There is a broader strategic understanding of power, such that an underdog doing violence can afford the authoritarian government political capital to retaliate disproportionately. A peer doing violence authorizes retaliation in kind. A superior force doing violence can only realistically be retreated from until the tables can be turned.
Oct 7th is a great case in point. Palestinians revolted and Israelis spent the next year paying them back with hellfire missiles into ambulances and machine gun rounds into NICU units, while their friends in the US and Germany and Russia and Saudi Arabia clapped. Yemen and Iran interceding on Gaza’s behalf might be seen as noble from a certain point of view, but it failed to halt the slaughter. Meanwhile, the Israelis and their American allies expanded the scope of violence into the West Bank, the Persian Gulf, Lebanon, and Syria.
Using violence doesn’t mean you’ll win. It means you’ll legitimize a reprisal (which threatens to legitimize a reprisal, etc, etc). Escalate far enough and you end up with the Twin Towers in flames or a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It ends with the obliteration of whole countries and the loss of millions of lives.
Who comes out ahead after all of this? Who benefits in the long run? I’m having a hard time finding any winners.
Who comes out ahead after all of this? Who benefits in the long run? I’m having a hard time finding any winners.
Nobody ever really wins here. In either the short term, or the long term, with or without violence. If the clap back of oct 7th hadn’t happened, then the state of affairs would’ve remained exactly as horrible as they’ve always been, and probably would’ve slowly decomposed even further, and the population probably would’ve just died slower deaths over the course of several years. Certainly in retrospect, that maybe seems better than the alternative, but nobody knows the future, really. It could be just as likely the oct 7th was exactly the kind of pressure that started a chain of events that ultimately leads to the deconstruction of the state of israel. It’s completely impossible to know the future, completely, anything else is kind of just armchair speculation.
We have to place oct 7th into context, and to place it into context, we have to have a chain of causality. That eliminates the sort of responsibility that people like to attribute to everything. It doesn’t eliminate tactics, or the decision making process, it actually enhances it, if anything, but we do have to look at, say, how the state of affairs in gaza lead to such an attack. Both in how such a sorry state led to such an attack, obviously, and also in how Hamas was funded as their government in part by israel in order to ensure a more violent opposing force that would be more willing to mutually escalate with them, especially when that force is locked in to a specific location and can only really fight on israel’s terms, unlike most of israel’s other actors, which can fight more on the terms of the international political stage. Obviously still a deck which is heavily stacked against them, but slightly less so.
What I mean by all of this is that israel manufactured the conditions to enact their genocide, and that escalation would’ve happened either way because they’re not able to be bargained with. Under that framework, any tactic the gazans, specifically, could’ve taken, was pretty much doomed to failure from the start. Or rather, was doomed to not really have a positive outcome in the immediate short term, for them specifically. I’m not saying oct 7th was really a wise decision, right, I’m just saying that we don’t really know. Maybe attribute to me analysis paralysis, then, I’m not quite sure, ironically, but I think it’s easier to have a hindsight-accurate armchair QB backseat approach to this than to make those decisions of what to do in the moment.
There is a broader strategic understanding of power, such that an underdog doing violence can afford the authoritarian government political capital to retaliate disproportionately. A peer doing violence authorizes retaliation in kind. A superior force doing violence can only realistically be retreated from until the tables can be turned.
Oct 7th is a great case in point. Palestinians revolted and Israelis spent the next year paying them back with hellfire missiles into ambulances and machine gun rounds into NICU units, while their friends in the US and Germany and Russia and Saudi Arabia clapped. Yemen and Iran interceding on Gaza’s behalf might be seen as noble from a certain point of view, but it failed to halt the slaughter. Meanwhile, the Israelis and their American allies expanded the scope of violence into the West Bank, the Persian Gulf, Lebanon, and Syria.
Using violence doesn’t mean you’ll win. It means you’ll legitimize a reprisal (which threatens to legitimize a reprisal, etc, etc). Escalate far enough and you end up with the Twin Towers in flames or a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It ends with the obliteration of whole countries and the loss of millions of lives.
Who comes out ahead after all of this? Who benefits in the long run? I’m having a hard time finding any winners.
Nobody ever really wins here. In either the short term, or the long term, with or without violence. If the clap back of oct 7th hadn’t happened, then the state of affairs would’ve remained exactly as horrible as they’ve always been, and probably would’ve slowly decomposed even further, and the population probably would’ve just died slower deaths over the course of several years. Certainly in retrospect, that maybe seems better than the alternative, but nobody knows the future, really. It could be just as likely the oct 7th was exactly the kind of pressure that started a chain of events that ultimately leads to the deconstruction of the state of israel. It’s completely impossible to know the future, completely, anything else is kind of just armchair speculation.
We have to place oct 7th into context, and to place it into context, we have to have a chain of causality. That eliminates the sort of responsibility that people like to attribute to everything. It doesn’t eliminate tactics, or the decision making process, it actually enhances it, if anything, but we do have to look at, say, how the state of affairs in gaza lead to such an attack. Both in how such a sorry state led to such an attack, obviously, and also in how Hamas was funded as their government in part by israel in order to ensure a more violent opposing force that would be more willing to mutually escalate with them, especially when that force is locked in to a specific location and can only really fight on israel’s terms, unlike most of israel’s other actors, which can fight more on the terms of the international political stage. Obviously still a deck which is heavily stacked against them, but slightly less so.
What I mean by all of this is that israel manufactured the conditions to enact their genocide, and that escalation would’ve happened either way because they’re not able to be bargained with. Under that framework, any tactic the gazans, specifically, could’ve taken, was pretty much doomed to failure from the start. Or rather, was doomed to not really have a positive outcome in the immediate short term, for them specifically. I’m not saying oct 7th was really a wise decision, right, I’m just saying that we don’t really know. Maybe attribute to me analysis paralysis, then, I’m not quite sure, ironically, but I think it’s easier to have a hindsight-accurate armchair QB backseat approach to this than to make those decisions of what to do in the moment.