Israel has dealt indiscriminate death and destruction to civilians in the Gaza Strip over the last month. Those who react to this devastation by calling for a ceasefire are at a disadvantage in the arena of U.S. foreign policy because of the arguments that proponents of war are allowed to make without being questioned. Warmongers may position themselves as hyperrational actors (and their opponents as living in a fantasy world) while making a series of arguments that are rooted primarily in emotion. One reason they are so successful in this is because U.S. national security policy, in some cases taking direct inspiration from Israel, has been conducted using the same shell game of projecting cold calculation while relying on appeals to fear and rage for the entire period of the War on Terror. Those of us who held out hope that the War on Terror had lost its grip on U.S. foreign policy were dismayed when the Hamas attack brought the old logic skittering out from every bolt hole.
The arguments of Israel’s defenders in this conflict work on a logic of conflicting justifications. The Hamas attack on October 7th, due to its brutality and deliberate targeting of civilians, invites any Israeli response. This includes brutally targeting civilians, up to a hypothetical (but rarely seen) point when Israel will have gone “too far.” Hamas’s defense does not work by the same logic: its attack cannot be justified because Hamas has no expectation that its attack will free Palestine. Any appeal to the emotional logic of Hamas’s justification (the long suffering of the Palestinians inside and outside Gaza), is dismissed as apologia for terrorism. Israel’s actions are deemed justified by emotional logic, while Hamas cannot be defended by emotional or strategic logic.
This double standard works for Americans (and Europeans) because we see Israelis as similar to us. Americans, especially white Americans, cannot shake our own fear that one oppressed group or another may choose to take out their rage on relatively blameless individuals in our society. The emotional logic lines up for us. It is important to continue to push Americans’ ability to have empathy for Palestinians further, and I think the gains pro-Palestine activists have made in public opinion over time have been mostly accomplished this way. That said, it is a slow-moving tool that does not lend itself to crisis. As casualties mount, opinions harden and people get tragedy fatigue, becoming numb to new emotional information.
This is why it is important to make arguments that appeal to people who emotionally identify with Israel. If someone sees what Hamas did and agrees that Hamas is a threat to Israeli civilians so long as it continues to exist, or that Israeli hostages should be released immediately, they should also want a ceasefire. The hidden part of the justifications above—Israel’s strategic logic for its retribution—needs to come into play. Because there isn’t a strategic logic.
Separate, for a moment, the Israeli state and the Israeli people. Think about the families of the victims of the October 7th attack, a group that deserves our empathy. The actual people whose friends and family are dead or taken hostage want to know the answer to the questions, “How do we get justice for this?” “How can we prevent this from happening again?” and “How do we get the hostages back?” Israel has over the course of the fighting shown two potential strategic logics in answering these questions. The first, chronologically, seemed to be, “Through killing enough Hamas fighters and destroying enough Hamas (and civilian) infrastructure in Gaza, we will dispense justice for the victims and destroy Hamas, preventing an attack like this from ever happening again. Hamas can unilaterally release the hostages at any time, which may or may not prevent them from being destroyed.”
All of this operates in a kind of fantasy realm. Israel can either negotiate for the hostages, giving Hamas an incentive to release them, or it can press forward with an all-out assault. The chance of more than a few hostages being freed through military action is slim. In the case of an assault, the safety of hostages is essentially sacrificed to answer the first two questions. Under pressure from Israeli citizens, the Netanyahu government appears to be at least hinting at a different paradigm. This new strategy is, “Through our all-out assault on the Gaza strip we have created a humanitarian crisis there. We can use Hamas’s dual role as governing entity and terror group against it, forcing it to trade the lives of Gaza civilians for those of Israeli civilians.” This cuts the other way: Hamas is unlikely to agree to a prisoner swap or a release of all its hostages without any guarantee of its own safety to operate. Even if it did, giving any kind of a win to Hamas while taking military steps to destroy it only increases the chances of Hamas’s rebirth after the war. Simply put, the destruction of Hamas and the safety of the hostages are goals at odds with each other.
The question of justice is obviously a complicated and subjective one, and for many people state-sanctioned killing does have a place in their conception of justice. But one thing it requires is discrimination—this person is punished for this act. Israel has announced the killing of several Hamas commanders, including some who are alleged to have planned the October 7th attack. But these announcements have come during a war with more than 7,000 Israeli strikes in Gaza. There is no real appearance of discrimination, nor any process of justice or explanation. We know of some families of victims who have said this response is not just, but I do not imagine they are in the majority. Still, it is hard to imagine the end of this conflict, with Gaza lying destroyed and some uncountable number of Hamas militants among the dead, leading people to feel that justice has been served. The act of justice also requires some moral high ground that the person or entity executing justice occupies. Given Israel’s newer strategy of securing the hostages through “pressure” on civilians in Gaza, it seems that the indiscrimination of the initial assault, the cutting of basic services, and the continued fuel embargo were ways to pressure Hamas to bargain the hostages for an end to the humanitarian disaster. Waging war on civilians to free civilian hostages creates a moral equivalence that precludes any sense of justice being done, unless you adopt a logic of collective punishment.
The question of prevention relies on a theory of how terrorism works. The theory the Israeli government is advancing is that there is a discrete number of terrorists who can be killed, and weapons and tunnels that can be destroyed, after which Hamas will disappear forever. This ignores that Hamas’s highest leadership is probably out of reach and able to rebuild. It also ignores the true strategic logic of Hamas as a terrorist organization. Arguments about Hamas not having a strategy go along with the cry of “Hamas is ISIS.” They are intended to convey that everyone in Hamas, now or in the future, has a primordial hatred of Jews that is inseparable from their identity. There is no way to persuade them, and there is no way to negotiate with them. This is something that Americans believe about ISIS, so it can be an effective analogy. It ignores the Counterinsurgency 101 that the U.S. learned (painfully) in Iraq around 2005: that terrorists are making an argument to the public and to their own recruits. That argument can be assisted or hindered by the policy of the occupying government. If Hamas’s justification is that Israel bombs Gaza indiscriminately, occupies Palestine, and will never stop doing either, it’s worth asking whether their recruitment pitch will be helped or harmed by the military campaign that ostensibly seeks Hamas’s destruction.
A question that ceasefire proponents are often asked, rhetorically, is “how can a ceasefire keep this from happening again?” This is a question that can and should be turned on the asker. All previous engagements between Hamas and Israel ended in a ceasefire. What strategic goal justifies this one continuing on? The U.S. experience in the War on Terror becomes valuable here. Sane people who lived through that time learned the comparative uselessness of pure military force in defeating an insurgency. And the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan was a relatively new occupier, with relatively more goodwill than Israel with the Palestinians. There are signs that this is worrying people within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, but it is taking the form of “What happens after you destroy Hamas?” or “Who governs Gaza after?” That is thinking too far ahead. This war will end in a ceasefire, or it will not end. Israel has set out to protect its citizens through a means that is impossible and can either choose to give up or just keep the war going indefinitely.
On its own terms, i.e., that the main goal should be to end Hamas’s existence, Israel’s response does not make sense. To effectively end a violent insurgency, an occupier needs to have a way to address the legitimate demands of the civilian population, to convince them that hardline insurgents are wrong that terrorism or other violent acts are the only way forward. In pushing the U.S. government to act, we should lean on these arguments, as we can’t rely on either legislators or officials to give equal moral weight to both Israelis and Palestinians. The point to drive home is that even from the point of view of Israelis’ priorities, there are many reasons to doubt the state response. Criticism of that response within Israel is being outright suppressed, though we know that Netanyahu and his government are taking a lot of blame for the attack. Within the U.S. government, the assumption seems to be that the leaders of the Israeli campaign are in pain, but ultimately trying to achieve the ends they’ve set out with as little collateral damage as possible. Anyone paying attention to this Israeli government before or after October 7th knows that’s not the case. It is the same government that millions protested as it weakened separation of powers in the country, and routinely uses rhetoric of ethnic supremacy and ethnic violence. Forcing the conversation to the gap between Israel’s stated goals and its strategy for achieving them highlights some of the possible motivations for this gap.
Significant parts of the U.S. population—including decision makers in the legislative and executive branches and in the media and think tank sphere—have worldviews that preclude them from treating Israeli and Palestinian lives as equally valid. This is tragic, and rage-inducing, but it cannot dissuade us from making arguments to convince these people to take productive steps to end the assault on Gaza. Luckily, those arguments can be made and have a much more consistent logic than is used by the defenders of Israel’s right-wing government. Peace, justice, and coexistence are better than the status quo for all people now living between the river and the sea, and we should not be afraid to say so.
Here are a couple things that I think are doing a fairly good job of speaking to these groups:
There Might Be No Day After in Gaza by Nathan Brown, which I linked above
This episode of the Ezra Klein show with Peter Beinart and Spencer Ackerman
The Case for a Ceasefire by Y.L. Al-Sheikh and Abe Silberstein in Dissent
Alex Norris 