Israel’s endgame in Gaza, an impossible mission

by Dr Daud Abdullah

A person holds a placard that reads ‘The Nakba never ended’ in London during the ‘National March for Gaza’ on August 3, 2024 [CARLOS JASSO/AFP via Getty Images]

Throughout the war on Gaza the weapon of disinformation has been used with lethal effect. From the beginning, Israel’s Western allies led the assault on global public opinion. Untruths about the beheading of babies and rape of Israeli women were repeated and overblown without verification. Other fabrications that continue to gain currency include the claim that Israel does not have an endgame in Gaza. Of course it does.

For Israel’s right-wing government, the ideal endgame is a second Nakba. That requires the depopulation of every town and village in Gaza, and the forced expulsion of survivors to the Egyptian Sinai. Eighty-four per cent of Gaza’s territory is now under evacuation orders.

Calls for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza started long before ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’. In October 2021, Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, told Arab parliamentarians: “I am not holding any conversations with you, you anti-Zionists…You are [here] due to a mistake because [Israel’s first Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and throw you out in 1948.”

More recently, in November 2023, Avi Dichter, the incumbent security cabinet member and agriculture minister, announced: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”

“Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end,” he stressed.

Everything that has taken place in Gaza since October 2023 confirms that there is indeed a plan. It is to make Gaza unlivable so that its inhabitants would simply pack up and leave. Already, a total of 1.9 million people, or nine in every ten in Gaza, have been displaced.

Even so, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s army remains demoralised and substantially weakened. Senior army officers and officials in the intelligence community have been openly criticising the prime minister, saying that the war is unwinnable. Army spokesman Daniel Hagari caused uproar when he told Israel’s Channel 13 in June that “Hamas is an idea, Hamas is a party. It’s rooted in the hearts of the people — anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.” He added: “To say that we are going to make Hamas disappear is to throw sand in people’s eyes.”

Similarly, former Mossad deputy chief Ram Ben-Barak lamented the fact that Israel is losing the war in Gaza. “This war lacks a clear objective, and it’s evident that we’re unequivocally losing it,” Ben-Barak told Israeli public radio. “We are forced to engage in fighting in the same areas and end up losing more soldiers,” he said.

Faced with this reality of mounting losses of men and equipment, and the refusal of hundreds of reservists to fight in Gaza, the Israeli government has resorted to the supreme court to order the conscription of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into the army. They were previously exempt from military service. Whereas some 1,000 were expected to register on 5 August, only 30 actually turned up.

76 years on, Palestinians are still living the Nakba – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

Like a desperate and compulsive gambler making the last throw of his dice, Netanyahu has therefore decided to intensify the bombing of Palestinian shelters across Gaza, claiming that a similar campaign was conducted by the Allies during World War Two. According to his twisted logic, the Israeli prime minister reckoned that by killing more civilians this would pressure Hamas to surrender or even force the civilians to rise up against the resistance. What he has failed to acknowledge is that after the destruction of 58 German cities, neither did Hitler capitulate nor did the German people rise up against him. Likewise, although the German Blitz of London and other British cities in 1940-41 killed an estimated 40,000 people, that did not force the British people to rise up against Churchill.

As it stands, there is nothing to suggest that Gaza’s civilian population is about to seek refuge in Egypt or rise up against the Hamas-led resistance. Israel’s ruling elite have clearly not learnt the lessons from their 1982 invasion of Lebanon. At the time, their objective was to eradicate fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the country. In the end, they were drawn into a war of attrition that lasted two decades until they were booted out in 2000. All that was achieved is that they created the conditions for a resistance movement, Hezbollah, to emerge with a military capability that none of the Palestinian forces possessed then or now.

Having learnt the hard way from their 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the Biden administration has tried in vain to deter Netanyahu from a protracted war in Gaza. For the US, what started as an operation to defeat Al-Qaeda eventually turned into an operation of regime change and then state building. Eventually, it spent two decades fighting in Afghanistan and achieved none of its objectives.

Israel’s current war in Gaza bears distinct similarities to its misadventure in Lebanon and the American fiasco in Afghanistan. Gaza has evidently become the quagmire that was predicted. The ‘absolute’ defeat of Hamas that was promised ten months ago is proving to be more distant and difficult than envisaged. Worse still, the preferred option of expulsion and reoccupation also seems unattainable. With or without an endgame, Israel faces a mission impossible in Gaza.