Only Israeli military failure will stop the genocide in Gaza

As the Gaza Strip is subjected to the most intensive bombing in the history of an already conflict-ridden Middle East, and as mass killings of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military are perpetrated on a daily basis, there is a growing belief that there is a level of death, destruction, and suffering beyond which Western governments will cease or significantly reduce their participation in Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, as well as their support for its actions. 

Yet the supposition reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how such governments formulate policy. Thus far, Israel has imposed a comprehensive siege on the Gaza Strip, depriving an entire society of all essential supplies except oxygen; razed entire towns and neighborhoods to the ground; and in the space of one month, killed more than 10,000 people and wounded perhaps three times that number, more than a third of them children. 

It has done so as part of a bombing campaign that demonstrably has no legitimate military purpose or objective, and whose transparent purpose is terror, revenge, physical destruction, and the punishment of an entire society. Nor has the bombing campaign degraded the military capabilities of the Palestinian organizations in the Gaza Strip in any meaningful way. By its own count, Israel has killed more UN employees than Palestinian military commanders. 

If the volume of Palestinian death, destruction, and suffering indeed played a role in the calculations of Western governments, it would have already done so. It hasn’t, and independently of other developments, it won’t. As Israeli forces directly and repeatedly shell schools, hospitals, refugee columns, UN facilities, self-proclaimed safe zones, and all forms of civilian infrastructure, most Western governments continue to proudly stand in full solidarity with Israel’s government. Pope Francis is virtually the only Western leader who hasn’t made the pilgrimage to Netanyahu. 

Rather, and as during the 1982 Siege of Beirut, previous Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip, and virtually every other Israeli campaign against the Palestinians since 1948 and particularly after 1967, Western governments have framed their policy around Israel’s “right to defend itself,” something all too often presented as its duty and obligation as well. It is a right these governments have, quite literally, never accorded to the Palestinian people on a single occasion since 1917. 

In 2023, for example, U.S. and EU officials began referring for the first time to specific settler pogroms in the West Bank as “terrorism.” Yet they pointedly refrained from stating that Palestinians have a right to defend themselves against terrorism. They instead called upon the state that has armed the settlers, deployed them as auxiliary militias to realize its policies, and ensured impunity for their actions, to rein them in. When governments invoke an Israeli right of self-defense against an occupied people, they are, in actuality, supporting Israel’s right to dispossess an entire people and seize its lands. They cannot but be fully aware of this, and that their calls upon the Israeli government to control the settlers that, as a matter of state policy, it has unleashed, is much like the current handwringing about sending humanitarian aid to the killing fields of Gaza: meaningless drivel.

What will cause a change in Western policy is Israeli military failure. That is why the Biden administration has devoted more energy to compelling Israel to formulate attainable objectives than it has counseled the restoration of fuel and water to Gaza’s hospitals. 

To give a prominent recent example in this regard, in 2006, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ecstatically welcomed Israel’s war against Lebanon as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Confident that Israel was pulverizing Hezbollah, the U.S. imperiously dismissed efforts to achieve a cessation of hostilities. Yet, as soon as Israeli armored columns and ground forces faced slaughter when they attempted to advance into southern Lebanon, the U.S. immediately changed its tune and beseeched the UN Security Council to adopt a ceasefire resolution. 

Similarly, in 1982, the U.S. gave Israel a free hand to eradicate the PLO in Lebanon. Once it became clear it lacked the capacity to occupy West Beirut, the Reagan administration sent Philip Habib to negotiate an agreement that preserved the PLO. In other words, so long as the U.S. and other Western governments reject a Gaza truce and focus on meaningless obscenities like “humanitarian pauses,” it means they still believe Israel will or can succeed. If they reverse their position, you can take all the homilies about civilian suffering motivating their new position with a grain of salt. Window dressing. It means they have concluded Israel has failed. 

An alternative scenario would be that Western governments have concluded that their and Israel’s conduct is producing a significant threat to their own interests and that it’s time to wind down the clock. This could take the form of growing instability in the region and threats to client regimes within it, the prospect of an expanded war requiring direct intervention, which the U.S. would prefer to avoid, and concerns about domestic economic or security repercussions, or potentially partisan political or electoral calculations. In their absence, reports that those enabling Israel’s onslaught are “discussing” or “negotiating” with the Israeli government about various issues but are encountering resistance from Netanyahu sound about right. In the absence of consequences for its conduct — and since 1948, there is no instance of Israel facing significant, sustained repercussions on account of its policies — it knows it can proceed without inhibition.