War Aims.
A lot of reporting on the Hamas Israeli War, indeed nearly all of it, is devoid of discussion on war aims. Some of it vaguely discusses Israeli campaign aims. None of it so far that I've seen has discussed Hamas campaign aims. Given that, a lot of the reporting is sort of naive.
Hamas, having started the campaign, will be discussed first.
Hamas was formed in 1987 (probably considerably more recently than many suppose. Hamas controls Gaza, Fatah, the political arm of what had been the Palestinian Liberation Organization, controls the West Bank. The two entities have actually fought each other. Hamas started off with the goal of pushing Jews out of the boundaries of what had been the 1948 Palestinian borders, but earlier in the 2000s seemed to lessen its demands.
It seems to have returned to them. As far as can be told, its war aims are to remove the Jews from Israel, dead or alive, and of any age, and create an Arab Palestinian, and seemingly Islamic (not all Palestinians are Muslims) state in its wake. That's what's summed up in the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", which like a lot of slogans is catchy but doesn't really convey the full meaning of what it seeks.
Those are the war aims.
Without abandoning them, Hamas cannot back down, and Israel cannot unilaterally realistically convert the current war into a large scale punitive action at this point. War aims can change, but Hamas shows no desire at all to do so. A limited raid that was not aimed at civilians could have been undertaken if it has some other goal, but it didn't.
The campaign aims are much more difficult to discern. Perhaps it was to spark a wider war in the belief that it could be won, or perhaps it was just a gross act of terrorism in furtherance of its remote, unobtainable goal.
Of course, discerning campaign aims, is often tricky in regard to an entity like Hamas, or even large entities. In spite of long knowledge to the contrary, they may have thought that their raid, if that is what it was intended to be, would scare Israel into submission. Hitting civilians never does that. The British didn't surrender after the Blitz, and the air raids on civilian populations in Germany and Japan, perhaps if we exclude the atomic bomb, didn't cause them to surrender either. Air raids on military targets in North Vietnam which inflicted civilian deaths didn't cause North Vietnam to give up. 9/11 only made Americans mad, it didn't achieve whatever it was that Al Queda thought it would, which seems to have been a hoped for general economic collapse.
Israel's war aims are also simple. Its goal is to destroy Hamas as it views it, correctly, as irreconcilably opposed to its existence and genocidal in nature. Its campaign aims seem to be to occupy Gaza, or perhaps the northern portion of the Gaza Strip, trap Hamas, and destroy it and its infrastructure.
Outright destroying an underground organization, however, is very difficult to do. The US basically did it in Afghanistan, however, so it can be done.
Nobody is talking at all about what's going to become of the Palestinians. Israel isn't addressing it. The Arabs aren't either. Hamas is simply using their own people as human shields and for propoganda.
A cultural existential difference, or Why can't everyone get along?
Cultures play a part in wars, which people in the West are oddly inclined to forget. Jimmy Carter famously absent-mindedly quipped that the problems between the Israeli's and Palestinians would go away if they all started acting "like good Christians", but of course neither group is predominantly Christian.
I've taken some criticism on a more stretched observation in this area recently, so I'll explain a bit what I mean.
This question posed above is really a Western one, filtered through our eyes, which are the eyes of heavy Christian influence. As a South American atheist friend of mine once stated, culturally, "we're all Catholics", even if we often don't behave like it. That's why we're shocked when people don't behave accordingly.
Historically and culturally, that's not necessarily the default human norm at all, which doesn't mean that every non-Christian culture (including the two in question) default to bad behavior. But, as Genghis Khan supposedly noted (often filtered in our culture through Conan the Barbarian in a modified form):
The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.
We don't think that way, and we don't want others thinking that way.
Back to this war, the fact of the matter is that these two groups of people aren't going to get along. The Western concept that somehow they can be made to is simply in error at this point.
It might have been true a couple of times. One was in 1948, just before the first Arab Israeli War broke out, although that's pretty debatable. The second time was when the 1993 and 1995 Palestinian Accords were reached. The big problem is that both times, large numbers of Palestinians simply rejected a future which included Jews within the 1948 Palestinian boundaries.
The 1948 rejection was accompanied by voting with their feet by the Palestinians, a logical choice but one that was taken advantage of by Israel in that it offered the opportunity to truly make the country principally Jewish. Nobody can fault somebody for fleeing fighting, but the fact that it occured meant that a large Arab population removed itself. If it had not, demographics alone would have repeated what in fact occured in Lebanon, where a majority Christian population at that time is now 32% of the population.
Instead of taking that route, the Palestinians first relied on Arab hostility to take the country back for them, and then for the PLO, which ultimately compromised on that, to do so. Now, a certain percentage are relying on Hamas.
Regarding that calculation, relying on it in the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, wasn't irrational. After that, it really started to be. At some point, the land belongs to those who live there. It was Zapata who stated; “The land belongs to those who work it with their own hands”, which is how it should be (and how it's increasingly ceasing to be in the United States) That same analogy pertains to revolutions. It instinctively makes sense for the people ruled by another people to rebel, but not so much a people that had once lived in a land where the majority of the population isn't yours, and the majority of your population wasn't born in that land. Indeed, the fact that the initial Jewish war for independence sort of violated that tenant is part of the reason that many nations around the globe were quite hesitant about supporting Israel early on, combined with the fact that it appeared they'd lose.
Beyond that, as an essay in Minding The Campus has related:
(Professor Mordechai) Kedar, a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, has spent his academic life studying Islamic and Arab history and society. He explains that the animus of Palestinians, Arabs, and Islamists against the Jewish state is based on the consensus of Islamic religious thought that believes that Jews as a religion, people, or nation are never to be the equals of Muslims, and so their independent state, Israel, must be “struck down.”
While that can be debated, there's at least something to it, or there has come to be. For the most part, since World War Two, Middle Eastern Islam, which is its cradle, has become increasingly more "conservative", if that is the correct term, and militant over the decades. That was always there, and indeed Saudi Arabia was founded due to the Saud family's alliance with a group so conservative it was regarded as heretical. Islam does not have a real coexistence ethos as we'd understand it towards other religions. It's often noted that it has allowances for "People of the Book", meaning both Jews and Christians, but that tolerance is limited and provides that they are to be second class citizens.
Neither Christianity nor Judaism have something similar towards other religions, which doesn't mean that individual Christian or Jewish societies are de facto tolerant. People tend to generally be intolerant of any group that's different from themselves.
Interestingly, early Middle Eastern governments didn't have this feature to them, or at least not to the same extent. Turkey just celebrated its 100th founding as a modern state, and that state was founded as a secular one. Atatürk suppressed Islam in his country. Jordan has always been a Muslim state, but the Hashemite family that rules it, and once controlled Mecca, has tended towards moderation consistently. The Baath movement that controls most of Syria and once controlled Iraq was a fascist movement early on that included Muslim and Christian Arabs and which sought a secular state in the Middle East. The PLO was a secular organization that leaned heavily on Communist thought. There was at one time a strong sense amongst Arab nationalist that Islam had to be suppressed or, if not outright suppressed, the state's had to be secular. That really began to fall way with the Iranian revolution, and there's been a good deal of retreat from it since that time.
Which takes us to the current highly conservative (again, if that is the right word) Israeli government.
The current Israeli government is the most conservative, again if that's the word, one ever. It follows part of the global drift towards far right populism. Prior to the Hamas attack, it was receiving a good deal of pushback from Western nations and internally, in no small part due to an effort to subordinate the Israeli supreme court to the Knesset. In the irony that all such conflicts create, that's all been forgotten now. At any rate, a sharp turn to the right by Israel made it pretty clear that any current Israeli desires to really find a mutual solution to the problems now being fought over just weren't there.
All of which leaves us with this.
Hamas has attacked and made it clear that it thinks it can murder its way towards achieving its goals, a sort of accelerated variant of the 1939-1945 lebensraum at this point. Israel can't allow that to happen.
There are paths to a lasting peace here, but nobody involved, or even with influence, is going to try to bring them about, so the question is whether the warring parties, or more precisely Israel, can bring it about by force.
