War is meant to be an honourable thing. Part of the reason military officers and veterans are revered in many democracies in the world is the aura of mystique surrounding giving one’s life to the defence of a nation’s sovereignty and dignity. In an ideal world, war should be strictly between identifiable combatants and fought within the confines of international laws, to give a humanitarian face to combat. What is going on in the Middle East right now defies all known laws of combat.
At the time of filing this piece, the four-day truce between the belligerents in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza had been extended by a further two days, as the exchange of hostages continued. The hostages released from both sides were mainly women and children, some of them just babies. And this is the first thing that makes the conflict in Gaza rather odd. Whatever philosophy that allows the capture of little babies in war has already failed the test of honour that should govern combat.
The initial ceasefire agreement indicated Hamas would release 50 Israeli captives in exchange for 150 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, on a 1:3 ratio. Against the backdrop of nearly 18,000 people killed on both sides, during the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, and the subsequent relentless bombardment of Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces, one wonders why it had to take thousands of deaths to agree on the release of 200 people. There is no justification scale to measure it.
Israel is a country was created from the ashes of war and which basically lives under a siege mentality, in fear of a repeat of the past when the Jewish community was practically on the run everywhere in the world. It is generally acknowledged that its reaction to adversity will always go overboard. The country itself is so tiny that the threat of being overrun makes every conflict a real battle for the sustenance, survival and soul of the only Jewish nation on earth.
Israel’s adversary, Hamas, is one with a complicated definition, as far as belligerents go. It does not have military barracks or definable bases within its stronghold within the strip. Its fighters are said to spring from inside a labyrinth of tunnels constructed underground in Gaza city. According to Israeli security, many of these tunnels are to be found under schools, residential blocks and hospitals. To fight Hamas therefore, Israel has to end up with a large casualty list of civilians, especially women and children, in Gaza. The resultant conflict hardly has a conventional face.
However, you would be forgiven for taking it for granted that the mightiest military in the Middle East, in responding to terrorist attacks on Israelis, would deploy better precision and strategy in hunting this faceless Hamas enemy hiding among Palestinian civilians, rather than what seems to be rage-fuelled collective punishment of the entire Gaza strip. As stated earlier, Israel was created in 1948 from the ashes of war and should be the last country to enable the same conditions under which a generation of traumatised, aggrieved Palestinian children will grow up to sustain their ancestors’ fight for freedom.
At the beginning of the current hostilities following attacks by Hamas on October 7, many countries in the world felt obligated to declare on which side of the divide they stood. Western powers, led by the US and Britain, immediately averred that Israel had a right to defend itself and that they stood with the Jewish nation. They didn’t criticise the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza in its response to the October 7 attacks. Later, in a conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on November 11, Arab and Muslim leaders roundly condemned Israel’s bombardment of the strip. In keeping to the script of the Western leaders, they neither condemned Hamas, whose actions triggered the conflict, nor even mentioned it. It was double-faced diplomacy at best.
Here at home, where not much thought goes into foreign policy and Cabinet Secretaries seem to float freely in the wind as the President runs the show, the government announced that it would stand with Israel. Quite hilariously, a few governors also saw the need to take a stand on official letterhead, which was odd, because international diplomacy is not a devolved function, so that once the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or other state organs have expressed the country’s position, Governors really have no need to release statements on the same. But I blame the latter on overenthusiastic communication teams at the county level, trying too hard to seek relevance, in a country where every day is, in fact, campaign time for the next election.
Predictably, the more horrific footages and pictures emerged out of Gaza, the more it became untenable for those who had taken certain stands to keep holding them. And even after this war, the global geopolitical scene will be preoccupied with just how much longer the world can keep silent about the conflict in that region, specifically Israel’s right to safety and security vis-à-vis Palestinians’ right to sovereignty, dignity and nationhood.
Israel’s recent moves towards rapprochement with Arab nations, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, is probably damaged now, at least in the short term. For the rest of the world, it feels as though we are entering an era where a country’s stand on this Israel-Gaza war will be a factor in multilateral engagements.
I am certain too that many militaries world over have countless lessons to draw from the conflict, too. The IDF bombarded the small city of Gaza before sending ground troops to lay siege to it, yet couldn’t come out with a single live hostage. When the time for the exchange of captives came, the ones from Gaza all appeared in good health, apparently untouched by the heavy bombardment conducted by their nation.
If ever there was a case for precision and technology-led warfare, away from heavy-handed bombing and scorched earth policies, this surely was it. Israel may hold the view that their bombing campaign led to Hamas agreeing to release the hostages, but the fact that the captives seemed to have been elsewhere, away from the reach of the IDF, is an indictment of the abilities of the mighty army.
Another lesson that will go beyond just the Middle East is the failure of intelligence on this occasion. Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, holds a mythical position within the world’s security networks as an indomitable, uncompromising and efficient intelligence- gathering organisation. Yet the attacks by Hamas terrorists clearly found the nation flatfooted and reaction times were painfully long. How was such a large number of attackers able to plan and ultimately breach Israeli defences without being detected beforehand?
When the bullets stop and the dust settles, heads will obviously roll within the Israeli government. Who knew, what they knew, when they knew and what they did with the information will probably take up a lot of space in the Jewish nation’s national conversation. Across the world, where certain political choices are determined by views around the perennial conflict in the Middle east, we have perhaps finally crossed into the reality where a lasting solution has to be found, because there is no sustainability in regular shooting matches between neighbours, in a world that boasts new civilization.
The writer is a political commentator