What Would Victory Mean in Gaza?
Decision/victory is the only optimal outcome of a military campaign. In the last three decades, deterrence has become the desired outcome of an IDF military campaign, while decision/victory has essentially disappeared as the primary goal. This pushing aside of victory and centralization of deterrence was largely due to the limitations the State of Israel and the IDF placed on themselves regarding the use of force.WSJ: U.S. Pushes to Shape Israel’s Rafah Operation, Not Stop It
The goals of these limitations were to reduce casualties among IDF soldiers; reduce civilian losses from rockets hitting the home front; reduce enemy collateral damage; reduce international criticism of Israel over its military conduct; and avoid the need to provide a civil response to the needs of a local enemy population.
Israel's belief that it can rely on intermittent deterrence operations was painfully shattered on Oct. 7. It took a severe blow to national security to force a review of the security doctrine and a rediscovery of the concept of victory/decision. It was quickly understood that victory/decision is required in the current campaign and probably also in future campaigns.
Tactical victory is not about killing all opposing military soldiers or terrorist operatives, but about breaking their ability to fight as a combatant framework. In the current war, operational victory does not mean the threat of guerrilla warfare and terrorism has been removed from Gaza, but that Hamas' ability to cause damage, especially to the Israeli civilian home front, is declining dramatically.
Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy's ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. It is achieved by continuing military operations in order to weaken the enemy's guerrilla warfare and terrorism capabilities until they either stop completely or are reduced to the scale of individual events. Grand victory in Gaza would mean a years' long process until the creation of fundamental change. A civilian authority would be established with an effective police force and the capacity for civil, economic and law enforcement governance. The population would implement a basic approach of coexistence with Israel. Yet such a process does not yet appear practical or feasible.
This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. But the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel.
In two days of meetings between the Israeli defense chief and senior officials in the White House and Pentagon, discussions on Israel’s planned military operation in southern Gaza focused not on how to stop it, but on how to protect civilians during its rollout.Washington Denies a Bedrock of Warfighting
The businesslike tone of the talks was a departure from previous weeks, when top U.S. officials bluntly warned Israel against an all-out offensive on Rafah—where more than a million displaced Palestinians have taken refuge—while Israel’s prime minister defiantly vowed to press ahead.
Rafah has been at the center of a growing rift between Israeli and U.S. political leaders. Those tensions boiled over on Monday, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a visit to Washington by top aides to discuss U.S. concerns over the planned offensive on Rafah, where Hamas fighters are making a final stand. The tit-for-tat move was in response to the U.S. abstaining from a United Nations Security Council resolution that called for an immediate cease-fire while also demanding the release of hostages.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, however, proceeded with his meetings at the White House and Pentagon on Monday and Tuesday, which had been previously scheduled. Gallant is part of Israel’s three-member war cabinet that includes Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, the prime minister’s chief political rival.
While President Biden’s relationship with Netanyahu has frayed, the channel between U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gallant remains strong. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the two defense chiefs have met several times and talked by phone about 40 times.
In Gallant’s closed-door meetings in Washington, a more pragmatic conversation began to emerge in which the discussions were on conducting a phased operation to reduce the potential harm to civilians while still ensuring that Israel dismantles Hamas’s four battalions in Rafah.
“I think there is an understanding we have to dismantle Hamas,” Gallant said, following his White House meetings.
At a Tuesday meeting at the Pentagon, Austin pressed his Israeli counterpart to ensure that effective arrangements were in place to protect civilians before an Israeli military operation is mounted to attack the Hamas fighters there.
“There is a sequence,” a U.S. defense official said. “The military aspect of the operation should not proceed until the humanitarian aspects have been fully addressed.”
Both sides also agreed that the Hamas battalions in Rafah must be dislodged so that the militants cannot attempt a comeback or continue to smuggle weapons into the enclave, which are prerequisites for ending the war and paving the way for a new political authority in Gaza. And that means trying to find ways to work with Israel on its Rafah strategy, for lack of better options.
The Biden administration recently pressed Ukraine to halt attacks on Russian oil refineries. Ukrainian strikes on refineries and tankers in the Black Sea have contributed to a rise in the global oil price, and specifically of oil products, especially diesel. Almost the last thing the Biden administration wants in an election year is higher fuel prices and associated inflation in other goods and services. But in acting to halt rising oil prices, Washington is undermining the Ukrainian war effort. Denying energy supplies to the adversary in war has long been a bedrock of military strategy. Washington’s policy toward adversary fuel supplies is likely to lengthen the Ukraine-Russia war, as well as the Gaza war.Bernard-Henri Levy: What If the U.S. Helps Hamas Win?
With oil and fuel product prices rising, Washington has now slammed the brakes on Ukraine’s effective strategies, effectively constraining Ukraine at a time that the war with Russia is likely to escalate soon. This is not the first time the administration has blocked an ally’s effort to choke off its enemy’s energy supplies. In the war in Gaza, the U.S. has demanded that Israel not only desist from disrupting such supplies but actually provide energy to Hamas. As a result, Hamas has been able to sustain tunnel warfare, which depends on liquid fuels. The provision of fuel to Hamas fighters enabled them to continue waging war from underground, prolonging the conflict and thereby endangering the lives of even more civilians in both Gaza and Israel.
In both cases Washington has imposed conditions on its allies that fly in the face of one of the cardinal principles of military strategy: disrupt an enemy’s energy supplies to cripple its forces. Allowing adversaries access to fuel extends a conflict and leads to more deaths as well as delays the conclusion of hostilities. Washington needs to let Ukraine and Israel finish the job, or indeed stop the wars. But hamstringing American partners is the worse option, since it extends the wars.
Let's imagine that Israel yields to the pressure, refrains from entering Rafah to finish off Hamas' four surviving battalions, and agrees to the general cease-fire of indeterminate duration that the U.S. administration seems to push. If that came to pass, Hamas would declare victory - on the verge of defeat, then the next minute revived. These criminals against humanity would emerge from their tunnels triumphant.
The Arab street would view Hamas terrorists as resistance fighters. In the West Bank, Hamas would quickly eclipse the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, whose image would pale next to the aura of martyrdom and endurance in which Hamas would cloak itself.
After that, none of the experts' extravagant plans for an international stabilization force, an interim Arab authority, or a technocratic government presiding over the reconstruction of Gaza would stand long against the return of this group of criminals adorned with the most heroic of virtues. Hamas would set the ideological and political agenda, and hope for peace harbored by moderates on both sides will be dead.