Total Victory

 

Satellite image by Planet Labs, food aid convoy in southern Gaza, via The New York Times.

This paragraph has been hanging out in the tabs for a few days already, but it's getting more bothersome as time goes by. From Tom Friedman:

This is the first Israeli-Palestinian war where the worst leaders on both sides are calling all the shots. The moderate Israeli opposition parties and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have no influence. And that is why I cannot tell you how or when it will end. Because Netanyahu still insists on “total victory” over Hamas, which he will never achieve, and the Hamas leadership still insists on surviving this war in order to still control Gaza the morning after, which it does not deserve.

Well, wait a minute, Tom. Not disagreeing with the basic premise that the Netanyahu coalition and the Hamas thing are the worst, as bad as political leadership gets, but "insisting on surviving this war" is not a good illustration of how bad the latter are. It's not crazy if they don't like a deal where they let go of the hostages and then IDF kills them all, which is why they keep insisting that the release of the hostages must  be accompanied by the end of the war. You may well feel that death is what they deserve, but it's not surprising that they feel different. This is actually normal. Good people and bad people alike object to being killed. You can bothsiderize the parties on some parameters but rejecting peace is not one of them.

And the other thing is that a solution in which somebody else controls Gaza the morning after is not on offer either, as Netanyahu resolutely continues his absolute refusal to talk about the possibility that there will be a morning after, other than vaguely endorsing the extremely vague but deeply disquieting Trump plan from last February to have the US occupy the Strip, give it a thorough ethnic cleansing, and turn it into the Riviera, which looks very much like a Trump Org project (who else in the US government has any experience in developing resort property?). And calling for "total victory" (totaler Sieg in the original German, if you know what I mean).

Netanyahu's negotiators don't suggest any reason why Hamas should sign on to a deal  (a reason like, "We won't kill you if you return the hostages") because they don't care. Or because Netanyahu has no interest in making a deal. Netanyahu would rather see the Israeli hostages dead than stop killing Palestinians. He dumped the hostages under the bus in November 2023, when his army broke that first ceasefire, and again in March 2025, when they broke another ceasefire (after violating it 165 times, killing 118). The whole scene in Qatar is an Israeli pantomime designed to keep the US press talking about a peace process that doesn't in fact exist.

Hamas is certainly looking for a way out—not because they're nice people, once again, but because they want to stay alive. They have apparently begun withholding food from the 20 surviving hostages, as Israel has been withholding food from two million Gazan civilians since March, and over the weekend, they released video footage of two hostages, Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski, as shockingly gaunt and weak as the starving Palestinian children we've been seeing in recent weeks, and in a sense more upsetting, perhaps because, as adults, they call to mind photos from the liberated Nazi death camps in 1945—here's a Times of Israel story with screenshots, if you can bear looking. David is said to be digging his own grave. Obviously Hamas's purpose in releasing the footage is to add to the pressure on Netanyahu, from the hostage parents and the general Israeli public, to make a deal before these men die of hunger, but Netanyahu is harder on them than he is on himself:

“I understand exactly what Hamas wants,” he said in a video released by his office. “It doesn’t want a deal. It wants to break us — with these horrifying videos, with the false horror propaganda it spreads across the world”....

Apparently referring to the hand of a captor that can be seen in the video of David, Netanyahu said that as the hostages “waste away in a dungeon… the Hamas monsters surrounding them — they have thick, fleshy arms. They have everything they need to eat. They are starving them the way the Nazis starved the Jews. But we will not break.”

The major difference between Israel and Hamas isn't the moral difference that Friedman wants to talk about; it's that Israel has all the power—military (including the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East) and financial. Israel can start and stop the starvation of the Gaza population, and Hamas can't. It's ridiculous for Netanyahu to blame the famine on Hamas when he can end it with a phone call. Both are willing to starve prisoners to death, but Hamas can only manage it with a few.

In fact, Israel is becoming aware of how badly their international reputation is damaged, at long last—the pro-war Israeli press hasn't been able to hide those starving kids from the public, and has been allowing some aid trucks into the Strip for the past 10 days or so, supplementing the efforts of the US-backed "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation", now recognized by everybody as a dismal failure, and probably worse, according to one team of UN special rapporteurs,

“an utterly disturbing example of how humanitarian relief can be exploited for covert military and geopolitical agendas in serious breach of international law,” the experts said. “The entanglement of Israeli intelligence, US contractors and ambiguous non-governmental entities underlines the urgent need for robust international oversight and action under UN auspices.” 

And this morning it was announced that they would resume the delivery of food through local merchants, stopped last October. Also that Netanyahu is leaning toward expanding the current military offensive and putting the whole territory under occupation, against serious opposition from the military and even in the security cabinet (in the person of chief of staff Eyal Zamir), which has led to the postponement of a cabinet meeting scheduled for today, and the remarkable intervention of the Commanders for Israel's Security, a group of some 600 retired Israeli security officials, sending an open letter to Donald Trump asking him to pressure Netanyahu to put an end to the war.

"It is our professional judgement that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel," the officials said.

"Your credibility with the vast majority of Israelis augments your ability to steer Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and his government in the right direction: End the war, return the hostages, stop the suffering," they wrote.

Because the country is on the endless railroad the US took to Afghanistan 24 years ago, as I warned for the first time on October 10, 2023 (about a month before Biden did, I think), after revenge instead of coherent policy, and (as I didn't yet understand at that point) Netanyahu likes it that way for his own political purposes; "total victory" is the last thing he wants.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.