A scholar who grew up in a Christian Zionist tradition, Jamin Hubner joins to talk about how the ideology is unrolled to kids and how he found his way out of it.
The Hodeidah Tribunal
A fictional story of Victor’s Justice
[Dear Readers: For a few months I’ve imagined writing a speculative novel or novella of a post-genocide world in which a group of heroes travel the world catching the war criminals and enablers behind the current genocide. The last act of the story would be the actual trial, which would give me the chance to show how much of the Nuremberg Trial text applies directly to the situation we find ourselves in today. All of which is to say, this scene is rather stripped of the elements of dramatic writing, but it could nonetheless be considered an excerpt of a future book… ]
A favorite target of the now shattered US empire, the old port city of Hodeidah was hit with saturation airstrikes in the final months of the war that liberated the Middle East from occupation. At the very end, the aircraft carrier USS Trump’s F-35s emptied their bomb bays on a final destructive run, after which the Trump left the Red Sea and ran into ‘mechanical troubles’ in the Mediterranean. It never got home. But Hodeidah was rebuilt – with a set of buildings rebuilt in the old style – and in it, a palace custom-built for the express purpose of holding the proceedings that were about to occur.
In the vast, main hall, the prisoners sat together in a glass-encased defendants’ box to the right.
The panel of judges shuffled inscrutably onto the elevated stage. Wardah and the other prosecutors sat directly across from their legal opponents: Egyptian, Saudi, and Jordanian lawyers defending the war criminals in the dock, their Western advisors sitting directly behind them. The proceedings were in Arabic, the jurisprudence Islamic, and so the defense team had deemed it best to have Arabs be the faces and voices of the defense and let the Westerners work behind the legal front line.
A pale, thin man with an impeccable haircut sat in the defendant box wearing a familiar smirk. The younger woman beside him leaned forward, twirling her hair and looking bored, appearing confident that nothing would befall her from this silly court. Watching them, Wardah found herself unbothered by their inaudible whisperings and incomprehensible complicities. As the leader of the Yemeni prosecution team, she felt a responsibility to history, to the past, to the living, to the survivors, to the children who would have to rebuild the nation and whose grief cried out for justice. Like hers.
When the room quieted and the bailiff signaled to her that her turn to speak had come, she walked to the podium and looked at the judges, ignoring completely the assembled criminals on display to the side.
“When the first Nazis were defeated, some of them faced a trial. One of the prosecutors, whose words I will quote here today (1), said that that trial had a grave responsibility because the Nazi crimes were so calculated, so malignant, so devastating, that civilization could not tolerate their being ignored because it could not survive their being repeated.
“They were repeated. And that American man, Justice Robert Jackson, said that instead of vengeance, putting the Nazis on trial, was a tribute which Power paid to Reason. Like Resistance fighters in the field who did not shoot down the Israeli Nazi enemy helicopters when they came to evacuate their wounded, like the men of Ansarallah who assured the crew of the Galaxy Leader that they would not be harmed but treated according to Islam, we too will pay tribute to Reason here today and to religion also, by seeking justice instead of vengeance.
“The law, my predecessor said, must not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people, but must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. I could say, evils which leave no screen in the world untouched.
“The men that your honors are here to judge, are, like my predecessor called the German Nazis, ‘living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names.’
“Under the banner of ‘Zionism’, these men took from their own people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being. The people were compensated by inflaming and gratifying hatreds towards their opponents, anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinians, all Arabs and Muslims, and indeed anyone else who stood in their path, they directed such a campaign of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since… the previous trial of this kind. They excited the Western ambition to be a “master race” which of course implies serfdom for others. They led their people on a mad gamble for domination. They diverted social energies and resources to the creation of what they thought to be an invincible war machine. They replaced all rules and laws of war ever developed with their own Dahiya doctrine of mass murder of civilians, their Hannibal doctrine of killing their own people, and their Samson option of trying to blow up the world rather than lose the land they stole from others. They have demoralized and morally compromised the entire West beyond recognition. These are the fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants in the prisoners’ dock.
“Like my predecessors at the Nuremberg Trial, we had to do an immense amount of legal work in a short amount of time. Less than a year ago, this Palace of Justice did not exist and the building that had stood here had been bombed. We too may suffer from incomplete research and would have benefited from more time, for the crimes were immense and the evidence for them as well. Our case is adequate for you to judge.
“Also like the last time Nazis were tried, the nature of these crimes is that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes. The worldwide scope of the aggressions carried out by these men and women has left but few real neutrals. Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. We, too, must draw a line between just and measured retribution and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war.
“These defendants have gone to great lengths to avoid being caught and tried. They did not extend the favor of a trial to the tens of thousands they tortured in their prisons. But they will be given a fair opportunity to defend themselves. We accept the burden of proving criminal acts and the responsibility of these defendants for their commission.
“And like the previous Nazis, these modern versions are not accused of yielding to the normal frailties of human beings. It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar.
“The Israelis performed their crimes and posted them as trophies on social media sites. We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants re-enact for you, from the screen, some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.
“The Jewish people should know by now that we Muslims do not hold them in fear nor hate. In our religion they are the people of the book. And if we are not awed by what the so-called ‘Jewish state’ has done to our people in war, Jewish people have long been truly integrated and celebrated in our lands and protected by just rulers of the Ummah. It is Zionism that led a portion of the Jewish people astray. Zionist aggression has left the whole region in ruins. Zionist readiness to pledge the West’s word without hesitation and break it without shame has fastened upon Western diplomacy a reputation for duplicity that will handicap it for years. Western arrogance has made the very phrase ‘Zionist’ a taunt – a word which used to be both proudly claimed and banned for use as an insult – that will be thrown at Westerners for generations. The Zionist nightmare has given the word a sinister significance that will linger: the Jewish, no less than the Muslim world has accounts to settle with these defendants.
“The fact of the war and the course of the war, which is the central theme of our case, is history. From the Nakba of 1948 to the Naksa of 1967, through to the 1973 war, the invasions of Lebanon starting in the 1970s, Israel seemed invincible. All the Arab armies were vanquished in five days of 1967, overrun by swift, powerful, well-aimed blows. All of Palestine from the river to the sea was under occupation. Parts of Syria and Lebanon, a huge part of Egypt. The Zionists built colonies in the lands they occupied and displaced the inhabitants. They committed unspeakable massacres where they went. Aggressive wars, wars of colonization, war crimes, crimes against humanity, which the nations of the world had renounced.”
Wardah looked at her notes, wondering if she was belaboring the point. Hadn’t the war settled the issue? Wasn’t it a different world now? No, she would make this presentation as if she still lived in a world where the most obvious truths about Zionism required nearly impossible standards of evidence. So she continued.
“This war did not just happen – it was planned and prepared for a long period of time and with no small skill and cunning. The authors of this war achieved a stupendous work in organization. Our case will show these defendants all uniting in a plan they knew could be accomplished only through genocide. Their planning of war, their calculated and planned ruthlessness in the conduct of warfare, their deliberate and planned criminality toward conquered peoples – all these are ends for which they acted in concert and all these are phases of the conspiracy, a conspiracy which reached one goal only to set out for another and more ambitious one.
“The case as we present it here will be concerned with the brains and authority behind all the crimes. These defendants were of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. But unlike the old Nazis, who used lesser folk as tools, Zionism created through careful design of the education system and media structures, a population that celebrated genocide, that self-organized to deny aid convoys and attack unarmed Palestinians in mobs. This design was a constant work-in-progress and it is the designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with these agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war, whom we hope to reach. As for the masses who participated in the crimes organized by their betters, they must be forgiven after telling their truth in a different set of proceedings, in Palestine, that will follow these. The pursuit of punitive justice against a genocidal majority would not lead us anywhere good, in the view of the prosecution.”
Wardah paused to take a sip of water, before continuing (2).
“One question that we must address first is, why not use the existing tribunals? The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court? Why did we choose to bring the criminals here, to stand trial in our region, rather than in New York, at the United Nations? Because these bodies have failed. When South Africa brought the case, the ICJ ordered Israel to stop its genocide after several months. These defendants ignored the order. The ICJ ordered a stop again before the Rafah invasion. The defendants ignored the order. The International Criminal Court prosecutor, after years of inaction, found himself unable to distinguish between aggressor and victim, and asked for arrest warrants against both. The defendants ignored these – they said Israel never signed on and the Americans had a law threatening to invade the Hague if any American were tried at the ICC. These are the courts of racism, the courts of injustice, the courts of inequality. We believe that all are equal before God and our concept of justice cannot accept that some of God’s children are above the law.
“We will leave it to the Palestinian prosecutor to go through the history prior to October 7, 2023. The Deir Yassin massacre and the many other massacres of the Nakba, the crimes of aggression, occupation, ethnic cleansing throughout the decades. The way that the Western countries and institutions of international law, human rights, and free expression that were supposed to protect the vulnerable, all conspired to create a separate standard for Israel that let them commit any crime against our people. They are the best authority on this history and they can set it out for you.
“We focus instead on the systematic nature of the crimes committed by these defendants in the post-October 7, 2023 genocide war.
“The South Africans showed video and provided an extensive dossier full of these defendants going on record publicly ordering their soldiers to commit genocide. They said there would be no food, water, or electricity going to the civilian population; they cited biblical passages calling for the murder of women, children, and livestock; they made trophy videos of the destruction of homes, buildings, hospitals, water infrastructure, farmers’ fields. The destruction and stopping of aid trucks became a scene for partying. No attempt was made to cover up. This was the most unashamed, open celebration of genocide we have seen.
“But what the South Africans could not say was what we know: that the Resistance operation of October 7 was not an operation to kill Israeli civilians, but to take military prisoners alive to try to obtain a prisoner exchange, Israeli military captives in exchange for thousands of Palestinian captives who were held – tortured and starved and done to death – in the Zionist prisons until they were liberated at the end of the war. And as the Zionist newspaper Ha’aretz reported on July 7, 2024, in Yaniv Kubovich’s report “IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive”, most of the Israeli civilians (3) who were killed on that day were killed by Israel, applying the Hannibal Directive. The genocide was built on a lie, a lie that was taken up, developed, and repeated by some of the defendants here today.
“We are bringing this case before you, your honors, because Western institutions of rights and justice chose to self-destruct rather than hold Israel accountable. We mentioned the ICJ, ICC, UN, and the Western media: all have lost their credibility, which is why we are holding the Tribunal here and in this form. But it is not just these institutions that have lost their credibility. The very conceptions of the conduct of war and diplomacy have been corroded and must be rebuilt from zero. It is for this reason that the prosecution of these defendants is so necessary.
“Regarding the conception of war. The Zionists put forward the following norms for the conduct of war:
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All civilians, including children, are fair targets if a claim can be made that they are close enough that killing them is necessary to kill a combatant target. The shorthand they used was, ‘Hamas uses human shields’. Their Israeli army used actual human shields, tying children to military vehicles and forcing them to go into tunnels and houses, but were not held accountable for this.
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The Zionists also put forward the notion that they can use any type of weapon, including two thousand pound bombs, for any purpose, including trying to kill an unarmed person in a tent. They removed any notion that a particular weapon might be overkill for the task for which it is used. In their conduct of war, they can use whatever weapons they choose.
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In their view, if they can make a claim that any protected group of people or infrastructure might be used by a combatant, that it can be targeted. This includes all hospitals in Gaza, all medical personnel, all journalists, all food supplies, all water supplies, apartment buildings – everything, as per the Biblical quotes about Amalek, the enemy of the Israelites who is to be wiped out man, woman, child, and livestock.
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Military censorship and manipulation of information is always present but in the view of the defendants, systematic and structural lying is merely a part of the war. Several of the defendants repeated a completely fake story about Resistance members eating lunch around the corpses of a family they’d murdered. This was before the thousands of trophy photos of Israelis posing with the toys and underwear of families they’d murdered, in the incitement period of the genocide.
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In their zeal for extreme force protection, their soldiers target the unarmed and avoid combat with armed combatants. On the other hand, they kill their own soldiers and civilians if there’s any chance they might become captives (who could then be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners). This is the Hannibal Directive we mentioned earlier. They have institutionalized cowardice in war.
“We wish to punish the defendants for all of these: targeting of civilians, systematic lying to incite genocide, destruction of infrastructure, and total disproportion of weaponry. We wish to punish these crimes to eradicate this whole conception of war from history, so that if there are wars that must be conducted in the future, they are conducted according to laws of war that distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, use weapons that are proportional, do not target civilians or civilian infrastructure, and – even if information is controlled during war – do not use lies to incite genocide.
“In terms of diplomacy, the defendants allowed a successful exchange of prisoners in November of 2023. But then, after a pause, they resumed the war, recaptured the Palestinian prisoners and resumed their torture, and methodically targeted the remaining Israeli captives to kill them. In one operation they murdered three Israeli hostages in cold blood. In another operation they rescued three hostages while killing several others and hundreds of Palestinian civilians. Whenever ceasefire negotiations reached a point of near success, the Israelis would add new clauses and insist on continuing the war as a condition of a ceasefire! These are contrary to the principles of good faith negotiation. To the United Nations, the Israelis sent a buffoon to accuse the countries of the world of terrorism. The West vetoed multiple ceasefire resolutions and when they finally accepted one, they allowed Israel to ignore it.
“We wish to punish the defendants for abusing negotiation and diplomacy to continue the genocide, so that these conceptions of negotiation and diplomacy are also left behind and the world can move forward on better ideas.
“In 1975, the United Nations passed Resolution 3379, which argued that Zionism was a form of racism. The Israeli representative to the UN stood before the gathered nations and tore the resolution to shreds, just as the Israeli representative took a miniature automatic paper shredder to the UN charter in 2024.
“As you know, UN Resolution 3379 was repealed in 1991 (4). While the United States was laying waste to Iraq, whose president Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and dared to propose a “linkage” of Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait with Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, the resolution stating that Zionism was a form of racism was repealed through US pressure. Your honors also know that when our country, Yemen, voted against the US invasion of Iraq, we were told that this was “the most expensive vote we ever cast” and we suffered sanctions for it (5).
“3379 should never have been repealed. But today I am asking your honors to go further. I am asking your honors to rule that Zionism is not just a form of racism, it is a criminal enterprise, one which ultimately requires genocide to continue, and which therefore must be ended. Doing justice here will be a first step.”
Wardah looked at the other prosecutors: her counterparts from Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. To her, they seemed satisfied, and she felt she had presented her case well. The judges gave little away from their expressions, and Wardah again did not favor the criminals with her gaze.
The presiding judge called for adjournment until the next day, when the Iranian prosecutor would present his case.
Notes
(1) The first part of Wardah’s speech is basically a reproduction of Robert Jackson’s opening remarks at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Wardah alternates between quoting between quote marks, paraphrasing with modern updates, and quoting without quotation marks.
(2) If you read Justice Jackson’s speech, the middle part of the speech is the history of the Nazi party, its rise to power, and its conduct of WWII. This section of Wardah’s speech is not a copy/paste with find/replace of Jackson’s speech, but instead a part of the case as it is imagined would be laid out at a tribunal run by the Axis of Resistance.
(3) Ha’aretz was very late to report this. There were some reports in the Israeli media here and there and these were assembled carefully by Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone, and The Cradle. I did my own modest assembly of a few Western sources on substack in October.
(4) I made part of a video about Resolution 3379, its rise and fall.
(5) Amply documented. E.g. Ian Williams, “A Costly Vote? Yemen Paid a High Price for 1990 Security Council Veto.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 2010.
World War Civ 41a: 1917 Russian Revolution pt1: to February
The leadup to the February 1917 Revolution, including the assassination of Rasputin, the abdication of tsar Nicholas II, and the rise of dual power between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet.
In defense of ‘wokism’
Briefly straying from my lane to make a quick point
A Black American folk singer, Lead Belly, enjoined listeners in 1938 to ‘stay woke’ in a song about a false accusation against a group of young black men in Alabama. A century later and the word is exclusively used as an epithet, a code word that identifies its speaker as someone who has some opposition to left-wing politics.
That isn’t how the anti-’woke’ would put it, of course. Champions of the liberal value of free speech, right-wing anti-wokes believe that left-wing orthodoxies have gone too far and stifled these once widely available liberal freedoms. When asked for examples, the anti-wokes will generally present examples like drag shows, pronoun etiquette, and trans women competing in sports.
There are details and ongoing areas of study and work when it comes to how to implement these values in a way that allows everyone to be who they are (trans rights, sex and gender equality, etc.) There’s a lot to know about these issues and readers know this isn’t my lane. But to my eyes, comparatively untrained on these issues, the selected anti-woke examples look like a distraction or an outrage engine, like the way most of these same anti-wokes talk about immigration, crime, or terrorism.
Anti-imperialism is, and like all left-wing ideologies is based on the core value of equality. And the anti-’wokes’, whether they justify it as naturally ordained by science or divine will, generally hold a core value of hierarchy. It’s an irreconcilable difference.
Almost all anti-woke criticism is just right-wing politics and therefore holds nothing of interest for leftists.
There is one legitimate complaint in the antiwoke arsenal, which is against the language-policing that takes place in mainstream, liberal institutions. But language-policing in such corporate environments has nothing to do with equality and therefore nothing to do with anything truly left-wing. It is nothing more than an office game, in which the winner is the one who can master the language and the bureaucratic rules. Words and concepts that were developed in communities fighting for liberation – or even survival – have been stolen, appropriated by liberal professionals for use in their office power games. But the theft of these words and concepts doesn’t discredit the projects of liberation from which they emerged.
Now we can come back to my lane. You know the old saying that when you scratch a liberal a fascist bleeds? The Gaza genocide has scratched the liberals and the fascists alike. Turns out that when Palestine comes up, the right wing (squealing for police to crush speech and deport protesters) doesn’t care about free speech or assembly and liberal professionals didn’t mean anything they said about the liberation of oppressed groups by race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Anomalous exceptions aside, both antiwokes and the liberal professionals they claim to despise have revealed themselves to be enthusiastic supporters of genocide who hate us much more than they hate one another. There’s no use contemplating alliance with these people or searching for common ground.
I have over the decades, every few years, written something to protest left-wing language-policing and the adoption of liberal professional games. But leftists will find no allies among the anti-’woke’. They don’t want us and we don’t want them. They mock social justice warriors and they mock being woke, but it’s better to be a warrior than a coward and it’s better to be awake than asleep.
False friends are everywhere. Lead Belly warned us about them, and told us the state we need to be in, to remain vigilant.
Israel can’t occupy like it used to
The devolution of Israel’s military happened gradually but it has lost abilities it once had
Mao Zedong presented a staged model where a guerrilla army began with organization in safe and remote areas, building the ability to hold territory, then hit-and-run actions and raids, and finally engagement in conventional warfare to destroy the enemy’s army on the battlefield. Israel has been doing this in reverse: in 1967 it defeated the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies. But it could not defeat Hizbollah in 2006 and cannot defeat Hamas today. It once possessed the ability to occupy and hold territory and control populations. But in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank, Israeli warfare has devolved into an endless series of hit-and-run attacks on civilian targets, with the heavily armed Israeli army running away before their comparatively lightly armed opponents can catch them.
The gruesomeness of the hit-and-run attacks themselves, the revolting trophy photos that the Israeli army takes (e.g. posing in women’s lingerie, playing with the toys of dead children, blowing up houses and apartment blocks, etc.), the torture of thousands of Palestinian captives, by Israel’s imposed mass starvation on Gaza – these have obscured this reality. But beneath this stomach-turning surface is a cold military fact: the methods of occupation that Israel used for decades are unraveling.
In the 2007 book Hollow Land, Israeli academic Eyal Weizman analyzed what he called the “architecture of occupation”: the way Israel used the built environment to impose its will on the Palestinians. Befitting a book by an architect, Hollow Land is filled with drawings and photos of how the occupation worked from the early Zionist days until the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
The work would begin with small settler outposts, defended by the army and the settlers themselves.
The outposts would grow into full fledged fortress settlements that commanded the heights and looked down on the native villages below.
The Israeli army forced the occupied people to accept these new realities. Palestinian movement from place to place was controlled by checkpoints. The big terminal at Qalandiya, for example:
Hollow Land also has a photo from the major checkpoint controlling people entering and exiting Gaza from Israel, Erez.
But the Erez terminal was destroyed on October 7 — mostly, like so much on that day and since, by Israeli airstrikes. The giant Israeli army that went into Gaza to destroy Hamas withdrew from Gaza City, then attacked Khan Younis, withdrew from there, threatened an invasion of Rafah for many months, invaded, and is in the process of being driven from there. The Israelis enlisted American help in building occupation infrastructure – the famous pier which took so long coming, floated into the sea, and then was rebuilt in time to commit a joint US-Israeli war crime of immense proportions in the Nusseirat refugee camp. They are trying to build a base along a road in central Gaza. But their base construction has come under constant mortar fire and soon, so will the American pier.
The Americans themselves have been forced into this way of fighting: they sailed into the Red Sea to engage in a little bit of classical gunboat diplomacy, to warn Yemen’s Ansarallah (the so-called Houthis) not to try to stop Israel’s genocide. They were roundly ignored, Ansrallah has not hesitated to engage the US navy directly with missiles, and the US has responded with aerial bombardment of civilian targets – hit-and-run.
There is no occupation if you cannot stay in one place, and Israel cannot stay in any one place in Gaza. They even have to return to the same hospitals again and again after destroying them because they can’t stay until the resistance comes for them.
That is Gaza, and Gaza is unique: Israel withdrew from there in 2005 (because the resistance made it impossible to maintain the occupation) and the resistance in Gaza has built an extensive infrastructure from which to fight the Israelis. But the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is devolving too. Yes, there are still checkpoints and settlements controlling the lives of Palestinians there. The occupation isn’t over in the West Bank. But Israeli operations in West Bank towns like Tubas, Tulkarem, Qalqilya, Nablus, and Jenin are raids: they go in heavy, besiege a house, fight gun battles with the resistance, have their bulldozers blown up by IEDs… and inevitably withdraw. And the duration of the raids seems to get shorter. Jenin had a raid a few weeks ago that was 48 hours long; the next one was 3 hours. In Tubas, the Israelis try to let their Palestinian Authority collaborators seize weapons and arrest resistance fighters on their behalf, so they can attack from a place of greater safety.
What explains this devolution from region-dominating conventional army to genocidal raider? The adaptations of the resistance have played the main role: their ability to defeat the ground forces of Israel render most of the occupation’s other infrastructural goals unachievable. Another factor: Israel slowly transformed its army into one that mainly staffs checkpoints and monitors electronic murder machines while serving as the institution responsible for socializing Jewish migrants and indoctrinating youths into Zionism.
But the arrogance of Zionist ideology and belief in racial superiority also played a role. Why train day and night to fight your racial inferior? Why risk death when you can kill by pressing a button? The Zionism of yesterday was stealing the land. The Zionism of today is killing from a distance. But stealing somebody’s land can only be done from up close. Too close, maybe, for illusions of racial superiority to hold up.
AER 142: Gaza War Sit Rep Day 224 – Abu Obeida speaks as Jabalia and Rafah battles rage
A report with Jon Elmer on the fierce fighting in Gaza on day 224 of the war and a breakdown of Qassam spokesman Abu Obeida’s speech on that day.
Why Israel is Stuck
Three concepts of Western warfare
After months of threatening a Rafah invasion, Israel finally went in. They quickly took the civilian crossing with Egypt – in violation of the peace treaty negotiated between the two countries to Israel’s great advantage in the 1970s. They planted Israeli flags at the crossing, blasted the sign saying “I love Gaza”, and declared a kind of “Mission Accomplished” moment.
But like George W Bush’s speech which was supposed to be the end of the Iraq war but was actually the beginning of the Iraq insurgency and a major step in the long-term erosion of American supremacy, Israel’s declaration of victory is premature.
Over the next few days, Palestinian resistance groups initiated a series of operations (many of which they recorded in dramatic field videos) at a tempo nearly unmatched in the war, now in its eighth month. Resistance spokesman Abu Obeida told listeners that the fighters had scored hits on 100 Israeli military vehicles in 10 days in Rafah in the south of Gaza, Jabalia in the north, and Zeitoun in the north (from which the Israelis have since withdrawn). Israeli soldiers, Abu Obeida said, were suffering casualties “by the dozen”.
Under heavy fire in both Rafah and Jabalia, Israel is likely to withdraw from these areas as well. We can then expect a return to aerial bombardment and siege warfare on the starving population. Then more raids, perhaps into the middle of Gaza, during which Israel will lose more soldiers and more vehicles, before withdrawing. Then a period of bombing, then more raids. All the while, Lebanon’s Hizbollah will be hitting military installations on Israel’s northern border with escalating firepower and Yemen’s Ansarallah will be tightening a blockade on ships trading with Israel.
Based on the experiences of the 2006, 2008/9, 2012, 2014, and 2021 wars, Israel would have been expected to have accepted a ceasefire by now, having settled for the demonstration effect of killing between 40,000 – 200,000 or more (according to an estimate made by Ralph Nader) and unwilling to bear the growing costs in soldiers’ lives, displaced Israelis, and economic difficulties.
Why has Israel been so determined this time, compared to previous times? Is it the case that, having mobilized around half a million men, that the numbers of casualties sustained in these ground operations is bearable by Israel, even if Israeli casualties reach the thousands or even tens of thousands?
This is, likely, the calculation. Israel has mobilized all available troops and the US has provided all the firepower Israel can wield. But this approach of maximal firepower and maximum mobilization – of overkill and of over-mobilization – has disconnected Israel from normal military calculations and normal strategic thinking, rendering it vulnerable to the resistance’s counter-strategies.
To understand this vulnerability, let’s break down Western wars in history into three types: Clausewitzian, counterinsurgency, and genocidal.
Clausewitz says war is policy by other means; Counterinsurgency wars are about controlling a population; Genocidal wars are about destroying the foundations of life.
Clausewitz’s book On War uses the campaigns of Frederick the Great, the Prussian king who fought with his European neighbours, and of Napoleon, who fought all the rest of Europe combined (while also fighting a genocidal war against Haiti, but we’ll leave that aside for this article). In these wars, the goal is to inflict losses on the enemy’s military to compel the loser to do the winner’s bidding.
In colonial counterinsurgency wars, the goal is population control. Insurgent leaders are targeted for assassination. Insurgent and insurgency-suspected organizations are dismantled by arrest and imprisonment, physical destruction, and sabotage. Compliant leaders are installed and supported. Populations are overawed and terrorized by campaigns of torture and demonstrative massacres, including “punitive raids”. Recent examples of these wars are the US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and general Israeli behavior in the West Bank.
In colonial genocidal wars, the goal is extermination. Food sources are targeted – both stored food and crops. Masses of people are killed indiscriminately including women, children, noncombatants. Survivors of massacres are driven into unlivable areas to die and ringed with enough firepower to kill them if they try to escape. Many of the US “Indian Wars” followed this pattern (see Stannard’s American Holocaust and Grenier’s The First Way of War) as did the German genocides of the Herero in 1905 and the Nama in 1908, reported in, e.g., The Kaiser’s Holocaust.
Israel has been trying to conduct a genocidal war on Gaza since 2005. The idea was to surround Gaza with the Gaza fence and the ring of settlements known as the Gaza envelope; to use automated weapons, AI targeting, and frequent “mowing the lawn” aerial massacres to prevent exit without being labor-intensive; and to gradually render the entire Gaza Strip unlivable by the destruction of farmer’s fields, denial of coastal fishing, and an ever-constricting siege of food supplies.
The strategy was foiled by the Palestinians in Gaza, who managed to keep making Gaza livable while also generating a military resistance capable of counterattack (the notorious rockets) and ultimately, on October 7 2023, of breaching the ring of firepower built to keep them contained in their long-term death trap.
To counter the Palestinian strategy, since October 7th, Israel has tried to further constrict the area through total siege, bringing about famine; destroy every hospital to deepen the unlivability of the strip; and finally to use their ground forces to break Gaza into smaller enclaves in the hope that each enclave might be made uninhabitable in a way that the entire Gaza strip could not be.
In response to this, the Palestinian resistance has maintained steady military pressure on Israeli troops forming the individual rings of fire to try to enclave Gaza, forcing the Israelis to withdraw after taking losses each time. The network of tunnels and the resilient local weapons industry has made it impossible for Israel to destroy the armed resistance, even as the Palestinian civilian population is targeted for genocide.
Now we can return to a discussion of why overkill and overmobilization haven’t brought Israel to victory.
Overkill means the ability to threaten is gone. Israel’s doctrine of massively disproportionate violence against civilians (called the Dahiya doctrine for a neighbourhood Israel destroyed in Lebanon) has culminated in Gaza in the most appalling string of war crimes that could, if an actual system of international justice were to materialize, at some point see its leaders in jail for crimes. But in the military context, the consequence is that Israel cannot use the threat of firepower to try to get compliance. If they are going to exterminate you no matter what, if they shoot anything that moves, if they attack hospitals – then there’s no benefit to complying and no additional penalty for defiance, since they’ll kill you in any case if they get the chance.
Overmobilization means most soldiers have nothing to do. The transformation into rubble of most of the urban surface of Gaza renders any counterinsurgency warfare strategy moot: there are no flows of people to try to control by setting up checkpoints, no one able to go to work or school as the schools and workplaces have been destroyed; no functioning civilian institutions to try to recruit spies and informants from; all leadership has moved underground. Would-be counterinsurgent troops have nothing to do except wander around in the rubble waiting to be ambushed from unseen tunnels. The Israelis have shaped the battlefield into one that gives them no role but to take a position, fire endless amounts of US-provided ammunition into the distance, and wait to be attacked.
While the mobilization of half a million troops means that losses of dozens of soldiers per day can be sustained for a very long time, these huge numbers can’t really be brought to bear on the enemy even if the Israelis were to try to go into the tunnels, which they thus far have not been.
The Israeli army is much more than a military force: it is the melting pot meant to create social cohesion (now failing) in a country composed of people from all over the world with nothing in common. As Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro notes in The Empty Wagon, the Israeli Defence Forces officer training course contains modules like “What is Judalism? The uniqueness of the Jewish people; the people and land in a Jewish perspective; War and the army in a Jewish perspective; is Judaism a religion, a way of life, or a constitution?; the identity of the Jewish people.” Ben Gurion envisioned the army as the place where the “admixture of people which flows in from foreign exiles will be cleansed, refined and purified from harmful, foreign dross in the melting pot of Jewish brotherhood and through military discipline.” Shapiro notes, “sounds more like a rehab than an army.” Only a tiny fraction of this half million would have the qualities to even be accepted into, let alone complete, a training course on knife fighting in dark tunnels. Even the basics of staying out of windows or infantry cover for armored vehicles doesn’t seem to have been learned.
Meanwhile the seeping of the Hannibal doctrine – in which a soldier should expect to be killed by his comrades rather than risk becoming a captive and a potential bargaining chip to swap for thousands of Palestinian prisoners – into every corner of Israeli life since its application against masses of Israelis on October 7th and its pervasiveness in the army cannot but erode the confidence of the ordinary soldier. Not only does the Israeli army not have an ethos of “no man left behind”, the ethos is “don’t get captured or your comrades will kill you because your life is worth less to us than the Palestinian prisoners we’re torturing…”
Keeping bad news from the Israeli public is a high priority for the regime, and that seems to extend to the army as well, as soldiers don’t appear to learn lessons from their engagements with the resistance. Keeping this huge force in the field, supplied, and above all propagandized, is costly in proportion to its size – while military results do not appear to be.
In 1905, the Germans were losing the war to the Nama. 20,000 Germans, succumbing to thirst and driving themselves mad, were chasing 2,000 nimble Nama cavalry, led by Hendrik Witbooi, around in the desert endlessly.
Nama noncombatants had fled to the bush where they suffered from hunger hiding from the Germans. The Germans finally tried to convince the noncombatants to surrender by using missionaries, who promised to alleviate the starvation in exchange for surrender. They lied: when the Nama surrendered, they were sent on further death marches and into (perhaps a German innovation) the world’s first death camp on Shark Island. When the Germans couldn’t complete the genocide by war, they did so by deception.
But that’s also a trick that expires, and a century later, the Palestinians won’t be deceived.
World War Civ 40: How Britain Took Palestine in 1917
General Allenby, Sharif Hussein and his son Feisal, and their handler TE Lawrence array the forces of the British Empire and the Arab Revolt against the Turco-German forces in Palestine. The battle starts in Gaza and ends with Allenby walking into the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem. The story of the fateful campaign that brought British imperialism to Palestine (and Lebanon, and Syria…). We note that the British found Gaza to be a “fortress” from which it was impossible to dislodge the Turkish forces; Justin felt TE Lawrence was overrated, just another imperialist; and we compare admiration of the stoicism with which Allenby took news of his son’s death, with an analogous situation today.
AER 141: Gaza War Sit Rep Day 213 – the invasion of Rafah has begun
On the Anti-Empire Project Youtube Channel there are frequent situation reports or Sit Reps that are posted late at night. Not all of them are reposted here to this podcast, but we’re posting this one on the day of the Rafah invasion. A breakdown of the ceasefire negotatiations and an assessment of where the war is at. With Jon Elmer.
World War Civ 39: War Takes to the Skies
From crashing test flights to close air support and strategic bombing – on the breakneck innovation in aerial warfare over the course of WW1. An issue with some implications today, you’ll agree?