Israel: A Pitiable, Pathetic, Paper Tiger

Vinay Lal

Israel has long flaunted its military prowess and much of the world has believed it. After all, the small Jewish state, foisted upon the Palestinians by a Europe that could not find a way to accommodate the gifted, liberal, often supremely enlightened, and enterprising Jewish people, defeated a coalition of Palestinian Arabs, Syrians, and Egyptians in 1948-49 and secured its independence. Then, in 1967, in what is called the six-day war, Israel took the wind out of the sails of the Arab states—largely Jordan, Syria, and Egypt—and rightfully claimed a conclusive and momentous victory, even taking the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula into its possession. Though its military triumphs would scarcely be as decisive in more recent decades, and Israel and Hezbollah fought to a standstill in 2006 after a bitter monthlong war, Israel’s military has nonetheless continued to enjoy a reputation as a great disciplined and professional force.  The reputation that Israel enjoys as a no-nonsense state, one that allegedly knows how to deal with terrorists, may be gauged by the fact that its retired generals enjoy sinecures and consultancies in countries such as India.

However, the present conflict between Hamas and Israel shows Israel for what it truly is:  a pitiable, pathetic, paper tiger. Such a description will appear surprising, perhaps somewhat absurd, to most considering that, after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel at once declared war and in quick order began a relentless attack from the air upon the entire population of Gaza. By the end of 2023 alone, Israel had dropped, according to the Gaza Media Office, 45,000 bombs weighing more than 65,000 tons, or more four times the tonnage of the atomic bomb that eviscerated Hiroshima.  Moreover, less than a month after Hamas went on the offensive, Israel commenced operations on the ground.  By January 24, on the World Bank’s estimate, 45% of the residential buildings in Gaza had been destroyed by the Israel Defense Force (IDF), though The Times of Israel reported, on 30 December 2023, that 70% of the homes in Gaza had been destroyed or damaged.  Now, in early March, that figure is certainly much higher; indeed, as many reports suggest, Gaza is practically uninhabitable.  This appears to be the response of an aggressive, vengeful, muscular nation-state, not a paper tiger.

Let us, nevertheless, consider what Israel’s short-term war aims have been and whether its achievements thus far, as well as it military actions, have been congruent with those war aims. We will not take into consideration the precipitous decline of its international reputation, if only because Israel, to be blunt about it, is largely indifferent to its reputation. It has habitually considered most of the world to be hostile to both the Jewish state and Jews, though of course many who are not sympathetic to the Jewish state do not hold the same views with regards to the Jewish people; more importantly, it is arrogant enough to think that its virtuous righteousness is enough to sustain it in the face of an onslaught from the rest of the world.  We may, thus, confine ourselves to Israel’s stated war objectives, the two principal ones being the rescue of the hostages taken by Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) and the complete annihilation of Hamas.  In early February, Israel reported that it had destroyed 17-18 out of Hamas’ 24 batallions, and Netanyahu has on several occasions boasted that Israel is well on the way to “total victory”.  The BBC reported at the end of February that the Israeli embassy in the UK estimated that it had killed 10,000-12,000 Hamas fighters.  Hamas has not corroborated those figures and the verification of estimates provided by IDF is nearly impossible, all the more so since just who constitutes a “Hamas fighter” is far from clear.  Let us recall that none other than the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, less than a week into the war, declared at a press conference that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible”:  if there are no innocent civilians, then one reasonable inference is that, from the Israeli standpoint, every civilian is a potential terrorist—and that, moreover, every civilian is a legitimate target. It is not hard to fathom why Israel can, on this reasoning, conduct a merciless war against civilians with the self-assurance of utter impunity, but let me return to this point later.

Just exactly how fighters are to be distinguished from civilians is but one problem.  Let us now, however, turn to the conduct of the war and assess Israel’s “achievements”.  A few days after the onset of the war, I wrote on the very pages of this blog an article suggesting that, with or without the support of the United States, Israel would exact a terrible vengeance and pulverize Gaza. Of course, to conduct a protracted war, Israel must doubtless rely on a continuing supply of arms and ammunition from the United States. Hamas has similarly been aided with occasional rocket launches fired by Hezbollah, but unlike the state of Israel, which for its size has a formidable army and receives the highest-grade weapons from the US, Hamas has neither any aircraft nor any tanks. The first intifada of 1987-1993 is also known as the “stone intifada” for nothing:  it was waged largely by the young with stones and captured the world’s imagination. The present resistance has gone well beyond stones, even if Hamas has in other ways displayed the ingenuity of the besieged Palestinians, but it is still nevertheless true that the gulf between the military power that Israel has brought to bear upon the Palestinians and the resources that Hamas can wield is enormous.  Hamas is practically a guerilla fighting force and, as countless number of articles have shown, it developed an extraordinary—one might call it, purely from the engineering standpoint, wondrous—system of tunnels which appear to constitute a veritable city.  These tunnels, running for hundreds of miles, were used to ship arms, ferry people from one part of Gaza to another, and much else:  as the Modern War Institute at West Point points out in a report, “Israeli forces have unearthed massive invasion tunnels two and a half miles long, underground manufacturing plants, luxury tunnels with painted walls, tile floors, ceiling fans, and air conditioning, and a complex, layered, labyrinth underneath all areas of Gaza.”

Underground Gaza, as it is sometimes called, was built under the noses of the Israelis. The failures of Israeli military intelligence have obviously been colossal:  what to speak of the fact that Hamas literally blew its way into Israeli settlements, Israel appears to have had little knowledge of the complexity and enormity of Hamas’s tunnel city.  Besides aircraft, sophisticated drone systems, missiles, radar system, the Iron Dome air defense system, tanks, and military intelligence, Israel is also an apparent pioneer in cyberwar, and there is good reason to think that Israel was responsible for the cyberattack that disabled the electricity grid in portions of Iran some weeks ago.  So, considering the vast arsenal that Israel has at its disposal, just what has it achieved of its stated war goals?  First, as I have already suggested above, there is little reason to believe that Hamas has been nearly obliterated. If it has been, one might also ask why north Gaza, where IDF spent three months flattening the landscape and reducing the population into starvation, is seeing renewed fighting.  It is certainly far too early to speak of a decisive military defeat; indeed, a “decisive” military defeat is wholly illusory, unless one is prepared to believe that tens of thousands of Palestinians, moving into the future, will not arise from the graveyard to which Gaza is being reduced and will not be prepared themselves to offer resistance even unto death.  Secondly, five months into the war, Hamas (and, perhaps, Islamic Jihad) continue to hold a hundred Israeli civilians and soldiers captive.  There is little reason to believe that the IDF or Israeli military intelligence even knows where these captives are being held.  Israel’s inability to rescue the hostages is striking, and we can anticipate that Israel’s response is that it is somewhat handicapped in its response since Hamas does not fight a fair war, or, to put it in more dramatic language, Hamas is a despicable terrorist organization that uses civilians as shields. Israel expects victory to be handed down to it on a platter, but its argument is all the more bizarre considering that it has a massively disproportional advantage over Hamas. And this is apart from the question that almost no one has dared to ask: why is that we should not view the thousands of Palestinians held in Israel’s jails as “hostages”.

Thirdly, none of Hamas’s senior political leadership has been apprehended.  Israel declared Hamas’s most important political leader, Yahya Sinwar, a “dead man walking”, but five months into the conflict Sinwar has proven to be adept in keeping even his whereabouts unknown to the outside world.  Israel has eyes and ears on the ground, but its celebrated intelligence has been unable to pick up either Sinwar, Marwan Issa—whose son Muhammad was killed in an IDF strike in late 2023—or Mohammed Deif, the head of the al-Qassam Brigades who has survived repeated assassination attempts and earned the nickname, “the cat with nine lives”. Deif was arrested by the Palestinian National Authority at Israel’s request in May 2000 but escaped several months later; he is believed to be the “mastermind” behind the surprise attack of October 7^th, and the IDF sought to exact vengeance by targeting Deif’s father home with an airstrike which killed three family members, including Deif’s brother.

Having been unable to obliterate Hamas, capture or kill its senior leadership, or rescue the hostages, Israel has set out to criminalize, terrorize, and pulverize Palestinians. That has been the sum of its verifiable achievements:  the widespread infliction of pain, suffering, and death on a largely defenseless population; the elimination of large sectors of the Palestinian intelligentsia, the destruction (in whole or in part) of all twelve of Gaza’s universities, and cultural genocide; the deliberate starvation of the Palestinians as a means of waging war; the forcible and repeated displacement of a people, and most unforgivingly to areas that have falsely been promised as safe havens; and much else that defies the imagination. Israel will say in its defense that it is only doing what every nation-state has a right to do, namely mount self-defense against an enemy that does not recognize the right of Israel to exist. Whether everything Israel has can be done can be forgiven or even grudgingly justified in the name of self-defense is one thing; it is also an ethical and philosophical question whether self-defense allows the wanton and widespread killing of a people.  It is still another question, one those who lend their support to the Palestinian cause, whether Hamas does not bear some responsibility for the death and destruction of the Palestinians. Hamas surely would have known that Israel would exact a deadly even monstrous price from the Palestinians for its savage attack of October 7^th, and that innocents, including children, would shoulder most of the burden of this vengeance.  None of these considerations, however, exculpate Israel.

If Israel is, as I submit, a paper tiger, we have to logically ask what happens to paper tigers. Most readers will be unaware that it was Chairman Mao who first used the term in contemporary times in an interview that he gave to the American journalist, Anna Louis Strong, in August 1946.  “The atom bomb is a paper tiger”, Mao said, “which the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapons. All reactionaries are paper tigers.” That people decide the course of war may sound fanciful, but Mao had in mind the experience of the Chinese people and the history of anti-colonial struggles.  Less than two decades later, the ignominious retreat of America from Vietnam would once again suggest the merit of his view.  Israel is a paper tiger because, having been humiliated by a new type of guerrilla armed force, and unable to subjugate its enemy, it chooses to wage a war against a civilian population; in doing so, it has yet to understand that the story of Palestinian self-determination will eclipse any narrative that Israel may put forward.