And you might not be interested in war, but war is damn well interested in you
(a first draft of a work-in-progress, seeking a coherent narrative)
9 October 2023 — Someday they will say of us that we were living in a strange time, the kind that usually follows revolutions or the decline of great empires. It was no longer the heroic fervor of midcentury upheavals, the glamorous vices of concentrations of power, or the skeptical soullessness and insane orgies of the latest bubbles.
It was an age in which despair and material comfort, technological wizardry and political malaise, and a paradoxical freedom, both from criticism and to endlessly criticize, were mixed together, along with deep but narrow enthusiasms, the renunciation of utopias, condescension toward the past, weariness of the present, and pessimism for the future.
We thought we were sublime. We thought we’d solved everything. But we were actually complacent. We had lost the thread of the story. We were sleep walking into the Apocalypse. It was the end of we knew not what, and so there was no real “we must put our house in order!!” because earth-shaking events had become the norm.
The Gaza Strip is one of the most hopeless places I have ever been in my life (I’ve been once; see below). Most of us will never step foot there, but if you’ve been, you won’t forget it. The corrugated tin roofs perched on rickety huts that people call home in the sprawling refugee camps. The open sewage. The poorly paved roads. The lack of basic infrastructure. The undernourished children.
But most of all there is the despair and anger in the eyes of adults, that always seems close to the surface. But what is so striking, tragic in fact, is the obvious reality that Gaza could be a gem. This strip of land crowded with 2 million people – many still categorized as refugees five decades after the conflict in question – sits along the Mediterranean Sea, where it’s easy to envision a thriving port. A fishing industry. Resorts with beautiful beaches and tourism. An international airport.
None of that has ever happened for Gaza.
Instead, the current Islamic authoritarian government – Hamas (officially categorized as a terrorist organization by the United States) – spends its not-so-limited resources on other matters. On Saturday, it mustered its strength and treasure and focus to launch an attack on Israeli civilians. To slaughter 260 young people attending a music festival in the desert. To hunt down families on farms and kill them in their homes. To – if early reports are to be believed – rape women. To take more than 100 hostages, including the elderly, people with dementia, tiny children.
I spent the good part of Sunday on various phone chats and messenger chats with my military intelligence network and OSINT network. The mind reels at the scope of this attack:
• Barrages of rocket fire were used as cover for the devastating and unprecedented ground attack, which saw Hamas operatives break through 29 points in the hi-tech Israeli defences surrounding the tiny enclave before fanning out in trucks and motorbikes into 22 nearby Israeli communities.
• The militants shot indiscriminately at people in the streets, before entering homes and public buildings, where in some cases they seized hostages.
• The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were slow to respond; fighting continued overnight and into Saturday evening as the army still struggled to neutralise gunmen in different locations.
• As of 9am this morning as I write this, I have reports that several villages and kibbutzim are still not free of Palestinian fighters, and several appeared to be going back and forth between Israeli and Hamas control.
• I have seen death toll estimates on the Israeli side as being 1,000+ and on the Gaza side as being 600+. But the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) noted this morning that the Israeli death toll is expected to go a lot higher.
And barbarism on display, and true to horrific form, celebrated in some Palestinian quarters and, officially, in Iran. Also at the hopelessness of the gesture, because Hamas cannot vanquish Israel, of course. Cannot eliminate the Jewish state, as is its stated intention. And its attack only invites retaliation by one of the best equipped armies in the world. But that wasn’t the point, really, was it? But it is repeated. An Al-Jazeera anchor asked an Israeli expert on Sunday: “How humiliated are Israelis right now?” Was that the point?
Note to readers: I am just back from a 2-day conference in Zurich on generative AI, synthetic data, real-world datasets and the inevitable pollution of our information ecosystem. As always at these types of conferences, when the “real world” dares to intrude on the conference agenda, organisers scramble to assemble an extra session to address the current event. Several of the military presenters at the conference put together an ad hoc session that explained the careful campaign of deception executed by Hamas ensured Israel was caught off guard when Hamas launched its devastating attack, enabling a force using bulldozers, hang gliders and motorbikes to take on the Middle East’s most powerful army. In fact, they had left our conference for several hours after news of the Hamas attack broke into the media to put together the session. More on the deception later this week in a special post.
But all of this is, in fact, a folly. But it is the kind of folly that has defined this conflict, defying common sense and good intentions for 50 years and a dozen administrations. This is an action that will live in infamy, and stain the Palestinian cause yet again. It might spell the end of Hamas, as Israel will not rest until it has eliminated every member of this organization that so brutally attacked its civilians. This new cycle of violence, after so many cycles before it, will – I fear – convince the last pie-eyed optimists that peace is not possible between Israel and Gaza.
You cannot begin to understand this one action without understanding the hubris, greed and entrenched emotion around what belongs to whom; whose victimhood is more virtuous; and what injustice is the real injustice. It is something I have strived to understand. 25+ years ago, when I got serious about my journalism career, I was guided by one line from the John le Carré novel The Honourable Schoolboy: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world”.
There is an Italian phrase that describes the people (Arabs, Greeks, Italians, etc.) who populate the Mediterranean … “una faccia, una razza” (one face, one race) … that is far too simple an expression but meant to capture a similar set of values, religions, customs, food, etc. across the region. I spend most of my time in and around the Mediterranean but not enough in the core of the Middle East and that was my intent. Fact-finding trips in keeping with a personal agenda to figure out what is going on.
I have made several trips. I was there in 2014 during the Gush Etzion kidnapping and murder, which refers to the abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. I was there in 2019 just after the Gaza–Israel conflict escalation after two Israeli soldiers were injured by sniper fire from the Gaza Strip during the weekly protests. I’ve been to tech conferences in Tel Aviv and in Amman, Jordan.
But the problem is that while I normally live in a world seemingly corralled by algorithms, when I travel to the Middle East I must bring to my soul an element of chaos to a culture that continually plays its deadly, dystopic sameness. I have traveled across Israel and all through the West Bank, eating/shopping/talking with people in Ashkelon, Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, etc. but also Hebron, Jericho, Nablus and Ramallah. But there was always one big take-away from all these trips. I had made a statement that “things are certainly better” and I was corrected by everybody: “No, things are simply quiet. Here, something can trigger an escalation. Anything can trigger a low-level conflict that simply escalates. At any time. But we all expect at some point something massive will trigger”.
And so this weekend we have seen what massive means.
I am not going to attempt to reflect on the multitude of conversations I have had this weekend with journalists, political pundits, the military, etc. Or the “everyday” people I have encountered in Israel and Palestine who seemed to be careless of hardship and risk and invited me into their homes. There are brutal geopolitics at play, with powerful regional and international allies (and foes) that have acted with indifference.
And the real issue is this is not a communication problem. It’s a political problem by people who do not want to solve it. This was true for too many years for Yasser Arafat. It is true for Hamas. In the ensuing decades, Israel has shifted from spunky underdog in the minds of many, to flawed regional power, to evil oppressor. None of those identities are right. Israel is complicated and full of disappointments, an exercise in the dastardly human condition. But Hamas – I can’t find the gray there. They mirror the nihilism of Al-Qaeda, ISIS and the like. They have shown their colors.
This is an enormous subject to cover, far too much for this post. So for now, just a “laundry list” of issues and then just 1 major point, and a postscript:
• Israel’s response is complicated. The following is from a Sunday interview with Martin Indyk, twice U.S. ambassador to Israel and involved in analysing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations since 2013: “Well, they’ve been through this five times before, and there’s a clear playbook. They mobilize the army, they attack from the air, they inflict damage on Gaza. They try to decapitate the Hamas leadership. And if that doesn’t work in terms of getting Hamas to stop firing rockets and enter into negotiations to release the hostages, then I think we’re looking at a full-scale Israeli invasion of Gaza. This was a total system failure on Israel’s part. Now that presents two problems. One is that Israel would be fighting in densely populated areas, and the international outcry against civilian casualties that Israel would inflict with its high-tech American weapons would shift condemnation onto the United States and Israel, and put pressure on Israel to stop. The second problem is, if Israel succeeds in a full-scale war, they then own Gaza, and they have to answer the questions: How are we going to get out? When do we withdraw? Whom do we withdraw in favor of? Remember, the Israelis already withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and they do not want to go back in.
• As scores of news reports have detailed, no other single event has cost as many Israeli lives since the state’s founding in 1948, and caught Israel’s security forces completely off-guard, prompting one former senior Israeli security official to call the attack a “catastrophic intelligence failure” that would have “major political ramifications”. On one of the weekend chat shows, a former Israeli intelligence officer said “all those electronic fences, all that electronic/mobile monitoring, all this human assets throughout Gaza and – nothing hits the radar? Unbelievable. No doubt Hamas commanders chose to launch their astonishing breakout from Gaza for theatrical effect.”
• Israel’s opposition parties have so far rallied behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with opposition leader Yair Lapid offering to enter an “emergency” government for the duration of the war, according to this morning’s Times of Israel. But Lapid hinted there would be a price to pay for his support, saying the war could not be managed so long as the far-right groups that have kept Netanyahu in power remain in government.
• Things will get tougher still for Netanyahu, who has divided Israel over efforts to limit the judiciary’s power, as calls for an investigation into the intelligence failings grow louder.
• Meanwhile, the United States is moving a carrier strike group into the eastern Mediterranean in a show of force, as the White House and Pentagon are “freaking out” over fears of a wider war.
• And dangerous times for Europe. As the scale of Hamas’ attack was becoming clear on Saturday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen voiced unequivocal support for Israel from a stage in Bordeaux, France, where she was guest of honor at a gathering of French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party. Calling the attack “pure terrorism,” she said Israel has the right to defend itself. “This is neither a political solution nor an act of heroism,” she said, adding that “the EU stands beside Israel”. In lockstep: that was in line with statements from EU Council chief Charles Michel and top EU diplomat Josep Borrell — though neither mentioned Israel fighting back.
• Why were Michel and Borrell not as enthusiastic? Doubts, dissent — and “both siding” across Europe. Not everyone agreed with the display of support for Israel. Left-wing parties in several countries declined to condemn the attack. Alberto Alemanno, a well-known commentator on EU affairs, posted on X: “Horrified by the attacks on Israel … Yet I doubt that having the EU taking [a] side will de-escalate the conflict.”
• But worse – a darkening world. In both the U.S. and Europe, there is growing angst about a deteriorating international situation. The risk for Europe is that American public attention gets diverted to the Middle East, diminishing Washington’s interest in supporting Ukraine. Already Borrell said the EU could not “fill the gap” in support for Kyiv if the United States withdrew its financial backing. And military analysts on the Sunday talk shows reiterated the sophistication of the Hamas’ attack meant they are a threat not just to one country. Ukraine. Africa. Now Israel. Terror has opened far too many fronts against humanity. Terrible destabilizations throughout the world are the future.
• Lastly, Iran and Russia are the two countries most likely to benefit from Hamas’ attack on Israel, and their fingers are all over this. Russia had a stream of “information posts” bleating out within 1 hour of the Gaza attack. The U.S. State Department did not respond for hours.
For a very long time full conventional war has been something that received very little discussion as a possible phenomena. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the military dominance that the U.S. showed in Desert Storm (the First Iraq War), meant that any large scale conventional war would have to not involve the U.S. (if the USA was involved, it would be dramatically different).
Really, for 30 years it meant that when it came to war, the focus was overwhelmingly on things such as cybersecurity/information/hybrid war, and insurgency/counter-insurgency, and things like drones/air power and special forces. The study and discussion of large-scale conventional war seemed to decline dramatically in universities, for instance, and was relegated to military colleges and a small number of think-tanks.
However, if much of the world was not interested in conventional war, conventional war (to steal a line that has been reputedly said by Leon Trotsky) was always interested in us – that Russia has always been at war with the United States and the West, although many Americans might be oblivious to this fact. Although there are no “boots on the ground”, the information war has been ongoing for years at the instruction of the Russian government. By means of cyberwarfare and active measures – which include corruption of banks and political structures, disruption through media propaganda, and inciting chaos – the Russian government actively seeks to create instability in the international system without engaging in kinetic warfare.
But in the last few years, conventional war has returned with a vengeance. The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine figures most prominently, but also the Azerbaijani campaigns to retake Nagorno-Karabakh, and now what looks like an Israeli conventional campaign to occupy Gaza.
Moreover, it’s not just the actual conventional wars that threaten our world, there is a real possibility that the largest economic/technological powers in the world could go to war in the near future. China and India have competing claims on their border that regularly erupt into small-scale confrontation and, of course, the US and China are now openly confronting each other in the seas of the Indo-Pacific region. And quite frankly, few would be surprised if China attacks Taiwan around Christmas.
The return of conventional war is perhaps the single most important strategic development of this era, and it’s one that we must try to understand. One of the key elements in that the choice for conventional war is almost always catastrophic for the state that initiates the war. One of the most distressing things about the discussion of a Russian invasion of Ukraine before February 2022 was the widespread idea that such a war could be conventionally won quickly (one analyst even said confidently that the war would conventionally be over in a day or so). The Pentagon was caught flat-footed.
Whatever happens, going forward militaries world-wide are now studying conventional war more closely. There is a good chance that it will define the era we are in and the one we are going into. With the U.S. sure to experience a relative economic decline as the global south continues to grow, and democracy increasingly under threat, the chance of large-scale conventional war is almost certainly on the up.
POSTSCRIPT
I may not know the intricacies of the history of the Middle East conflict. I know it is complicated and each side has its own truth. But today, all things are connected. Iran is helping both Russia and Hamas by supplying weapons and training troops. Russia has not condemned Hamas, they just “called for peace”. That phrase has become the euphemism of saying “we support the agressor”.
The world needs to understand this cauldron, to understand these are the pieces of the same picture. But I just do not know how anybody is going to stop terrorist states like Iran and Russia. War will come to your home no matter where you are.