that the purpose of war was to achieve political goals and that violence was not pursued as an objective or a complete substitute for diplomacy. It reminded readers that it is not something to be pursued as a person.
Clausewitz’s words would have been well heeded by the United States and Israel before the start of the current war in the Gaza Strip, which is currently mired in a painful but predictable stalemate. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or injured, Israel is currently facing genocide charges at the International Court of Justice, and Hamas is already returning to control of the Gaza Strip, which Israel previously declared conquered.
Israeli military officials are now publicly criticizing the Gaza war as misguided for a simple reason that Clausewitz himself would have recognized. In other words, the war had no clear political strategy or purpose other than revenge.
Israeli leaders take the position that Palestinians are simply a target group to be oppressed and controlled.
This lack of political approach reflects long-standing attitudes in Israeli society that currently trap the country in eternal war with the Palestinians and other neighboring countries, and which, as its patrons, The United States is, in effect, cooperating with it. The roots of this failure were years in the making.
Well before October 7, the Israeli government decided that Palestinians, whether in the West Bank or Gaza, were no longer politically relevant. The position of Israeli leaders that, rather than treating the Palestinians as political subjects, they are merely a target group to be oppressed and controlled through a combination of military, technological, and economic means. I took it.
Israel has continued its policy of blockading and regularly bombing the Gaza Strip, while ignoring or rejecting the Palestinian Authority’s calls for a two-state solution with the support of international law. Instead, Israel unilaterally proceeded with its colonization and annexation of the West Bank, solidifying the consensus among major human rights groups that Israel is an apartheid state.
The United States under President Joe Biden followed other administrations in abetting this process of dismissing Palestinian political claims. Most notably, Biden followed the Trump administration’s lead in pursuing pseudo-diplomacy in the form of regional arms agreements and normalization agreements between Gulf Arab states and Israel, the so-called Abraham Accords. That short-sightedness ultimately led to the current conflagration in Gaza, with the October 7 Hamas attack showing that Israel’s technological and military control over the Gaza Strip is far less powerful than advertised. was exposed.
From the US perspective, Biden’s reflexive support for the war has proven to be semi-aimless and brutal, trapping the US in a situation that is now a major factor in the genocide allegations. ing.
The war has not only damaged America’s reputation abroad, but is increasingly tearing apart America’s own social fabric. Even ardent supporters of the US foreign policy consensus are being forced to consider the failure of treating the Palestinians as politically irrelevant. In a recent interview with Politico, former top US diplomat Victoria Nuland acknowledged that this approach laid the foundations for the current dire situation.
“Since the Trump administration, everyone has become obsessed with regional normalization as a panacea to resolve instability, discontent and anxiety in the Middle East,” Nuland said. “But if you ignore the Palestinian issue, someone will pick it up and run away. And that’s what Hamas did.”
The folly of that path — and ours.
The Gaza war began amid heightened emotions following attacks on Israeli civilian communities by Hamas. It was quickly promoted to the Israeli public as a war to eradicate the group once and for all. But seven months later, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or injured, and Israel remains mired in the territory, with no end in sight.
One of the many sad ironies is that Hamas itself has repeatedly made political pleas to Israel, which Israeli leaders have rejected as it refuses to engage with Palestinian leaders in the West Bank. That’s true. Instead, Israeli leaders preferred to visit Dubai and continue developing military and surveillance technology that they believed would allow them to control and ignore the Palestinians indefinitely.
The results of this approach are now becoming clear, but the collapse may still be in its early stages. As a result of the war, Israel now faces the possibility of a new conflict with Hezbollah on its northern border, where tens of thousands of Israelis have been displaced since October 2023. It also faces other risks, including the possibility of the collapse of key locations. In its security relations with neighboring Egypt, it has threatened to suspend the landmark Camp David peace accord and recently joined an ICJ case accusing Israel of genocide.
Despite this growing pressure, Israeli leaders show no signs of relenting or returning to political negotiations. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant recently declared that Israel should build large new cities in the occupied West Bank with the aim of moving “Israel’s population” eastward. If there is still any possibility of a two-state solution, any hopes will be dashed if such development takes place on land earmarked by international law for a future Palestinian state. Meanwhile, Palestinians will be further confined to a series of fenced-in encampments in their homeland.
The political situation in Israel is of little consolation. The Israeli government includes far-right and even openly fascist ministers. Gallant is considered a “mainstream” Israeli politician, but this is a clear sign of how far Israeli politics has moved away from the realm of diplomacy and negotiation.
Just as the war in Gaza is slowly becoming a military failure, Israeli policy in the West Bank is likely to create further catastrophe in the future. Israel continues to refuse talks with the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League, which for more than two decades has offered full diplomatic and economic relations in exchange for a two-state solution.
Despite overwhelming international consensus that Israel violates international law, the United States allows Israel to continue digging this trench. Thanks to the unquestioned support and diplomatic patronage it has received from successive US governments, most recently the Biden administration, this small country has been able to defy global norms and public opinion, avoiding a posture of paranoia and defiance such as that of North Korea. I’m falling into this.
Biden is currently languishing in the polls, despite reports of his own distrust. If he loses the next election after enabling all of Israel’s worst tendencies, he will go down not only as the leader who returned the presidency to Donald Trump, but also as a failure of diplomacy. It will be. He locks superpowers into relationships with client states that have long abandoned diplomacy and international law in exchange for apartheid, endless wars, and the use of brutal and even exclusionist force to deal with problems. It will probably happen.
Clausewitz himself warned of the shortcomings of such an approach. “A political end is an end, war is a means to achieve it, and the means can never be considered separately from the end,” he wrote. For Israel, and along with the United States, it is likely that wars without clear goals will continue.
