Gaza War in Review: Israeli Victory unlikely as Genocidal desperation reaches Climax in Rafah
Rafah Operation unlikely to achieve military goals
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.
I mislead them, destabilize them, mock them, and then hit them over the head. It’s impossible to reach an agreement with them ... Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames.
Benjamin Netanyahu, 2019
On paper, Palestine is infinitely outmatched by the resources of the Israeli army - the Gaza Strip is roughly the size of Chicago, a majority of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed, 2% of Gaza has been killed and 5% has been killed or wounded. Despite all of this, no end is in sight to the war. Certainly, no Israeli Victory is in sight. 7 months in, Palestine shows no shortage of weaponry, fighters, or determination. The Israeli economy is “in shambles.” Hamas has not budged on core demands, while Israel has gradually been making ever more generous offers for a pause in the fighting. A majority of Israelis now support a hostage deal over an invasion of Rafah. This is mirrored in the attitudes of Palestinians at large. In March, 71% of Palestinians felt it was correct to initiate the war. 64% of Palestinians believe Hamas will emerge victorious and only 9% believe in an Israeli Victory (this should also put an end to common Western view that Palestinians wish to be rid of Hamas, PIJ, PFLP, and so on). The data cannot even be attributed to Hamas censorship, as Hamas does not govern the West Bank where the belief in victory is highest.
How did this happen?
In Chess, War, Politics, or Business, one engages in an overall strategy, so that tactics may appear on the board. The Israeli war campaign has been the reverse: unleash a flood of devastating tactics, and hope that a strategy emerges. The strategy thus far, to the extent there is one, has been to enact a massive wave of human destruction in the hope that Palestinians capitulate. This is the very same dynamic of State Terror that was meant to make the Al Aqsa Flood Operation, October 7th, unthinkable and impossible. In a rational world, the complete crumbling of this logic on that day would dissuade one from a further extension of the exact same logic. However, no such reprieve has yet appeared. Instead, this Sword of Damocles has been dutifully delivered, cutting short the lives of tens of thousands of people, an industrial lynching which Hamas expected and anticipated and prepared for. Hamas does not feel real pressure to cave on their core demands because the war has progressed in a manner that suits their predictions, and their clearly explained goals, perfectly well.
How is this possible?
It is a strategic advantage when your enemy underestimates you. Dimly known to Western punditry, Palestinian armed struggle employs high ingenuity despite limited resources. Rather than being reliant on Iranian and North Korean imports, or at least substantially in addition to such imports, Palestinians in Gaza have developed a sprawling domestic arms industry. A network of local production bountifully operates under the surface, mostly cloning cheap Soviet weaponry, albeit also producing novel Palestinian devices. An AK-47 just requires stamped sheet metal. The Yassin RPG is a tube copied from the RPG-7, and the warhead is produced with TNT and/or fertilizer. TNT can be synthesized with techniques that are nearly 200 years old. The rockets fired out of Gaza (which compel Israel to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Iron Dome) use fertilizer and sugar, and preparing this rocket fuel is so simple and easy that you can do it yourself on a stove at home. The much-acclaimed tunnels, which protect Palestinian fighters from relentless bombing and enable flanking guerrilla maneuvers, only requires the use of concrete. When Palestinians overwhelmed the Gaza fence, they used small drones to drop grenades on communications towers, watch-towers, and remote-controlled sentry rifles. You can make this kind of drone with a Raspberry pi and a few tiny motors.
This is combined with a ruthless guerrilla campaign that makes it impossible for Israel to maintain direct occupation over Palestinians. To directly occupy a people, you must establish standing positions within a territory, but when you stay in one place, you render yourself a sitting duck, subject to endless harassment and degradation. The mass destruction of civilian infrastructure - which Israel pretends is to eliminate hiding places for Hamas, does nothing to prevent Palestinian fighters from simply hiding amidst the rubble. Guerilla warfare isn’t about the elimination of your enemy through violence, but to ensure that the violence against you only weakens them in the long run. It is under these conditions that Israel withdrew from Khan Younis. The military conduct of IDF ground operations, adapted to this pressure, is simply to operate as roving death squads: shoot anything that moves, and don’t stick around too long. Israeli soldiers generally do not even enter the tunnels, because, when it is One-on-One combat, all the typical advantages of Israeli Superiority vanish, you are just a few guys trapped with a few other similarly equipped guys, and only one side has a map.
Lost amidst the blinding atomic light of the horrors in Gaza, the current level of unrest in the West Bank is approaching levels not seen since the Intifadas. Meanwhile, Hezbollah has been patient and restrained, engaged in a relatively low intensity conflict on the Northern Border. They are content to maintain this low intensity so long as Hamas does not report a credible risk of their elimination, but it is still a level of conflict which has forced tens of thousands of Israelis to flee the Galilee, with no credible plans from the government to ensure their return any time soon.
Israel used to be able to believe that the overwhelming violence and destruction it can impose, as we see in Gaza, was a useful deterrent against actors like Hezbollah and Hamas, and thus it could curtail insurgency within Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas has shattered this illusion, and there is no credible belief that such a cost necessarily deters anyone. The capacity for these insurgencies to absorb pain is often dismissed as irrational because of the devastating toll it has taken on the Palestinian people. Analysts who claim this are - universally - stupid or lying, most such talk comes from people who have never had a cause that they value more than their own career, let alone a calling which they value more than their own life. They are thus fundamentally incapable of understanding the martyrdom that has fueled every National Liberation struggle or Revolution to date on this planet. You cannot take something away from people with nothing to lose, not even their lives.
You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.
Ho Chi Minh, noted Tunnel Enjoyer, 1946.
Give full play to our style of fighting - courage in battle, no fear of sacrifice, no fear of fatigue, and continuous fighting … our strategy and tactics are based on a people’s war, no army opposed to the people can use our strategy and tactics.
Mao Zedong, potentially influential historical figure, 1947.
The Palestinian military strategy is combined with a public relations strategy that rests on the civil society of Palestine, while the former is currently primary over the latter, the latter plays no small role, beaming out an endless live-stream of horrifying videos one after another, which has put the entire UN General Assembly - the global majority of humanity - in an uproar. This is made use of by America’s traditional enemies - Iran feels more bold than ever, with a relative rise in popularity in the Muslim world, and compared to American belligerence, China now more than ever is able to credibly position themselves as a voice of reason by contrast. The situation has obviously also put many Americans in a high level of unrest, as the organic propaganda networks that helped BLM explode are now once again working over-time, synchronized with Palestinian civil society, to capture hearts and minds. This campaign is slowly but surely establishing a new common sense which may last for generations. Student unrest in America has now also forced a number of campuses to distance themselves from Israel. The pressure at home and abroad has been forcing President Biden to walk a tight-rope, which is equally matched in the pressure on Arab leaders, for whom their dealings with Israel are historically unpopular and are now extremely unpopular, particularly in Jordan and Egypt. Palestinian morale is sustained through a steady stream of combat videos from propagandists embedded in Hamas military units, including now numerous videos of attacks on tanks while the cameraman is staring down the barrel of said tanks. The military and political strategies against Israel further intersects economic strategy. Ansar Allah, the Houthis, have enacted a blockade of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a narrow channel that is required passage to access the Suez Canal. 12% of global trade passes through the Suez Canal, but since the start of the war, shipping volume through the canal has been cut in half - insurance rates are so high that ships opt to sail around the Cape of Africa instead. The war saps the economy of Israel by diverting their resources to an unwinnable conflict (e.g. the cost of Iron Dome), and, abroad, the savagery of Israeli operations has begun making Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions ever more popular. The economic impact been particularly acute on McDonald’s and Starbucks, who have seen their business plummet in the Middle East - the latter boycott, notably, was directly triggered from conflict between the Starbucks Corporation and the Starbucks Union movement, and the corporate opposition to the Union’s unabashed solidarity with Palestine. Growing up, one of my birthday meals was to get 20 McNuggets and 2 Large Fries, for my part, I have not eaten at McDonald’s in months (Life is so hard).
Taking it all in, the mood in Israel is understandably somewhat dismal. First, they have never felt so alone. Second, what would it mean to demilitarize Palestine? What is the ‘total victory’ that Netanyahu espouses, the ‘dismantling of Hamas’ that even Biden still nominally backs? Rewind back to the detailing on Palestinian military production: it would mean denying Palestinians the right to independently handle sheet metal, springs, fertilizer, sugar, concrete, motors, computers, microcomputers, and fuel. In other words, Palestinians would have to be denied the right to have their own economy in any real capacity. When Israel was expelled from Gaza in 2005, they tried to maintain exactly such a strategy from afar, requiring supervision of all construction projects as well as screening all imports and exports. Clearly, this has been incapable of preventing Palestinians from developing a formidable military force. The only thing which can accomplish such demilitarization is a permanent occupation, the kind which still governs the West Bank. When Nat Turner’s slave rebellion slaughtered dozens of American whites, including intentional killings of women and children, the reaction of American slavers was to enact literacy bans nationwide. The widespread Israeli dream of permanently crippling Palestinian life, so that Israel can maintain ‘security control,’ is the same idea.
But, as we can see, this is not a viable solution.
And this is for the best.
All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that.
Mark Twain, 1889
We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.
Karl Marx, 1849
A hate crime has risen to the level of state policy
Imagine what it is like to be Palestinian. Imagine what state of mind you would be in, and what you would be willing to do, if you were shoved from your home, quarantined in poverty, to be put under the rule of a jailer who dictates every term of your life and hates your guts. For a while, the Israelis themselves understood this, and even sympathized with it, albeit, never enough sympathy to make one forfeit the established colonial rule. David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, put it succinctly in 1956:
Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?
Over the next few decades, this nominal sympathy has withered away, and the political persuasion that carried this attitude, Labor Zionism, has vanished concurrently. In the Zionist mentality today, it is simply absurd that the Palestinians have not yet accepted the expulsion from their land. A few years back when I was still swiping the halls of Tinder, I matched with a woman who had served in the IDF. When Palestine came up, she told me that she was confused about why the Palestinians were not GRATEFUL! - for Israel keeps their dependent, crippled ghettos alive with a supply of free (!!) electricity and water. I asked her to imagine how black South Africans felt about State services provided under the Apartheid Regime (a comparison that South Africans have made for decades in defense of their natural unity with the Palestinians). The conversation with her came to an abrupt end. More recently, I listened in on a ‘Times of Israel’ podcast, where two Israeli Jews discussed the appropriate framework through which to understand (and combat) the rising opposition to Israel among American youth. These two men discussed the situation for about 30 minutes, and as best I recall they did not mention the Palestinians even once. The idea that our students are upset because Palestinians may be legitimate targets of human love - and that Palestinians may have a legitimate interest against the expulsion from their land and subsequent imprisonment - this explanation simply did not warrant discussion.
In November, only 1.8% of Jewish Israelis thought the IDF was using too much force in Gaza, 57.5% thought it was using too little. In February, 68% of Jewish Israelis opposed any humanitarian aid entering Gaza, even when it was stipulated in the poll that the question regarded aid not under the control of UNRWA or Hamas. When Palestinian have returned to raided hospitals, they find that medical equipment has been sabotaged. Israel claimed that Al-Shifa was the headquarters of a sprawling underground HQ, only for no such structure to be found, and, further, indisputably rearranged alleged evidence within the hospital. Adnan al-Bursh, a renowned Palestinian surgeon, recently died in Israeli prison after being arrested in the raid on Al-Shifa - and let’s be honest, he is most likely dead on account of torture. Captured Palestinians are routinely amputated from handcuff injuries. Walid Daqqa, the longest serving Palestinian prisoner, 38 years, died last month after being denied medical treatment and adequate food. When Israel announced the forcible displacement of Northern Gaza, this declaration was used to 'transform hundreds of thousands of civilians into “legitimate” military targets. Northern Gaza is now under IPC-5 level starvation - an entirely engineered, catastrophic famine. Palestinians in the south of Gaza navigate through endless fields of tents to secure food and water, hundreds of thousands of people living amidst a mixture of sewage and open wounds. Israel makes use of an AI called “Where’s Daddy?” - designed to target Hamas combatants while they are at home with their family. This last one connects quite directly to an essay from Giora Eiland, former head of the Israeli National Security Council:
[We] tell ourselves that Sinwar is so evil that he does not care if all the residents of Gaza die. Such a presentation is inaccurate since who are the “poor” women of Gaza? They are all the mothers, sisters, or wives of Hamas murderers. On the one hand, they are part of the infrastructure that supports the organization, and on the other hand, if they experience a humanitarian disaster, then it can be assumed that some of the Hamas fighters and the more junior commanders will begin to understand that the war is futile and that it is better to prevent irreversible harm to their families.
The way to win the war faster and at a lower cost for us requires a system collapse on the other side and not the mere killing of more Hamas fighters. The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers.
All of this to maintain the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land. And not only the expulsion from their land but the permanent denial of any national rights, to keep them under permanent occupation. Israel would kill them all if they could, but they can’t. Israel would take all the land if they could, but they can’t. The Israelis hate the Palestinians, and a hate crime has risen to the level of state policy.
Simply - Genocide.
It is through the fear-mongering of hypothetical genocide, against Israeli Jews, that we as Americans are emotionally hounded into backing an actual genocide. This push receives substantial reception in Congress and across American civil discourse, particularly with older generations. A genocidal military strategy comes with a genocidal PR campaign, specifically, to drill into popular consciousness the idea of Palestinians as uniquely and ontologically evil. Vermin! Beasts! In Starship Troopers, a satirical film on how fascism portrays itself, there is a good reason that the threat to humanity is a bug species. You can’t reason with bugs, or talk to them, they are a force of nature and you can only destroy them - heavy is the crown of those who must keep our homes clean of their intrusions. The Palestinians are but “children of darkness” who hate the light, as Netanyahu puts it. Our own leaders feed this machine, such as when Biden claimed that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies and he had seen the babies himself - a claim which is thoroughly debunked. Biden may not be entirely aware of what is going on around him at any given moment, but most of the people who spread these lies are rather lucid. Zionists want Hamas to be a bunch of totally lost crazy baby rapers, they want the Palestinians to be vermin, a failed people who would just as soon kill every Jew if their shackles are lifted, and an army of propagandists, paid and unpaid, will say anything to affirm these beliefs and keep the war on solid footing. All too often, people don’t think twice when they are told what they want to hear.
It is despicable. It is unbelievable that we give Israel any arms and any platform under these circumstances. And yet we do. That is just the cost of business, so we are told. But if your business requires you to be complicit in genocide, it does not deserve to exist. It does not deserve respect. It only puts upon us that we must try and claw our way out. All of us are guilty until this is accomplished.
We now turn to Rafah, to determine what happens next.
All Eyes on Rafah
A “limited” invasion of Rafah - one of the most densely populated places in the world - has now begun. In violation of the Camp David accords, Israel has seized direct control of the Rafah Crossing (the Gaza-Egyptian border crossing through which most humanitarian aid flows, now closed), and tens of thousands of Palestinians have begun to flee from Eastern Rafah under intense bombing, toward Al-Mawasi, which is now effectively a tent city amidst some dunes with little to no infrastructure. Al-Mawasi is advertised as a safe zone for Palestinian civilians, but no safety is to be found, it too has now been attacked twice. As I have been writing this, Israel’s war cabinet has again voted to expand the ‘operation zone’ for active combat. The international humanitarian alarm has raised to a level not heard since the start of the war itself.
A few competing theories have emerged in this chaos, addressing three intimately linked questions. First, will Israel purge the land of Rafah or not? Restated, should we take figures like Netanyahu and Gallant at their word - that a full invasion of Rafah will happen with or without American support? Second, American leaders constantly demand a more rational or surgical war, but is this even possible? Third, if American pressure is sufficient to prevent a total clearing, or the Israelis otherwise exhaust their war campaign, will this be a road to Total Israeli Victory, or is it simply a means to apply additional ‘pressure’ so that Israel may get a better deal in negotiations?
We do not know, but we can make educated guesses, and return to our prediction in the coming days and weeks see to what extent it holds up. Let us take as a given that we are on the precipice of a full, unrestrained invasion of Rafah. It does seem to be the most likely next step. Although Israeli public opposition to this operation is rising, the call of National Unity and unity for the war seems strong enough to keep people in line if their government carries out the campaign, and a government is the one who calls the shots. The pressure against Israel to conduct such an operation does not appear particularly decisive. Biden cannot be seen as responsible for an Israeli surrender. Step by step, as much as America moans, Israel knows that America is an empire which needs Israel, and as long as our current generation of leaders draw breath, they will not truly abandon Israel. The Israelis view this as an existential war, with no desire for a Palestinian state of any kind. But to surrender in this war, a loss, an unconditional ceasefire, a hostage deal - would obviously constitute the end of Zionism-as-Such. The government of Israel, in parliamentary terms, would collapse, and the Israelis will be forced to negotiate with Hamas, really, to negotiate with the Palestinians for the first time in history as a genuinely sovereign entity, a negotiation between equals. In a Prisoner-Swap, easily the highest figure of Hamas’ list is their demand to release Marwan Barghouti, a former member of Fatah, where Fatah is historically the main internal opposition to Hamas. Fatah in fact technically still governs the West Bank, albeit in a corrupted form that is now viewed by Palestinians as a captured puppet regime, a mere collaborator in the occupation. Barghouti is not tainted in this manner. He may be the single most popular man in Palestine, owing to his leadership of the First and Second Intifadas. This popularity would be rivaled, of course, by, Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, who would emerge from the war as a leader or joint leader of a nationally unified Palestinian movement. The demands which could be imposed upon Israel in this scenario are simply enormous. The entire existing leadership of Israel would collapse, equal and opposite to the rise of a strong, experienced, unified, popular Palestinian leadership.
While Biden is an ardent Zionist, with a deeply passionate personal commitment to the Jewish state, it is telling that the U.S. has long distanced themselves from a potential Rafah operation, including a symbolic suspension of some arms shipments. This opposition does not stem from a fundamentally moral or loving calculus, the last few months should disabuse anyone of that notion when it comes to American foreign policy. No. Most likely - they don’t think the Israelis can pull it off. Notably, during the stalling of the Rafah incursion, there has been a tonal shift from Democrats, increasingly pinning Netanyahu as a fall guy to throw under the bus. The Israeli ‘strategy’ to date has been to shove Palestinians out of their homes, shoot anyone who refuses to flee, and then ravage and destroy anything required for human habitation in that newly depopulated space. But now there is nowhere left for the Palestinians to flee. Israelis cannot say it openly, but the demand to go into Rafah and purge the city of life - on the terms they have wanted to do such a thing - is a fairly obvious ploy to kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians as an end in it of itself, which could cause a massive rush on the Egyptian border, an opening of the front from Hezbollah, revolutions, regional war, inescapable war crimes trials, or a humiliating Israeli retreat - not to mention the destruction of countless humans beings. It’s not exactly clear how badly this could go, but the U.S. government does not want to find out, and it definitely does not want to be seen as responsible or culpable in such affairs. The Americans, not wanting to call this out so bluntly, instead obliquely undermine the proposed Rafah operation, asking Israel to provide a plan for how to protect 1.5 million displaced civilians forced into new tent cities without any remainder of the running water, streets, established aid networks, so on. Israel has repeatedly failed to provide these details because the entire point would be to deny Palestinians the means of life and raise the “pressure” until Palestinians capitulate and accept food from an Israeli spoon.
What does not seem in doubt is if a full expansion of this operation will actually resolve the war. It will not. We should remember the progression of lies when Al-Shifa and Khan Younis were similarly advertised as decisive and crucial. Every time, the Quantum Hamas vanish upon observation, and the attention turns to the next concentration of Palestinian civilians. It is the same progression of logic through which Israel views every aspect of human life within the Gaza strip as a legitimate military target in their campaign against a fluid, popular insurgency. I can tell you what is understood in every quarter of the Gaza strip - it does not matter how many Palestinians the Israelis kill, to surrender is to kill the nation itself, and to crumple at this juncture would render the Palestinians into chattel livestock for generations to come. With nowhere left for Palestinians to flee, the Israelis will carry out a new and higher level of this genocide, a crime at scale far worse than the Srebrenica massacre, and yet it still will not be enough. As seen at every turn of this war, and the decades of history proceeding it, Israel will be unwilling to bear the permanent cost of the harassment of Palestinian armed resistance, and they will inevitably withdraw. While Netanyahu speaks quite boldly about a ‘total victory’ - most Israelis believe a total victory is unlikely, and that was back in February, meanwhile, remember, the large majority of Palestinians believe Hamas is most likely to emerge victorious. This is not because Palestinians doubt a Rafah invasion, rather, Palestinians in Rafah have endured a constant state of terror as people wait for the inevitable and pray for ceasefire. After a hefty rampage, Israel will claim that it has taken its pound of flesh and satisfied their bloodlust. Israel talks of maintaining concentric rings of checkpoints around Rafah, if they could enact such a plan, one should wonder why they could not also hold Khan Younis? Regardless of specific details, for their efforts, the likely judgement is that Hamas will not be dismantled. Hamas will not surrender. Palestinians will not surrender. Hostages will not be saved if they are ever even approached. Hostages may not even stay within Rafah, which itself is granting a generous assumption that they are there right now. Such is the manner in which you can smuggle people with a well maintained tunnel network and popular insurgency. Outlined in the prior paragraph was some of the worst case scenarios for an invasion of Rafah, but even in the best case, we will simply return to the same discussion we are having now, the only difference being a far higher death toll.
But if it was possible for Israel to defeat Palestine through more surgical means - why was this not pursued months ago? Here is a strong intuition - because Israel can’t pull that off either. To surgically clear an insurgency requires a nuanced distinction between combatants and non-combatants. You must have troops on the ground who come bearing flowers, a political promise to non-combatants that can win them to your side against the insurgency. Unfortunately, Israelis despise Palestinians at every level of their being, and soldiers view the entire civil infrastructure of Palestine as a military target. Hospitals, schools, administrative buildings, humanitarian headquarters are not reluctantly targeted, and we know this in part because we get to watch Israelis soldiers upload their own grim, gleeful celebrations to social media as they render Gaza uninhabitable and flatten the strip block by block. Even if you could overcome this, and I’m not sure what reason anyone should have to believe such a thing is possible, you then face the next problem - the “sitting duck” problem outlined at the beginning of this article. The more you commit to a real ground operation, the worse it gets. Israel has not shown a stomach for the losses needed to really carry out such an approach. Altogether, it is an intensified microcosm of the same failures to uproot insurgency in Afghanistan and Vietnam.
This is why we should not expect an Israeli Victory: Heads, you lose, Tails I win. Neither approach provides salvation. Either way, a traumatized generation of children will come into adulthood with certain conviction that the occupation upon them is or was intolerable. This is the Gordian Knot that traps Israel, reduced to impotently mulching Palestinians in an American-backed bloodletting.
A propaganda war is ongoing to pull you into despair - reject it. Regardless of what may soon unfold, now more than ever it is becoming clear that Palestine will be free within our lifetimes.
So it goes,
Kay
Great article, especially on what motivates the Palestinian Resistance and how the idea of fighting for a cause is alien or outright ignored by commentators in the West.
One thing that I haven't seen discussed much is the difference in the level and quality of training between the fighters on both sides, especially the IDF. I have noticed that the IDF frequently has soldiers with the rank of sergeant who are less than 20 years old, and there are officers ranked major and higher who are less than 30 years old. In most militaries, it takes years to reach these ranks. I was in a NATO military for a few years when I was younger, and while the training wasn't anything to write home about, seeing the rabble in the IDF call themselves a 'military' is surreal. Most Western militaries are just glorified colonial police forces, but the IDF seems to take this to the extreme, countless videos have been published showing their soldiers looting and destroying property. On the flipside the conduct of the Palestinian Resistance has been incredible, even after 6 months they are still contesting Khan Younis and have proven themselves as capable as any military force on the planet.
The training and motivation could also boil down to the settler-colonial nature of Israel I suppose. The Palestinians are fighting for their land. While the settlers can always go back home to Philadelphia, Russia, Poland, or where ever.
Wow. Great article! Provided so much clarity and perspective.