Essay published in Swedish Expressen, Danish Weekendavisen and Norwegian Klassekampen. November 11-12, 2023.

Israel’s impasse

The Bible has much to say about the fatal significance of shifting military alliances in the small strip of land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Throughout biblical history, the societies arising here were characterised by their need to ally themselves with one or other of the far larger, more powerful and often competing civilisations they were positioned between.

The prophets who came to see how none of these alliances could prevent the recurrent conquest and destruction of their societies, therefore came up with the historically groundbreaking idea of a society based on the justice of the weak against the power of the strong, and thus, to use a contemporary terminology, the idea of soft power against hard.

”Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help! They rely on horses, trusting in the number of chariots and the great multitude of chariot fighters,” the prophet Isaiah warned the kings of Jerusalem.

Instead: “By right shall Zion be saved, by righteousness those who dwell therein.”

In a sense, Isaiah’s prophecy came true. What remained after biblical kingdom after kingdom had been conquered and destroyed was a people, Israel if you will, who in the “dispossession” or “diaspora”, was able to continue existing and develop an occasionally flourishing Jewish culture without relying on chariots and chariot fighters. Already at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, more Jews were living elsewhere than on the small strip of land between the river and the sea.

In the light of biblical history, hard power has not been Israel’s best weapon.

And perhaps neither in the light of the history being written now.

In a long time, Israel’s military superiority has not translated into strategic advantages. Ever since the ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (resulting in the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila), Israel’s wars have cost more than they have yielded. The war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 did not destroy Hezbollah as intended, but strengthened it. The war in Gaza six months later did not destroy Hamas as intended, but strengthened it. Likewise, each new war to wipe out Hamas (2008, 2012, 2014), or “mowing the lawn” as it came to be called, did not wipe out Hamas but strengthened it.

Nor will the current war that is supposed to wipe out Hamas “once and for all” wipe out anything “once and for all”. Least of all, the fact that Israel still lies where it lies, on a narrow strip of land between the sea and the river, and is still surrounded by larger and potentially more powerful empires. Nor the fact that Israel in its present incarnation, however well armed and fortified, has had to rely for its survival on alliances with greater powers – since 1967 with the United States.

In the wake of yet another war with no discernible end and no sustainable goal, with more death and destruction in its wake than ever before, and with yet another geopolitical earthquake in the making, it should by now be clear to Israel that no number of chariots will secure its existence “once and for all”. And that therefore, albeit all-too late in the day, it should make yet another attempt at the kind of power that Isaiah advocated in his day: to bring about peace and reconciliation between the two peoples on that narrow strip of land between the sea and the river, based on justice and righteousness.

The 1993 Oslo Accord between Israel and the PLO was one such attempt, and for a brief moment it seemed that the high-level handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat would be followed by thousands upon thousands of handshakes on the ground, leading to a mutually agreed division of the land into two states living peacefully side by side.

I tend to believe that it was in the wake of the Palestinian uprising of 1987 and Saddam Hussein’s missiles over Tel Aviv in 1991, that Yitzhak Rabin, a former Commander-in-Chief and a military hardliner, had become aware of the strategic limitations of Israel’s military superiority and came to see peace and reconciliation with the Palestinians as a strategic necessity.

But Rabin was assassinated by his own people, and the strategic necessity gave way to another period of strategic hubris, and an increasingly aggressive occupation and settlement policy. One people continued to rule the other militarily and one state continued to undermine with ‘facts on the ground’ the territorial foundations of what could have been the other.

In the decades that followed, Israel told itself that the strategic problem had been solved, that the state on the small strip of land could live on forever as an occupying power and a de facto apartheid state, that the Palestinians were too weak and divided to assert their cause, that Israel was militarily superior enough to put down any Palestinian revolt and deter any regional enemy. In recent years, moreover, Israel has believed that it could consign the Palestinian cause to the dustbin of history by forging alliances with autocratic rulers in the Arab world (the Abraham Accords).

For too long then, Israel lived in strategic self-denial, which became all-too evident on the morning of 7 October 2023, when Hamas, with its breach of the “secure” border between Gaza and Israel and the staging of a pogrom-like massacre of some 1200 unsuspecting Israeli men, women and children, delivered a perfect stab to the heart of the State of Israel – and of the Jews of the world. This was not only one of the deadliest pogroms in living Jewish memory (the Holocaust aside), but a massacre on Jews perpertrated in the very state that had historically justified its existence, and its policies, by being a safe haven for Jews. If Hamas’s intention was to awaken the historical demons of the Jewish world and provoke Israel into a military response of such proportions that it would trigger a geopolitical earthquake, and hopefully (from Hamas’s point of view) a devastating regional conflagration that would end once and for all the possibility of peace and reconciliation between the peoples between the sea and the river, this is exactly what it would do.

Israel’s goal of ending Hamas ”once and for all” with an all-devastating military action is, of course, just as illusory as Hamas’s goal of launching the ”liberation” of Palestine ”from the River to the Sea” with an all-terrifying terrorist attack. Nevertheless, even illusions can have real and devastating consequences. No matter how the war ends (this time), Israel’s existential vulnerability and strategic weakness have been exposed as never before, while Hamas has managed to provoke another disaster, another Nakba, on its own people, with the intention of blowing up the last remnants of the admittedly overgrown road to peace and reconciliation.

In that sense, Hamas has already won, since Israel, with its disproportionate and humanly disastrous response, has continued to act on the morally and geopolitically unsustainable strategy that the Palestinians must be forever suppressed - and, if necessary, expelled from the small strip of land between the river and the sea.

The moral unsustainability has been evident for a long time now, but indeed also the geopolitical one. What Isaiah once warned for, and Yitzhak Rabin once tried to draw the political conclusions from, the long-term unsustainability of a strategy based on military superiority alone, should have become evident as Israel’s military protector, the United States, has demonstrated time and again (Afghanistan and Iraq) its diminishing ability to project power in the region by military means. There is very little evidence today that this ability has increased. Instead, there are many indications that the US is heading for a period of internal uncertainty and external unreliability.

Regardless of how much of Hamas is wiped out this time, and how much of Gaza is razed to the ground, and how many thousands of Palestinians are killed or driven from their homes, Hamas horrific attack marks the end of an Israeli security doctrine built on political-military hubris and strategic self-deception.

Ein breira, no choice, is a Hebrew expression that has come to be associated with the foundational myth that the State of Israel never had a choice, that the forces of history and the conditions of geopolitics confronted the young state on the narrow strip of land between the river and the sea with only one choice to make and one way to go.

This is of course not true, in the history of Israel there have been choices not made and paths not taken. Where they might have led we do not know. What we do know is that the paths chosen have led Israel to a dead end. The geopolitical vulnerability has steadily increased, the military supremacy’s ability to deliver security has steadily decreased, and the fragile conditions for peace and reconciliation between the peoples living on the same narrow strip of land have been steadily eroded.

And Isaiah’s most beautiful prophecy is sounding more utopian than ever:

For out of Zion shall the Law be proclaimed,
from Jerusalem the word of the Lord.
He shall judge between the nations,
administer justice among all peoples.
They will forge their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into vineyard knives.
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.