The Bullet we Bite
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you already know that Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023 — the eve of the major Jewish festival of Simchat Torah. The attack came in the form of a rain of missiles into residential areas, bulldozers that breached fences and were followed by motorcycles, and paragliders dropping from ultralite aircraft. The targets were civilian, with the elderly, women, and children as equal targets for murder and kidnapping. Joyous festivals and quiet communes alike were extinguished. By October 15th, the carnage in Israel resulted in over 1300 fatalities, over 3200 injuries, and nearly 200 hostages. To put these numbers into historical proportion for Israel, just under 1000 Israelis died in the six-day war. To put these numbers into proportion for Jews, October 7th saw the greatest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust.
Hamas is an Islamist organization with a political wing and a militant wing, the establishment of “an Islamic state throughout Palestine” in its charter. Its political wing won an election in Gaza in 2006, and its militant wing have continuously lobbed unguided rockets into Israeli residential areas more-or-less since Israel returned control of the Gaza strip to the Palestinian Authority in September of 2005.
Indeed, Israel has made it apparent that their response to the events of October 7th is to crush Hamas. Since Hamas’ attack, Israel has retaliated with artillery and airstrikes. Israel then proceded to lay siege to Gaza, cutting off its and fuel (although the water has now restarted), but it appears for all intents and purposes that Gazan infrastructure is collapsing completely. It is looking more and more like an extensive ground operation will begin soon. The details of military strategy are, of course, secret — but the north of Gaza has been ordered evacuated, so it seems realistic to expect that any ground operations will begin there. To date, Israel’s counterattack has resulted in over 2300 dead and over 9000 injured.
While there have been exchanges with Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as over the Syrian border, it remains to be seen whether or not other fronts will be opened.
There’s a term in philosophy called “biting the bullet”. It means, more or less, that one must occasionally accept uncomfortable or unexpected consequences of a system of beliefs. It is more-or-less the equialent of what engineers refer to as a “corner case”, a situation occuring when extreme cases occur across multiple conditions simultaneously. It is unfortunate that such a term uses the imagery of a bullet when very physical bullets are at stake — but that’s the term. I find myself struggling with a bullet to be bitten. I suspect many diaspora Jews may also be experiencing such a struggle.
Consider the following premises:
- It would take a special sort of pacifist to deny that the state of Israel (or, for that matter, any state) has the right to defend its citizens from such an action. Who could claim that, in the face of such butchery, they believe that Israelis should either pack up their belongings and leave — or simply perish? And even if they believed in pacifism to that extent, would they truly expect similar behaviour from the state of Israel?
- Hamas is the perpetrator of the gruesome violence on October 7th, and should suffer consequences. I cannot possibly believe that Hamas wouldn’t expect a counterattack after their actions. More likely, I expect the brutal character of their terrorism was meant to provoke counterattack — in fact, to provoke overreach — during which innocent Palestinians would certainly suffer.
- Gaza is one of the densest population centers in the world. Hamas operates from urban centers by design, firing rockets from schools and hospitals alike and concealing its materiel among urban centers. This allows the decentralization of points of operation, decreases the likelihood of a counterattack, and influences public sentiment if and when the counterattack does come. The risk of collateral damage is therefore painfully high, as we are now seeing. (Note: I can’t believe I feel the need to write this, but I am in no way equating the intentional torture, kidnap, and murder of civilians with collateral damage).
- I am not a military or counterterrorism expert (no, being an armchair general or amateur student of history doesn’t count), so I have no idea what’s actually necessary or sufficient to defeat Hamas.
So, given that Israel has a right to defend itself, and that Hamas has to suffer the consequences, and that maximizing the deaths of innocent Palestinians is a feature of Hamas’ strategy and not a bug, and that the conditions for victory are not immediately obvious:
- The best an international observer can hope is that the Israeli Defence Force is doing whatever it can to mitigate Hamas’ strategy of maximizing the deaths of innocent Palestinians. That seems like a great degree of faith to place in the hands of the IDF (who is largely carrying out its response in the name of Israelis and diaspora Jews alike) given the atrocity it has just suffered.
- A post-Hamas peace (or, at least, détente) will necessarily be built on the bodies of the innocent.
I don’t know that either of these two consequences are new (to the Israel-Palestine conflict particularly or to warfare/counterterrorism in general), but they both seem inevitable and uncomfortable consequences of the generally-accepted premises indicated above. We seem forced to gird our collective loins and accept them, in all their grisly reality.
Israeli and international commentators have compared Hamas’ attack on October 7th to Al Qaeda’s attacks on September 11th, 2001. This comparion is being made on the basis of body count proportions: 2991 people died on 9/11. The USA counted 285 million people in 2001. Israel counted 9.36 million people in 2021. That’s a population factor of 30.4, and so, by the coldest cross-multiplication I’ve ever performed, that’s an equivalent of 39,583 Americans — or 13.23 September 11th attacks. By that measure, 9/11 was a homeopathic dosage of 10/7.
Rather, the metaphor resonates with me for another reason. In retrospect, 9/11 is probably the single most impactful geopolitical event in my life thus far. I was in high school when the towers fell, and I remember how quickly the United States pivoted to a with-us-or-against-us mentality — a mentality that was critiqued in, of all things, a Star Wars prequel movie. Now there is a generation of voters who were born after the 9/11 attack, and who never witnessed firsthand the cynical and mendacious fearmongering that led up to the USA’s mad argosy in Iraq. I remember how I had to start presenting a passport when crossing the land border from Canada to the USA, and how I had to start taking my shoes off for the Transportation Security Agency when entering the USA by air. I remember how, a year after the attack, the government of the United States conjured a new body for its already impressive security establishment, the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security. In a further shift towards neoliberalism along the Jihad-vs-McWorld axis, I remember the ads encouraging consumerism to ‘bolster the economy’, as if the USA couldn’t have put $0.75 trillion back into its pockets by not invading Iraq. I remember how, upon hearing that the point of terrorism was to make people change their way of life, I wondered whether or not the terrorists succeeded.
So now, members of the international community in general — and diaspora Jews in particular — are being called upon to Stand With Israel. Beyond a grim understanding of the human cost of defeating Hamas, I hope we truly understand what those words mean.
Addendum: Foreign Affairs magazine has published an article on how the IDF understands its responsibilities to minimize collateral damage in these conflicts, written by an author of the IDF’s own doctrine. It’s hand-wavey at times, but it’s a serious article that clarifies how the IDF makes decisions.
Addendum #2: Meanwhile, here’s Hamas leadership, seemingly without equivalent moral qualms.
