At the time of writing, there is a ceasefire in effect in Gaza, although it is one-sided, because as usual in such cases, Israel continues occasionally to bomb the Strip. The experience of previous such ceasefires does not inspire confidence that this one will hold for long. Still, it may be useful to reflect on the situation as it currently exists and pose the question: if this were the end, which side won? One way of determining that is to look at the war aims of each of the two parties and see which were realised and which were not. If one side attained the most important of their aims, it ‘won’; if it did not, it ‘lost’.
There are, of course, tremendous differences in the resources and capacities of the two sides: Israel has a large and carefully trained military with a virtually unlimited supply of the most modern, high-tech weapons in the world, including fighter jets, tanks and helicopters, whereas the Palestinian side is a coalition of militias comprising a few fighters equipped with small arms, home-made rockets and some improvised devices (mostly constructed, it seems, from salvaged, unexploded Israeli ordnance). This means that the possible aims which the two sides could envisage are also systematically different.
The Israelis did succeed in causing massive destruction, but they attained none of their official (or semi-official) war aims. They did not exterminate the population in Gaza or drive it from the Strip, despite two years of total war; they did not defeat, disarm and disband Hamas, and they did not retrieve their hostages by direct military means – virtually all were recovered through negotiation with Hamas, although negotiation was the last thing Israel said it wanted.
If the Israelis lost, does that mean that the Palestinians won? A case could be made for this. After all, the stated aim of Hamas was to acquire the means to engage in an exchange of prisoners. The Israelis hold thousands of Palestinian prisoners, including many children, and many detained long-term without charge. Since under international law Israel is illegally occupying East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza and an occupied population has a right to armed resistance against the occupying power, taking Israeli military personnel prisoner is in principle perfectly legal. Since Israeli governments have in the past been willing to exchange prisoners, acquiring some Israeli military prisoners could have seemed a good way to free detained Palestinians. That turned out to be a correct calculation, in that a mutually agreed exchange of prisoners did eventually take place.
Moreover, it is perhaps not fanciful to discern an ulterior aim, namely, to put Israel in a position in which it dropped its mask of being a liberal, rational society, and revealed its true nature as a lawless and bloodthirsty predator. If indeed Hamas had that as one of its goals on 7 October, they seem to have attained it beyond what anyone could have imagined. No one who watched the gleefully live-streamed genocide which the IDF was carrying out could ever think about the State of Israel, or Zionism, in the same way again. Once the mask fell, it became hard to unsee Zionism’s true face. The events in Gaza have transformed, perhaps permanently, not just attitudes toward the current government in Israel and Israeli society as a whole – which has overwhelmingly and enthusiastically supported the genocide – but also the way people think about the whole history of Zionist settlement in Palestine.
Seeing the destruction in Gaza play out in real time has, in other words, irrevocably changed the commonly accepted view of Israel’s past. Fewer and fewer people now think of this as a desperate attempt to construct a safe refuge for a persecuted group; increasingly it is viewed as just another instance of the old European colonialist story, that is, like the British settlements in Ireland, Australia and North America, French Algeria, apartheid South Africa, and so on. This idea of Israel as a settler-colonial state has been around since the beginning of Zionism, many of whose early leaders described their project in these terms. It got a momentary boost in the West when the distinguished scholar Maxime Rodinson published his essay ‘Israel, fait colonial’ in Les Temps Modernes in 1967, but it remained a niche view until the horrors in Gaza became too blatant to ignore. Now it is mainstream, and it will not easily be dislodged.
Was Hamas’s action on 7 October an unmitigated ‘success’? That seems hard to accept because of the immense price that was paid: 70,000 documented civilian deaths (including over 20,000 children) with many still buried under the ruins, an artificially induced famine, untold deaths from long-term, but direct, effects of the war, thousands of child amputees (many of whose limbs had to be amputated without anaesthetic because Israel blocked medical supplies), hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructure bombed to rubble.
That the cost of ‘success’ may be too great to bear was noted by King Pyrrhus of Epirus in 279 BC, when he remarked about the Battle of Asculum: ‘One more victory like that, and we’re done for.’ Was the price for 7 October worth paying? Any attempt to answer this would have to consider various things, including what the alternative was. Was the status quo pre-7 October (a decade-long siege of Gaza by Israel) tolerable in the long run? Who is to say? If the majority of Palestinians think what they have had to suffer was worth it, is it for observers from afar to contradict them? If what is at issue is a general evaluation of the events of 7 October and their consequences, presumably Israelis, too, may claim to have a voice in discussing this. To ‘have a voice’ does not of course mean to be able to dictate the terms of discussion or to have any kind of veto. And we should not expect unanimity.
Losing control of the narrative of a conflict is not the worst thing that can happen to a group, just as simple military defeat is arguably not the worst possible outcome of a war. In the American Civil War, the Unionist forces of the North triumphed and it is their version of events that we now read, but though the American South was devastated and the political structure of the Confederacy dismantled, the population continued to exist and there are plenty of accounts of the war from a pro-Confederacy perspective. The fate of the ancient city of Carthage is grimmer in both respects: it was not just defeated but obliterated by the Romans at the end of the Third Punic War. In addition, we have no idea how the Carthaginians viewed the war because all Carthaginian accounts disappeared completely. Until the advent of modern archaeology all we knew about Carthage, its people and their beliefs was what we were told by their enemies, the Greeks and Romans.
Many Israelis do not merely wish to expel or exterminate the Palestinians, they wish to convince people that they never existed at all. It is a simple fact, however, that ample documentation of the atrocities in Gaza now exists in the public domain. The Palestinian cause has come to resemble opposition to the war in Vietnam or to apartheid in South Africa, something which has been taken up all over the world, by many people who are not directly involved and by many more than the usual suspects; this is to a large extent the result of Israel’s own actions. The efforts of Israel and its Western allies to control the narrative have been more or less completely ineffectual. The future is unknown, but we can be reasonably sure that whoever eventually writes the history, the Israeli wish to expunge the very name ‘Palestinian’ from the record will not be fulfilled.
[This is Sidecar, the NLR blog. Launching in December 2020, Sidecar aims to provide a space on the left for international interventions and debate. A buzzing and richly populated left-media landscape has emerged online in the past decade, but its main English-speaking forms have been largely monoglot in outlook and national in focus, treating culture as a subsidiary concern. By contrast, political writing on Sidecar will take the world, rather than the Anglosphere, as its primary frame. Culture in the widest sense – arts, ideas, mores – will have full standing. Translation of, and intellectual engagement with, interventions in languages other than English will be integral to its work. And while New Left Review appears bi-monthly, running articles of widely varied length, Sidecar will post several items a week, each no longer than 2,500 words and many a good deal shorter.]
