The enemy’s progress

In a war, it’s important to know the real strengths and weaknesses of your enemy. The purpose of this article is to assess where our enemy, the Israeli ruling class, stands nine months into its offensive in Gaza.

Israel’s real goal

In order to make this assessment we should understand the difference between Israel’s stated goals and its real goal. Its stated goals are the freeing of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas. The hostages could have been rapidly freed in a prisoner exchange. This is the point that the hostage families inside Israel have been making over and over again.

Destroying Hamas altogether was never a realistic goal. Hamas is much more than just its military wing. It has a broad popular base. It may be a rightist Muslim Brotherhood affiliated movement, but it’s a powerful rightist Muslim Brotherhood affiliated movement. All experience shows that even an invasion cannot eradicate organizations of this type. The IDF leadership and the Israeli intelligence organizations are fully aware of this.

So if freeing the hostages and destroying Hamas are not the real goals, what are? To answer this question we have to have to go back to the nature of the Zionist project itself. Its objective is remove the Palestinian population from within what it considers to be the natural boundaries of the Israeli state. The aim of Zionism is the expulsion of the Palestinians, not keeping them in place in order to exploit them. Apartheid Israel has a different relationship to the Palestinians from the relationship that Apartheid South Africa had to the Black working class of that country.

The expulsion project took its first big step forward with the 1948 Nakba. The second step was conquering Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 war. The projected third step of the expulsion project was to use the turmoil created by October 7 to make conditions so unlivable in Gaza that the population would migrate. That’s Israel’s real aim in this war.

We have to record the terrible reality that the Israeli offensive has made real progress towards this end. The figures speak for themselves.

37,431 Palestinians have been killed. There are thousands more under the rubble.
87,653 have been wounded.
Infrastructure damage is vast. 60% of homes are damaged. 80% of commercial buildings have been attacked. Less than half of the hospitals are even partially functioning. Two thirds of water and sanitation facilities are severely damaged or totally destroyed.
There are huge piles of garbage and sewage throughout Gaza. UNRWA believes that these amount to 33,000 tons.
The amount of rubble caused by bombing and artillery bombardment is astronomic.

Large portions of Gaza are inhabitable now and will be so for years. This was Israel’s central objective in this whole war, and they have made real progress towards that end.

But war goals are not the only indices to look at when assessing our enemy. The strictly military situation, the achievement of domestic unity, and the winning of international political support are important elements also.

Military situation

The military situation is complicated. While Israel has vast technical superiority, it has not secured a stable occupation of Gaza. Most of the recent fighting has occurred in areas that Israel had previously entered. The IDF has clearly not established freedom of operations in these areas. They are yet to gain control of the Rafah area. Israel is nowhere near eliminating Hamas and the other Palestinian national organizations as guerilla resistance movements.

Domestic consent

Netanyahu has clearly not established a domestic consensus of support. Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot’s dramatic resignation from the War Cabinet is the most recent example of turmoil. At least four major factions are dueling with one another.

There is the foaming at the mouth ultra-right personified by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Secondly there are Netanyahu’s supporters. Netanyahu is a Trump like character with endless legal problems, perpetual intrigues, and a great sense of self-importance. His self-preservation is his central motivator. Thirdly, there are what could be called the more intelligent wing of the Israeli ruling class. Yoav Gallant joins Gantz and Eisenkot in this category. Finally, there are the hostage families and their movement. They obviously prioritize a cease-fire and hostage release deal. Domestic unity is a necessary component of military success and Israel does not currently have that unity.

International support

Finally, we should look at the extent of Israel’s international support. Here the situation is terrible from Israel’s point of view and wonderful from ours! Of course, Israel still receives massive military support from the United States. The US has given Israel at least $12.5 billion worth of aid since October 7. “Genocide Joe” has certainly earned his name. However, even Biden has been forced to increase his comments critical of the Israeli offensive.

South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice is one of the clearest indicators of Israel’s lack on international support. The recognition of Palestine by Spain, Ireland, and Norway is an important sign of the times. The UN’s 143-9 vote in favor of Palestinian UN membership is another indicator of the changed world context. Of course, the strongest factor showing international revulsion at the Israeli war in Gaza has been the extraordinary growth of the international solidarity movement. Israel has never been more isolated internationally.

Fog of war

The phrases “truth is the first casualty of war” and the “fog of war” are well known. They apply with real force in the current situation. Gilbert Achcar has recently dissected the real motivations behind Biden’s recent claim that Israel had already agreed to the cease-fire proposal that he was presenting. Most commentators believed that this was a maneuver to solicit Hamas’s endorsement. In actual fact, it was a maneuver to attempt to get Israel to agree to the settlement package.

This type of feint and counter feint is taking place every day. For example, Netanyahu recently complained that the reason for Israel’s slow progress in Rafah was the lack of US support. Was this statement a ploy to make the US increase aid or an attempt to explain away a seeming running down of the momentum of the Israeli offensive? Similarly, the Israeli Prime Minister recently complained that he had not been consulted on the daytime Israeli halt of operations on the Kerem Shalom road. Was this really true or was it, as many suspect, an attempt to appear hardline in order to win domestic support? Is the halt really to lessen international commendation of the blockade of aid to Gaza or is it a meaningless PR stunt over territory of no military significance. We can expect this type of confusion to increase as Israel faces increasing international isolation and domestic discord.

This, therefore, is where our enemy stands today. On our side of the barricade, the Palestinian side, the task of the revolutionary left is clear: building the strongest possible Palestinian solidarity movement.