The Israelis Have To Invade. They Mustn’t.

As I write this, Israel remains poised for a ground war that most of us thought would already be well underway. The forces they now have arrayed just outside of Gaza are massive, and massively expensive. Over 360,000 reservists have been mobilized, leaving their civilian jobs behind for the duration, an economic strain that Israel can’t withstand indefinitely. Massive air strikes, which are unavoidably killing large numbers of civilians – which no, is not the objective, it’s simply inevitable unless no air campaign is conducted – must now be reaching the point of diminishing returns, beyond which the “collateral damage” inflicted upon helpless non-combatants looks less and less like the unhappy side effect of striking legitimate military targets, and starts down the path towards war crime. Hamas, which has already been preparing for this fight for quite some time, is doubtless busy surveying the rubble and looking for places where ambushes and booby-traps can be set, further strengthening their defences. If Israel is going to invade – and if they want to destroy Hamas, they have to invade – it’s going to have to be soon.

I’ve started to think they shouldn’t do it, for compelling reasons both principled and pragmatic.

From a humanitarian perspective, the sort of massive ground incursion the Israelis are now threatening is certain to be a catastrophe. No matter how often civilians are warned to flee the combat zone, a great many simply cannot. Some are medical personnel and their patients, tethered to hospitals that can’t be moved. Some are too frightened of getting killed in the bombing, and prefer to remain hunkered down in whatever somewhat safe position they’re in. Some, probably a lot – I don’t think any of us out here in the world can say how many – would leave in a heartbeat, except Hamas won’t let them, preferring to maintain their human shields, the better to ensure that when the Israelis move in, they’ll be responsible for carnage sufficient to turn global opinion against them.

This is a moral trap that Hamas has set, and to invade is inevitably to run right into it. Only God knows how many civilians will be caught in the crossfire, but surely it will be thousands, maybe tens of thousands, many of whom, given Gazan demographics, will be children, with the balance consisting of innocent victims of a war they didn’t want and had no chance to prevent. It will be a terrible thing to witness. It will cost Israel support in the nations predisposed to be sympathetic, and inflame the Muslim world to an extent that’s difficult to predict, or even imagine. The West Bank could blow up. Embassies could be burned. Terror attacks inside Israel may once more become a constant. It’s also likely that the sheer, bloody horror of the battle will overwhelm the memory of the 1,200 Jews who were murdered, and make it easy to paint Israel as a vengeful, oppressive, bloodthirsty state bent on carnage, and nothing else. When it’s over, no matter the outcome, it will have made any peaceful settlement of the Palestinian question vanishingly less likely, and possibly out of the question for as long as there’s living memory of the death and destruction.

From a military perspective, a massive ground incursion may embroil Israel in a much wider war, one that may suck in surrounding nations and even force some level of American intervention, since U.S. forces in the region will almost certainly be targeted too. It’s already starting to snowball, even as Israel keeps its invasion on hold. Last week, the Iranian-sponsored Houthis in Yemen tried to get involved, sending drones and long range cruise missiles we didn’t know they possessed toward Israel. Had they struck their targets, Israel might have felt itself compelled to strike back, which in turn might have prompted the Iranians to run to the support of their proxies and launch some of their much more fearsome ballistic missiles at Israel (yes, they now have missiles with sufficient range). We got lucky; an American destroyer of the very potent Arleigh Burke class, the ships of which mount extremely sophisticated radars and anti-missile systems, had just been deployed to the Red Sea, and in a series of engagements that lasted over nine hours, intercepted all of the Houthi weapons, reported to have been five cruise missiles and as many as 19 drones.

Meanwhile, Israel is conducting air strikes in Syria, aimed particularly at putting the airports in Raqqa and Damascus out of commission, in order to prevent the transhipment of weapons from Iran to the Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, of course, already has just about all the weaponry it can use, and if Israel moves on Gaza, we might see the opening of a new front in the north, as literally thousands of missiles are fired into Israel, including some powerful ballistic types that can hit any part of the Jewish state, putting targets like airports, military bases, and nuclear reactors at risk. In response, Israel will then feel obliged to pound the living bejesus out of Hezbollah territory, and perhaps launch another ground invasion, which, and you can trust me on this, will be an unholy horror show. Hezbollah has something like 30,000 well trained, well armed fighters, many of them battle-hardened in the interminable Syrian conflict, and taking them on will be very, very costly in both blood and treasure. These guys make Hamas look like the Girl Guides. As long as they’re fighting what they see as an American client state, and just to keep things spiralling on a downward trajectory, the jihadists, who have stockpiles of Iranian anti-ship cruise missiles, might also decide to launch an attack on the American carrier battle group just off the coast. These battle groups are very well protected by numerous units of the same type that thwarted the Houthis, and the missiles might therefore be swatted down, but who knows? If American servicemen are killed, or God help us, a ship is destroyed, what will the United States do?

What happens after they do it?

Even if all such knock-on consequences are avoided, and the battle remains limited to Gaza, it’s still going to be nightmarish. Urban warfare amidst rubble and terrain that the defenders know far better than you, and have spent years preparing for just this battle, is probably the hardest mission any army can take on. Fighting within cities is horrible. It’s a door-to-door struggle at close quarters, requiring the soldiers to clear thousands of booby-trapped buildings while being fired upon by enemies that seem to lurk around every corner, occupy every window, snipe from every remaining rooftop, and hide behind every pile of shattered concrete. Hamas fighters won’t just be elusive, they’ll be popping up from underground, exiting the elaborate tunnel system they’ve spent years digging deep beneath the city, creating, we think, about 300 miles of subterranean facilities. It’s practically another city down there. Just the idea of trying to root them out of these positions is enough to make the most hardened warfighter blanch – anyone who doubts that should do a Google search for “Vietnam tunnel rats” – but dealing with the tunnels one way or another will be absolutely necessary. Some may be shallow enough to be taken out by air-dropped “bunker buster” bombs, and many can be found, and bombed or otherwise destroyed, because they’re susceptible to location by ground-penetrating radar. It may be possible to seal up the exits, a gruesome exercise if it actually worked, but you’d never find all of them, and those underground may have some means to dig themselves out. The obvious choice is to go down there and take them on directly, but sweet Jesus, a running firefight through 300 miles of tunnels is an almost unimaginably horrifying prospect. But what are you going to do? Gas them? Is that a war crime? Pour in thousands upon thousands of gallons of napalm and light them all up? Is that even possible? Could citizen soldiers even stomach a thing like that? OK, maybe pump in seawater? Drop earth-penetrating bombs that dig deep enough to destroy them, even though they’ll also bring down nearby buildings? The mind boggles. Remember, too, that the hostages may also be down there somewhere, presumably still hoping against hope to be rescued. Does anyone have the heart to write them off in such hideous fashion? What would that do for morale?

Meanwhile, up above, reservists trained for mechanized warfare will be fighting a mostly dismounted battle in which tanks and armoured fighting vehicles are of definite, but still limited, utility. These will be vulnerable to top attack from tall buildings (the armour is thinnest on top), and Hamas may also, having studied the tactics as they’ve evolved in the Ukraine conflict, attack both men and vehicles with drones. Dealing with all of this requires tactics and skills that I’m not sure are within the repertoire of the Israeli rank and file. Urban warfare can be mastered – if you took any notice of what the U.S. Marines did to retake Fallujah a few years back, you’ll remember how comprehensively the Americans were victorious – but it’s never easy, and learning the ropes involves a very steep and treacherous learning curve. In the recent battles against ISIS, a combined force of Iraqis and Kurds, supported by U.S. airpower, took something like nine bloody months to retake Mosul. They were brave, but they weren’t the Marines. We estimate, too, that as many as 11,000 civilians were killed before it was all over, giving us an idea of what we can expect in Gaza, where greater population density, and greater difficulty in fleeing, can only make things worse.

That’s how awful it is to win such a battle, and Israel might not win. An invasion could instead turn into a bloody, endless, strength-sapping stalemate lasting many months, even years if anybody has that sort of stamina, and could end in a humiliating withdrawal that Israel might characterize as some sort of victory – whatever happens, Hamas will certainly be savaged – but which, over the long term, accomplishes little. Hamas or something just like it will put itself back together (for obvious reasons, I very much doubt they’ll have much trouble with recruiting), and then it’s back to square one.

Which brings us to the next problem: what does winning even look like? What’s the end game? The Israelis can’t want to reoccupy Gaza, but who replaces them when they withdraw, even supposing they’ve wiped Hamas off the face of the earth? What government comes into being? How? Who polices the peace? Who funds the rebuilding of civil society? Who convinces the bitter, battered young men just coming of age to ignore the exhortations of any infiltrating extremists, and choose peace instead? What stops Gaza from becoming the very same thing that it turned into after the last Israeli withdrawal – a frail state ripe for takeover by the latest set of fanatical jihadists, bent on revenge against the hated Jew?

Or maybe, considering the possibilities, Israel does want to reoccupy Gaza? How well can that be expected to go?

I get the sense that the Israeli policy community is beginning to ask itself the same questions. Perhaps the hesitation isn’t just the result of American pressure, which is surely being exerted, and isn’t just owing to the advice of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, who’re telling them that the IDF hasn’t come up with any sort of overarching plan, or a clear set of achievable military objectives. Maybe the Israelis are beginning to feel the same way. Maybe to them, Gaza looks increasingly like the deadly tar pit I think it’s sure to be. Maybe they’re fully cognizant of the terrible risk of a wider war that turns into a conflagration the like of which has in the past destroyed whole empires, and could certainly spell the end of little Israel. Maybe, after all, they don’t do it.

More probably, they’ll be going in soon. Cancelling the invasion, while stopping the bombing as well, would be a hellish and probably politically unsurvivable decision, and it would leave Hamas bloodied, but unbeaten, and still in command of Gaza. This is, of course, massively, painfully short of anything that feels acceptable. After the slaughter of 1,200 innocent people by means too barbarous to contemplate, it’s almost impossible for Israeli policymakers to show such superhuman restraint, and I must admit that my own almost overpowering instinct is that this battle can’t end, the invasion must happen, and Hamas must be destroyed, utterly, once and for all. Yet I’m growing more and more certain that the best thing for Israel is to draw back from the precipice. There will be other ways to at least keep Hamas at bay, and prevent a recurrence of the tragedy on October 7, as wholly unsatisfactory as the re-establishment of a tenuous strategy of containment must seem to the Israeli people, as indeed it does to me.

This is one of those moments when statesmen find themselves presented with nothing but horrible options, and there’s no way for me or anybody to really know which decision will set the course of human events back on a better, saner course. This time, deciding which path to travel is even more fraught than usual. Think of the stakes. Get it wrong, and you’ll be vilified throughout all of history as an abject fool, maybe like George W. Bush, who got his country into a disastrous war of choice, or maybe like Neville Chamberlain, waving around the paper he said amounted to “peace in our time” after making his bargain with the devil in Munich. I’m certainly glad it’s not me in the hot seat, especially when everybody’s blood is quite understandably boiling, but then, I never aspired to run a country. This is the job. Those at the top need to rise above the pressure of the moment and think clearly, even dispassionately, about what’s best for Israel. I think Benjamin Netanyahu should go on television and tell his citizens, with all the sorrowful gravitas he can muster, that continuing the bombing can’t accomplish anything useful, and that Israel cannot, will not, achieve Justice for the dead through the wholesale slaughter of the innocent, an outcome he knows his people would never seek, yet one that would be inevitable if his nation takes the plunge, and rushes into a miserable, vicious, and perhaps insupportably costly street fight that might well be un-winnable, and might set the whole region on fire.

Which, even as I say it, leaves an extremely bitter taste in my mouth. Realistically, I don’t see how Bibi could actually give that speech, or really comprehend how cheated of justice his people would surely and justifiably feel if he made it. Which, I’m pretty sure, he won’t.