‘Israel’s Vietnam’: Occupying Gaza widely condemned

Israel's Vietnam: military warns of endless war (Ben Caspit, Al-Monitor)

Israel has never embarked on wars or made important strategic moves without a national consensus and the support of its military and security chiefs. Opinion polls show that occupying Gaza lacks public support among Israelis, and as noted, military backing is lacking as well. A Tatika Research and Media survey published at the end of July showed that 53% of Israelis are against the annexation of Gaza territory, and a Channel 13 survey from July 13 showed 71% of Israelis in favour of ending the war and making a deal with Hamas. 

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid described the security cabinet’s approval of the plan as “a disaster which will lead to many more disasters.” A senior Israeli military source who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity concurred, saying,  "[The politicians] insist on charging full force into a disaster, ignoring warnings and the law of diminishing returns in order to gain a few more months in power." The source was referring to warnings by Netanyahu’s radical right-wing partners that they will bring down his government unless he conquers Gaza and quashes Hamas once and for all…

For now, Netanyahu has made the headlines he wanted without having to actually carry out the complex military manoeuvres required amid troop shortages and exhaustion. As always, he is trying to hold the stick at both ends — keeping the extreme right in line by promising the occupation of Gaza and exerting pressure on Hamas by threatening the total occupation of the Gaza Strip. The situation looks terrifyingly like Israel's Vietnam War.

Gaza is a mess. Israel’s Prime Minister is about to make it worse (Greg Sheridan, The Australian)

Netanyahu seems drawn to the worst option, which is that Israel should, for a period of about five months, occupy the whole of Gaza.

This is fiercely opposed by Israel’s military leadership. IDF Chief of the General Staff Eyal Zamir was widely reported in the Israeli press as saying: “Occupying the (Gaza) Strip would drag Israel into a black hole – taking responsibility for two million Palestinians, requiring a years-long clearing operation, exposing soldiers to guerilla warfare and, most dangerously, jeopardising the hostages.”

The urban warfare could be savage, despite Hamas’s degraded state. There’s no guarantee Israel would get the hostages back. The danger of renewed humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and many more needless deaths among Gazans who have nothing to do with Hamas, as well as many Israeli soldiers, would be acute.

The plan involves evacuating Gaza city and sending a million people into temporary humanitarian facilities to be set up by Israel further south. The far right of Israeli politics would hope that Gazans in these circumstances might leave the territory permanently if they could find another country to take them.

The bizarre idea that Trump briefly supported, of moving Gazans en masse out of the territory and then redeveloping it as a Riviera-style resort, encouraged the most extreme elements of Israeli politics in a fantasy of de facto ethnic cleansing. Of course, any Gazan who wants to leave and can find another country that will take them and that they’d like to go to should have freedom of movement. But for Israeli leaders to think this a serious, plausible policy at scale is almost hallucinogenic in its foolishness…

 The downside in human and political terms is enormous, the upside almost wholly imaginary.

Netanyahu broadly criticised at home and abroad (Adam Ragson, New York Times)

The chorus of condemnation from longstanding European allies, Arab governments and the families of hostages held by militant groups in Gaza reflected Mr. Netanyahu’s intensifying clash with foreign nations and the supporters of hostages.

It laid bare Israel’s isolation as its government decides, against the advice of its military’s top command, to expand a war that has reduced cities to rubble, killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and caused a widespread hunger crisis.

“The Israeli Government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong, and we urge it to reconsider immediately,” Keir Starmer, the prime minister of Britain, said in a statement. “This action will do nothing to bring an end to this conflict or to help secure the release of hostages. It will only bring more bloodshed.”

Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany said that, “until further notice,” his country would not export military equipment that could be used in Gaza, a significant step and a break with the country’s postwar past of support for Israel.

In recent weeks, many European countries have urged Israel to end the war in Gaza. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the war killed about 1,200 people, and about 250 others were taken captive to Gaza.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said the “inhumane ideas and decisions” being adopted by the Israeli government “affirm once again that it does not grasp the emotional, historical and legal connection of the Palestinian people to this land.” The Turkish and Jordanian foreign ministries also condemned the move.

Israel’s delusional, inhuman Gaza takeover plan could be recipe for perpetual war (Peter Beaumont, Guardian)

Netanyahu’s history in politics and diplomacy is one of endless excuses for why Israel should never meet the commitments it made in the Oslo peace process towards real self-determination and a Palestinian state, describing endlessly over the years the lack of a “partner for peace” or claiming that any Palestinian state would be a threat to Israel.

In practical terms, Israel’s decision to seize full control of Gaza appears as reckless as it is delusional and inhuman, not least the notion that Israel will maintain control until the “establishment of an alternative civil administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority”. As it currently stands, that alternative remains a fiction of Netanyahu’s imagination.

What will seem more plausible for many will be the far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich’s unpalatable parsing of the decision on Friday. “We are erasing the Palestinian state,” he declared, “first in action and then officially”.

In financial terms, as Israeli media have pointed out, the move is likely to place another huge financial burden on a country that has been haemorrhaging money during more than two years of conflict in theatres from Lebanon to Syria, Iran, Yemen and Gaza…

While the IDF controls 75% of Gaza, the remaining 25% of territory where the new Netanyahu offensive will be focused is where 80% of Gaza’s population has been displaced to.

How Israel plans to achieve its full control without a massive increase in civilian deaths in an already starving and desperate Palestinian population is chillingly undescribed.

Military rule in Gaza won't free hostages (Zvi Bar’el, Ha’aretz)

The security cabinet's decision to approve occupying Gaza City and later the entire Gaza Strip has turned freeing the hostages into a marginal goal at best, and in the most realistic case, totally eliminates it. Even if we ignore the messianic goals of the far-right ministers who seek "to correct the sin of the disengagement" and rebuild the settlements, the working assumption on which the occupation rests is that a military government will replace the Hamas regime, thereby achieving a key goal of the war.

Alternatively, if the occupation does not materialize, its very threat is intended to serve as a "doomsday weapon" that will make it clear to Hamas that it may lose its main asset, territorial control, its sources of income, and its status as the only body that can bend Israel and ensure Hamas' continued rule, and even make the world recognize an independent Palestinian state. But within the threat lies voiding Israel's previous working assumption that the hostages are a Hamas "strategic asset".

Therefore, under the occupation option, there is no longer a need for them. Not for Hamas, for whom the hostages will no longer ensure its survival, nor for Israel, which prefers collapsing Hamas over the hostages' freedom. Consequently, there will be no need to negotiate their release, which would impose a political price that the government cannot afford.

If the sole remaining objective of this war is to overthrow the Hamas regime, that means that it is not enough to "take control" of territory and "move" the population. The cabinet decision makes it clear that direct and full occupation, with all its legal, international, economic and social implications, will be necessary.

Netanyahu’s Gaza takeover plan satisfies no one but himself(Tal Shalev, CNN)

The Gaza takeover plan places Netanyahu and Israel in unprecedented international isolation. Despite the unwavering free hand that President Trump’s White House has given him in the Gaza war, the growing famine and starvation crisis has already diminished global legitimacy for Israel’s war, and the additional fallout from the latest cabinet’s decision was swift and unambiguous: Germany – Israel’s second most important strategic ally after the United States – announced it was suspending some of its military exports to Israel, setting the stage for other EU countries to further downgrade relations.

Netanyahu is pushing forward with a plan that satisfies no one: Israel’s allies abroad, its own military leadership, a public that wants the war to end on the one hand, and on the other, his hardline partners who are unhappy and think it does not go far enough.

The constituency it does serve is primarily Netanyahu himself: buying him more time to avoid the inevitable choice between a genuine ceasefire that could save the hostages or a full military escalation that satisfies his coalition. More than a strategic move, it represents yet another classical Netanyahu manoeuvre to prolong the war, while perpetuating harm and suffering for Gaza residents and Israeli hostages alike. All for his own political survival.