Israel's War in Gaza Was Destined To Fail

Edited by Sam Thielman

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I'M WRITING THIS BEFORE WE KNOW IF WE HAVE A CEASEFIRE IN GAZA. For the last three nights or so I've been waking up every few hours to check my phone for the alert that a deal has been reached. I figured I'd put some short thoughts while we wait. Hopefully there is a ceasefire and the beginnings of a hostage exchange by the time you read this. 

In one of his final statements as secretary of state, Antony Blinken said on Tuesday that Hamas has "recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost." He treated this as a tut-tut to a recalcitrant Israel, as if Israel cannot see that its stated objectives were never going to be reached because of a reluctance to commit to a political solution. 

Blinken did not treat this as a recognition of the failure of his strategy, the strategy of sponsoring Israel's genocide knowing that the most right-wing Israeli government in history—so far—was never going to negotiate the freedom of any part of Palestine. The Israeli government does have a political solution, and that solution is apartheid and as much ethnic cleansing it can get away with. That is why fascist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir boasted of stopping a ceasefire agreement multiple times throughout 2024, despite Blinken and President Biden's blatant lies that Hamas was the ceasefire holdout. 

The text of the ceasefire deal that has circulated over the past 48-plus hours makes it clear that Hamas will remain in power over what remains of Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu's "Total Victory" was never going to happen, and that was obvious from the earliest days after October 7. I wrote that during the first month of the war. Using mass violence against a population to suppress its political aspirations intensifies those aspirations and guarantees their violent reprisal. This is the lesson of the War on Terror. If you want to read a think-tank paper with a lot of charts and anodyne descriptions addressing that point in more respectable language, here's Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 2018. There's also, well, my book. 

But maybe you'd prefer to get that lesson from a novel. As it happens, after Israel assassinated Hamas' Yahya Sinwar, I decided to read the two-volume novel Sinwar wrote during his captivity in Beersheva Prison, The Thorn and The Carnation. I finished the second volume on Sunday.

It likely isn't well translated—it doesn't seem to have an American publisher, for obvious reasons—and Sinwar, at the risk of understatement, will not be remembered as a novelist, but as the architect of the bloodshed of October 7 who died fighting. But The Thorn and The Carnation is not an Islamist screed or a propagandistic attempt at settling scores through fiction. It's a social novel of Palestine, and especially of Gaza, from the time shortly before the 1967 War through the First Intifada, and then through the dawn of the Second. (Basically, the time span of Sinwar's life to that point.) 

As a social novel, it tells the story of the narrator's family to show the varieties of Palestinian experience of expulsion and occupation. Various brothers and cousins adopt different factions in the Palestinian struggle; one cousin, a villain, even works with Israelis. The eldest brother, Mahmoud, is a heroic figure aligned with Fatah. Another of the narrator's cousins, and later more of the family, becomes an early member of Hamas. The different factions contend, both during the First Intifada and especially during the Oslo Accords. But Sinwar, who obviously thinks Hamas has the right of it, presents the PLO side, represented by Mahmoud, as well-intentioned and worthy of respect. Mahmoud has hard questions for Sinwar’s own militant movement. Before the First Intifada, he asks the growing Islamist faction why it has been so quiet while the left-wing, internationalist factions bore the brunt of Palestinian national struggle. 

I won't review the whole book here. Sinwar's novel certainly depicted Jews and Judaism in ways I recoiled from, even though he or the translator frequently—but not always, it has to be said—makes clear that Sinwar is discussing Judaism-qua-Zionism rather than Judaism-qua-Judaism. But the point is that the family will not submit to colonization, because the Palestinian people will lose everything dear to them—their homes, their families, their history, their dignity and of course their land.

And the point of the various factions emerging in the family, opting for more or less bloody tactics, is that their struggle will take different iterations until they have their freedom. Israel once cultivated Hamas as an Islamist counter to the PLO, to divide and weaken Palestinian resistance. Of course 15 months of a U.S.-backed Israeli devastation of Gaza will "recruit almost as many new militants" as Hamas lost. There will be other forms of resistance after Hamas—unless and until Palestine is free, in a manner meaningful to Palestinians. The choice is Israel's, and, it has to be said at this point, America's. 

Finally, let's acknowledge something that tends to get lost in the easy politics/violence binary. For an apartheid state or an imperial power engaged in conquest, mass violence serves a kind of political solution. It provides a rationale for permanent war until that population no longer troubles the state, via either removal or eradication. We need to remember that. "Total Victory" was less Netanyahu's goal than it was a pretext to render Gaza as uninhabitable for Palestinians as possible. Saying "there needs to be a political solution" is question-begging. The type of political solution matters. 

According to my phone, there is still no ceasefire. I hope one comes by the time this finishes getting edited. I'll end this edition with this: The leaked texts of an accord, reflective as they are of the late-May proposal from the White House, stagger the ceasefire in confidence-building stages. That means the opportunities for intransigence are many, and Israel proved in Lebanon that it will violate ceasefire terms while the U.S. remains silent or denies the violations are happening. We'll have to be vigilant about that. And Sami al-Arian told me yesterday that once a ceasefire is reached and Trump is in office, Saudi normalization of Israel will be back on the table after a decent interval. 

But that all is a problem for later. The problem for today is securing a ceasefire in the first place. End the war and bring all the hostages home. 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.