“The lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently made headlines by warning.
“You see, in this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population,” he said. “And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”
Austin’s remarks, made at the Reagan National Defense Forum in December, should be sobering for the sizable cohort of Israeli and Western officials and commentators who insist that a “military solution” to Hamas is the only way for Israel to ensure its long-term security. While the horrendous civilian death toll of Israel’s military campaign is regrettable, this line of thinking goes, the threat from Hamas means Israel has no choice but to prosecute the war until the group is eliminated, as long as it takes, and no matter the cost.
If it’s allowed to survive, it will simply choose another moment in the future to attack, and Israeli citizens will never know peace.
Yet Austin is only one prominent voice in recent months that has pointed out the faultiness of this logic, and reminded the world that when a state battling terrorism leaves a trail of human carnage in its wake, the resulting rage, bitterness and despair fuel the very problem it’s fighting, and many times over.
When Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. was asked directly if he feared that high civilian casualty numbers would create future Hamas members, he replied, “Yes, very much so.” “We’ll be fighting their sons in four or five years,” former Shin Bet chief Ya’akov Peri told the New York Times.
“Israel Is Fostering the Next Generation of Hatred Against Itself,” read the headline of a recent column by Haaretz’s Gideon Levy, as he warned readers to “look what hatred was sown in the hearts of almost all Israelis by one barbaric attack,” and consider what an even worse, prolonged slaughter might do to the Palestinian population. “These children will never forgive the soldiers. You’re raising another generation of resistance,” one Palestinian father, his young son killed by Israeli soldiers, told Levy.
Former UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace recently warned, with reference to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, “that radicalisation follows oppression” and that “a disproportionate response by the state can serve as a terrorist organisation’s best recruiting sergeant.”
Security services in the United States and around the world have already backed up these warnings. FBI Director Chris Wray cautioned last month that U.S. support for Israel’s war had led multiple terrorist organizations to call for attacks against Americans and the West, and had significantly “raised the threat of an attack” inside the United States.
That’s on top of advisories and intelligence findings by various U.S. government agencies warning of credible threats by groups like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah over U.S. support for the war. Both the German and British spy agencies have likewise sounded the alarm over the war potentially fueling militant radicalization, citing specific threats being made by jihadist groups and those sympathetic to them.
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