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.

An Ignominious End for a Superpower: Run, America, Run

First in a series of 2-4 articles on Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the United States

Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban and the United States is scrambling to evacuate Americans.  So screamed a headline in the New York Times all of yesterday and so say the images being flashed on television and mobile phone screens.  How the Americans are running with their tails between their legs!  US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was on the air defending the Biden administration’s decision to undertake a rather abrupt withdrawal of American forces and the most striking pronouncement that came from his lips was surely this:  ‘This is manifestly not Saigon.’  The very fact that he attempted to disabuse people from recalling the humiliation that the United States suffered on 30 April 1975 as North Vietnamese troops occupied the city and the US sought to evacuate its personnel from its embassy in Saigon suggests the potency of the analogy.  Then, and now, the most iconic image from the end game is of American helicopters ferrying US personnel and ‘collaborators’, as the enemy dubs them, to safety—this time to a secure location at the airport the perimeter of which is ringed by American military forces.  Then it was the evil communists; now it is the dreaded Islamic terrorists.  But it is America, once again, which is fleeing from scenes of chaos—the very chaos that it engendered in the first place.

The United States, the preeminent military power of the post-World War II period, has suffered yet another crushing defeat.  Let us not minimize the enormity of this defeat.  Many commentators have sought to soften the blow:  some are calling it an ‘embarrassment’, others are speaking of the loss of American ‘prestige’, and yet others are speaking of how the US military has been caught flat-footed.  It is all this and far more than just the end of the US era in Afghanistan.  It cannot suffice to say that the Americans were committed to a withdrawal in any case and that Biden and his advisors only miscalculated if severely the extent to which Afghan security forces would be able to hold back the Taliban.  On this view, the present ‘humiliation’ can be put down to failures in strategic thinking and implementation of a policy laid down by Biden’s predecessor, though many American themselves will wonder why a ‘trillion dollars’ have gone down the drain.  This is the amount that is being mentioned as the cost of the 20-year war, allowing for expenses incurred in military engagements, maintaining a massive American presence, and nation-building in an attempt, as the Americans saw it, to secure the ‘free world’ from the scourge of terrorism and bring ‘civilization’ to tribal ‘savages’.  Such a view shows a complete unawareness of the culture of militarism, which is another form of savagery, which is as intrinsic to American foreign policy and even the American character as the purported love of liberty. 

Last Days in Vietnam: The Evacuation of American Personnel from the American Embassy, Saigon, 29-30 April 1975. Source: PBS.

Last Days in Afghanistan: Evacuation from the US Embassy in Kabul, 14 August 2021. Source: AP Photo, Ahmad Gul.

The brute fact of the matter is that, since the end of World War II with the decisive victory of the US and the Allies against the fascists in Germany, Italy, and Japan, the US has not won a war outright, if it has won a war at all.  The Korean War (June 1950 – July 1953) ended in a stalemate, marked by an armistice agreement, and its bitter legacy continues to the present day.  In Vietnam, the Americans assumed the responsibilities, as it saw them, that the French were no longer able to carry out of stemming the menacing advance of communism.  Then, two decades later, in what can be called another protracted entanglement, this time in Iraq, the Americans sought the submission of Saddam Hussein first by bombing Iraq back into the stone age and then, some years later, by cornering the Iraqi dictator and literally digging him out from a hole before he was sent to the gallows.  In the process, they not only left the country in shambles, but their ambition to introduce democratic reforms—when they had enough to do in their own country, as the rise of white supremacists and xenophobic militarists has established all too clearly—would have the effect of unraveling entire societies all over West Asia (or the Middle East as the Americans call it).  The debacles in Syria, where the atrocities committed by the Western-educated Bashar al-Assad make Iraq under Hussein look tame, as well as the civil war in Libya, precipitated by the US resolve to bring down the government of Muammar Gaddafi, bear the imprint of US foreign policy, even as one recognizes the role of other states such as Russia and Saudi Arabia in creating the unholy mess in which the Arab world is now enmeshed.  Now, to cap it all, is the story of twenty years of the presence of American troops dissolving into capitulation to armed tribesmen over a matter of a few days. Some might argue that the US did win the Cold War:  if it did so, which thirty years after the demise of the Soviet Union is far from being clear, it is worthwhile asking what the implications might be of winning only a ‘cold’ rather than ‘hot’ war.

What should be unambiguously clear now is that military power, indeed overwhelming military power, has limitations and indeed is even a liability. There is a lesson in this for other powers, especially China, though one should never underestimate the human tendency to forgo what historians fondly and sometimes wistfully call ‘the lessons of history’.  The US never fully acknowledged its military defeats and the generals only took back the lesson that they would not fight a war with one hand tied behind their back. American counter-insurgency operations would henceforth be focused on developing tools and the skills required to fight guerrillas and what are called non-state actors.  In the operations against the al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, and other jihadi outfits, the Americans thought that they had learnt something about how to engage non-state actors. However, none of this should be allowed to obscure the fact that overwhelming military power does not necessarily confer advantages as it once did, even when the asymmetry of firepower is astronomical.  What is seldom mentioned about the American triumph over Germany, in contrast to the wars that the US has fought in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, is the element of the shared culture between the US and Germany as one of the torch-bearers of ‘Western civilization’.  This had a great many implications:  the US forces were never viewed as alien in Germany, just as the Taliban, whatever one might hear in the Western press about the dislike for them among common Afghans, have capitalized on the shared culture between them—even allowing for differences between Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and the handful of other ethnic groups—and the myriad other insurgent groups and political parties. The newly appointed Taliban mayor of Kunduz, Gul Mohammed Elias, is reported to have said that ‘our jihad is not with the municipality, our jihad is against the occupiers and those who defend the occupiers’.  The return of the Taliban, to which I shall turn in a subsequent essay, owes much to this consideration, not merely to realist political assessments of foreign policy, geopolitics, military strategy, and the like. 

A Polish translation of this article by Marek Murawski is available here.

A translation into Georgian by Ana Mirilashvili is available here.