Quo vadis, Israel?

A year after the Israel Defense Forces — provoked by Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack on Israeli soil which saw nearly 2,000 killed, 7,500 wounded and 251 taken hostage — launched one of the most ferocious bombardments ever witnessed in the history of modern warfare, no end to the fighting, death and destruction is in sight.

Not only has it not ended, but we’re now seeing a wider, multifront war unfolding between Israel and Hamas allies in the region, with the former’s invasion of Lebanon and Iran’s missile attack against Israel.

The conflict has sparked intense debate on what should be prioritized — to keep on fighting until Hamas crumbles to the ground or to focus on a ceasefire and negotiate for the release of all the remaining Hamas-held hostages.

Meanwhile, the world shudders at the results of Israel’s relentlessly fierce military response to the Hamas attack, which included the killing of nearly 42,000 people, mostly civilians. Much of Gaza is in tatters and Palestinians, along with their sympathizers across the world, accuse Israel of genocide.

A year after Hamas invaded Israel and the retaliation by the latter, the fighting has not stopped mainly because Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has set a virtually unattainable path to victory. Israel wants to destroy Hamas’ leadership and free the hostages still being held by the group. But here’s the thing: Hamas’ surviving commanders in Gaza, led by Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the 7 October attack, hide among the hostages, making it hard for the IDF to capture or kill them without harming fellow Israelites.

The fighting likewise continues because Hamas uses guerrilla tactics, hiding in a vast network of underground tunnels, making it hard for Israelis to strike a decisive blow against them.

Also, Netanyahu’s retention of power is dependent on far-right Israeli lawmakers threatening to collapse his coalition government if he abandons the fight without first destroying Hamas. And that’s precisely why Netanyahu has refused to agree on a hostage-release deal that includes a permanent ceasefire as a condition.

Meanwhile, Sinwar and his seeming unconcern for Gaza’s pulverization and the killing of civilians in massive numbers prod Hamas to continue fighting. Sinwar’s insistence on a permanent ceasefire — a condition unacceptable to Netanyahu — prevents a pause in the war and negotiations for the release of the hostages.

On one hand, Hamas has made it clear: there can be no return to how things were before 7 October — the Israeli occupation must end. Can Netanyahu be blamed if the 7 October massacre of Israelis by Hamas makes him feel vulnerable and, thus, his decision to prevent — at all costs — any or all hostile moves by groups focused on Israel’s destruction?

“This is a tragedy,” points out US Ambassador to Israel Thomas R. Nides. “There is no end in sight to this war because no one is willing to blink.”

In the meantime, he says, “everyone loses — the hostages and their families, innocent Palestinians, Israelis displaced from northern Israel, Lebanese civilians.”

It’s tragic also that, as a consequence of the unrestrained savagery of its war in Gaza, Israel today is viewed by some nations as a pariah state.

Does Netanyahu care about this perception? Shrugging aside an International Court of Justice order to stop its military operation in Gaza, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s hard-right finance minister, quoted Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion: “Our future does not depend on what the gentiles will say, but on what the Jews will do.”

The reality, some global analysts point out, is that for all of Israel’s pronouncements regarding diplomacy, its military instinct is to rely on itself, and not struggle for the world’s opinion.

Said one Middle East observer, “The IDF does not care what people think of them. Israel is a security state, it does not want to be loved; it wants to be respected, and feared. The IDF has always played hardball, relying on escalation dominance, and has never seen waging war as playing a popularity contest.”

A clear manifestation of this is Israel’s recent effective strike against the Hezbollah leadership, undertaken sans US support and now portrayed by Netanyahu as part of the current goal “to change the balance of power in the region for years.”

Given the Israeli prime minister’s current frame of mind, there indeed doesn’t seem to be a resolution to the conflict in the Middle East any time soon.

It’s sad to see how this tiny country, which had become one of the modern world’s technological and entrepreneurial powerhouses out of virtually nothing from its arid desert setting, with more Nobel Prizes per capita than Germany, the US, and France, seems to have forfeited worldwide regard and sympathy so swiftly.