The Devastation of Gaza

Backing the war to the hilt has been an outrageous moral failure, and it is also an incredibly stupid policy because it just paves the way for more conflict and suffering in the future.

The Financial Times reports on the scale of destruction in Gaza:

Citing estimates of damage to urban areas, military analysts say the destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war [bold mine-DL].

“Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne — some of the world’s heaviest-ever bombings are remembered by their place names,” said Robert Pape, a US military historian and author of Bombing to Win, a landmark survey of 20th century bombing campaigns. “Gaza will also go down as a place name denoting one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns.”

Like the many other bombing campaigns before it, this one wreaks havoc on the civilian population without doing much to achieve the stated goals of the government doing the bombing. Pape wrote a recent article for Foreign Affairs in which he spelled out the failure of the Israeli bombing campaign:

Whatever the ultimate goal, Israel’s collective devastation of Gaza raises deep moral problems. But even judged purely in strategic terms, Israel’s approach is doomed to failure—and indeed, it is already failing.

Like other policies of collective punishment, bombing the civilian population typically fails to weaken the regime or group that the policy is supposed to be targeting. Instead of turning the population against the regime or group, it naturally intensifies the population’s hostility to those responsible for the bombing. To the extent that bombing has an effect on the population’s political views, it will tend to drive them into the arms of hardliners. Even if some significant percentage of Hamas fighters are killed in this war, the IDF has been acting as the lead recruiter for militant groups with its brutal and criminal bombing campaign.

The immediate consequences for the population are dire. Now that the military campaign has moved to southern Gaza, there is every reason to expect the same extent of destruction there. Palestinians in southern Gaza have said that the pace of strikes by the Israeli military is even faster than it was before the truce. Some in our government fear that the campaign in the south could be even worse than it was in the north:

Despite repeated calls for Israeli restraint from senior figures in the Biden administration, U.S. intelligence assesses the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are committed to “business as usual,” with only limited concern about civilian casualties, a U.S. official said, and there are suspicions the renewed campaign is actually bloodier than the previous offensive in northern Gaza.

It is no surprise that the IDF would be going back to “business as usual” when there is no meaningful pressure from Washington to change anything. The calls for restraint are empty when they are not attached to any consequences for failing to show restraint. As one State Department official told Akbar Shahid Ahmed for his report, “It just feels like patting ourselves on the back while it increasingly seems like the IDF are waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing.” That hits the nail on the head. It has been bizarre to watch administration officials boast about their record on this war, as if they have anything to be proud of after the last two months of slaughter and starvation.

It seems obvious that the experience of relentless bombing, seeing friends and relatives killed, and watching their home laid waste will have a radicalizing effect on the survivors. How could it not? As the UN emergency relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said earlier this week, “I can’t think of a better way to create a generation of anger and extremism than this.”

The Biden administration has justified its unconditional backing for the war by claiming that they want this to be the “last” war between Israel and the Palestinians. As Biden said in his strange op-ed last month, “Our goal should not be simply to stop the war for today — it should be to end the war forever, break the cycle of unceasing violence, and build something stronger in Gaza and across the Middle East so that history does not keep repeating itself.”

There is no chance that this war will be the last one when there have been so many innocent victims and the entire population will be so deeply embittered by the experience. The administration’s policy is all but guaranteeing that the cycle will continue and that it will get even worse in the future. Backing the war to the hilt has been an outrageous moral failure, and it is also an incredibly stupid policy because it just paves the way for more conflict and suffering in the future.