Israel ended months of terrified speculation on Monday evening, when its tanks moved into the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt. By morning, the army had claimed control of the crossing, and the operation near the town of Rafah had begun.
The move seems ill-advised. Israel’s allies have warned that attacking Rafah will bring fresh disaster for more than a million Palestinians sheltering there. On Wednesday, US president Joe Biden announced that he would cut the supply of weapons needed for a full offensive, representing the greatest American threat to Israel’s interest in decades. And while Israel claims it must enter Rafah to destroy four Hamas battalions there, even Israeli experts doubt that the operation will be a game-changer: it could be “tactical at best”, according to a former Mossad figure, and once it’s over, Hamas will creep back in as it has in other parts of Gaza.
Why, then, has Israel’s government charged ahead? The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly insisted that the assault on Rafah is essential to achieve “total victory”. The elusive term is supposed to mean destroying Hamas’s military and governing capacities and returning Israel’s hostages being held by Hamas. But if Israel chooses this path, it must acknowledge what the “total victory” strategy has meant so far in practice.
To date, the government’s prosecution of the war has not destroyed Hamas. The IDF’s assessment that it has killed 10,000-14,000 fighters is widely considered to be exaggerated; and can include any dead male of the appropriate age. Hamas still controls the fate of the hostages, who are deteriorating and dying in captivity.
The government’s “total victory” policy has prompted the most significant global isolation in Israel’s history. Before Biden’s announcement, Canada and Italy had announced the cessation of new weapons exports to Israel. Colombia has cut diplomatic ties, and Turkey has announced a trade ban, which it might yet suspend, but the threat is an economic and diplomatic bombshell. Israel stands accused of genocide at the international court of justice, and the spectre of arrest warrants by the international criminal court looms.
The global zeitgeist pegs Israel as a pariah, manifested in the campus protests sweeping the US, UK and Europe, or demoralising boos for Israel’s singer, Eden Golan, at Eurovision. Israeli academics are being squeezed out of international forums. Airline cancellations make it harder to travel, cementing the sense of isolation.
At home, more than 100,000 Israelis are still displaced. The war is grinding down people’s income and mental health, and every day more families are bereaved as soldiers die in Gaza for a “total victory” that never arrives. The aim of destroying Hamas as a military threat to Israeli civilians and sovereign territory may have been justified in itself; but the government has yet to demonstrate that it can achieve this aim. The evidence points to failure.
There is an alternative path. Last week, a hostage/ceasefire deal yet again appeared to be within reach. But the talks collapsed, mostly over Hamas’s unwavering demand for a complete end to the war.
There is nothing easy about this path. Hamas is an abomination for its people and a death cult that shouldn’t enjoy the satisfaction of victory. But ending the war cannot be reduced only to the pain of acquiescing to Hamas; it would bring a long list of gains as well, to Israelis and Palestinians alike. For Israel, an agreement to end the war will first of all salvage the lives of those remaining hostages. The majority of Israelis want this: 62% prefer a hostage deal to an operation in Rafah, according to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute last week, while only 32% prioritise the Rafah assault. In another poll by Channel 13, 52% of Israelis do not believe the operation will achieve “total victory”. And a poll by Israel’s public broadcaster found that the largest portion – nearly half of Israelis – support a hostage deal involving the release of all hostages in return for “a complete end to the war and release of thousands of terrorists”.
In the international sphere, ending the war will salvage Israel’s relationship with its closest ally, the US. It is hardly marginal that an end to the fighting in Gaza would reduce the threat of escalation with Hezbollah in the north – an exceedingly dangerous prospect.
Ending the war will also require Israel to come up with realistic day-after plans for Gaza, in cooperation with a range of western and Arab allies. This might well involve the big Saudi normalisation agreement that America is pushing, and a more sustainable, multilateral arrangement for a true paradigm shift in Israeli-Palestinian relations, including independence and self-determination for Palestinians.
The cruel truth is that for most Israelis right now, Palestinian lives are an afterthought; but the accurate truth is that their fates are intertwined. Nearly 35,000 Palestinians have been killed; more than 14,000 were children. Ending the war means saving those lives going forward; and any innocent life saved is a victory for all.
But there’s another fact that should concern Israelis: videos from Rafah show Gazans pulling toddlers out of buildings, limp and dangling like melted rubber; children with shredded skin and children’s arms poking out from crushed cement. Observers can find this documentation online, but Israelis in Gaza will have witnessed horrors without searching. In addition to the PTSD they will suffer for their own injuries, psychologists have identified moral injury in conflict – from inflicting such things. Israelis are no different from US soldiers in Iraq, and avoiding this fate should be an incentive for anyone.
Israelis may be internalising the grim scenarios ahead. A recent survey commissioned by the Jewish People Policy Institute found what is frankly an extraordinary decline in the portion of Jewish Israelis who are certain of victory – from 74% in October to just 38% as at early May. More than 40% of Israelis are now unsure Israel can win. But perhaps some of those are anxious about the cost, if it does.
Israel can choose a different path: one of saving hostages, saving Palestinian lives, saving Israel’s global relations, and staving off the deterioration of its soul that is inevitable in a forever war. It’s the fetishised commitment to total victory that is becoming Israel’s total defeat.
• Dahlia Scheindlin is a Tel Aviv-based political analyst and pollster. She is the author of The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel (September 2023)
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