I have a strong aversion to discussing Current Thing, but decided to put forth a few thoughts on the situation in Israel.
The Abstract View
Imagine this as a general scenario happening in any earlier period of history: Polity A exists as a narrow strip of land mostly surrounded by the borders of Polity B. Polity B is larger, wealthier, and militarily more powerful than Polity A.
My bet over the long term would be that Polity A gets absorbed, by hook or by crook, into Polity B. The main question would be whether it gets absorbed on relatively peaceful and voluntary terms, maybe retaining some local autonomy and cultural distinctiveness.
If we add that these two polities are bitter enemies, and that, in fact, the border between them is a wall policed by Polity B because the government of Polity A is dedicated to killing them — well, peaceful sure seems less likely.
I might add that both societies had fairly high fertility rates, growing populations, and no shortage of every society’s violence specialists — young men. Though for most societies in history that would go without saying, as its only in the modern world that it stands out as worthy of comment.
I’m talking about this in abstract terms because I don’t mean it as any particular judgment on the character of the cultures involved or the rights and wrongs of their respective positions. I mean just judging them as human societies against the backdrop of human history, you would think Gaza’s days were numbered over the long haul.
I doubt that’s an original observation — I’ve heard that Nixon said the same thing in 1973. But when the idea first occurred to me personally some years ago, I thought the long haul would be longer.
Social Distance
Perhaps I should have updated my view based on the rise of Hamas to power and the subsequent severing of various social and economic ties between the Israelis and the Gaza Palestinians. It used to be that a hundred thousand Gazans worked in Israel, but that came to an end with the election of Hamas, a group that rose to prominence with suicide terrorism and that maintains killing Israelis as its central political platform. Israel started issuing work permits again a couple years ago, but the decade-and-a-half hiatus surely destroyed many ties of interdependence and intimacy that might otherwise dampen the conflict.
Walled off and separated from the Israelis, kept under guard and blockade, the entire population might have undergone a large-scale version of the process sometimes seen in the radicalization of jihadi recruits in the West: They retreat into a solidary group whose members effectively radicalize one another through mutual influence and one-upsmanship. Of course, having elected suicide terrorists as their actual government, they were already starting off pretty radicalized. But I would imagine that voices of moderation are even rarer now than in 2006.
I would also imagine that some of the young men carrying out Saturday’s attacks might not have seen an Israeli civilian up close until they killed one. Likewise fewer young Israelis would have a work acquaintance who is “one of the good ones.” Such ties across groups might not be enough to prevent collective violence, but they can lead to it being more restrained than it would be otherwise. Based on sociologist Donald Black’s theories, in their absence I would expect violence to be more severe, and levied with broader liability.
In addition to social distance, the nature of the underlying offenses matters as well. One side’s way of prosecuting its grievances usually begets grievances on the other side. And beheading infants or parading around the corpses of slain women will also not encourage a restrained response.
The Nature of the Violence
I’ve puzzled over how to classify the patterns of violence that unfolded over the weekend. People in the media just use terms like “terrorism” or “genocide” to convey moral disapproval, but in my line of work there are explicit definitions that I’d like to consistently apply.
(Update: Bradley Campbell has a Twitter thread on this matter.)
For instance, sociologist Donald Black defines terrorism as mass violence carried out covertly by organized civilians against other civilians. I’m not sure to what extent the attackers can be called civilians here — Hamas is now the government and these are its forces, though they might not be uniformed I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them had no formal rank but were just joining up with groups of kin and friends to get a piece of the action. Maybe we can say it’s a hybrid of army and militia or paramilitary.
As for targeting civilians: Gazan forces are hitting both civilian and military targets. In addition to the images of women and children being killed or kidnapped, one can find videos of tanks destroyed and bases overrun. The killing of civilians happens in conventional, bilateral warfare as well — there were families in Dresden and Hiroshima — but there seems to be some special effort here to attack them as soft targets. Children and infants have been beheaded, with some hostages killed on camera.
(Edit: I pointed out that specific example with the infants was being disputed, but now it looks confirmed, and in any case there’s lots of examples of women and children being killed in various ways — the method is relatively unimporant, other than that it shows a willingness to engage in up-close, brutal violence.)
Sociologist Bradley Campbell defines genocide as the unilateral ethnically based mass killing, and something like the massacre of 250 mostly Israeli concert goers or the extermination of over 100 Israelis at a kibbutz seems to match this as well. The overall conflict won’t remain unilateral, but we could call them localized genocides in the context of warfare. This is pretty normal by historical standards, really, as mass killing of enemy populations was part and parcel of much ancient and tribal warfare.
Author Wilfred Reilly has made this point on Twitter, noting that Saturrday’s attacks remind him some of the really big attacks by American Indians on settlers. For instance, at the start of the Second Anglo-Powhatan War, Opechancanough’s forces launched a surprised attack that massacred over 300 men, women, and children — one third of the English colonists in Virginia — and took 20 women captive.
A surprise attacks that combines assaults on enemy forts with up-close massacres of entire families, the taking of women and children as captives, parading enemy corpses or body parts as trophies — this is basically the way of tribal warfare, and really much warfare up to the modern era. As such, it is somewhat inaccurate to characterize it as inhuman or subhuman — it is all too human. If anything, it is rather amazing that modern rules of war, or distinctions between soldiers and civilians, have as much influence as they do have, even if only at the margins. Large-scale tribal or post-tribal warfare seems to blend categories like war, genocide, and terrorism that are easier to distinguish in a world dominated by states with uniformed militaries.
Comparing this to the Indian Massacre of 1622 raises the question of what happened to the Indians. We all know which side won out over the long term. Even in the short term, despite the initial successful shock, Virginia Colony did not fall. And a year later the settlers would get their revenge by inviting 200 members of the confederacy to peace talks, only to kill them with poisoned wine.
It is common for atrocities to beget atrocities in this fashion.
The Fate of Gaza
In his work on genocide, Bradley Campbell discusses one scenario that produces it: When two ethnic groups live in close proximity, and one is superior to the other in numbers, wealth, technology, and military power, and the inferior group rises or rebels in some way. That is similar enough to the current situation. And California ranchers exterminated the nearby Yuki Indians for much smaller provocations than this. Will a vengeful Israel finally exterminate its enemies?
It’s possible, but I think less likely than not. Israel is democratic, and democracies usually have less stomach for this sort of thing. It is also, for lack of a better term, a modern society. It won’t be fighting a tribal-style war that would have been normal in an earlier age. In the modern age, genocide is deviant behavior, something that large constituencies at home and abroad will condemn. Those constituencies include the something like 20 percent of Israelis who are Arab, and I think the internal diversity of the country (even the Jewish majority is far from homogeneous) also works against such extreme violence toward outsiders.
While I don’t expect mass extermination, I do expect a gloves-off war that produces a lot of civilian casualties — as modern wars do. Israeli bombs will kill little girls just like American bombs did in Germany and Japan. Personally, I think the evil of war — even a just or necessary war — is underrated.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is one or more localized massacres of Gaza civilians — probably a squad of adrenalized soldiers venting their tension and rage on a convenient civilian target. This sort of thing happened in the Vietnam War, and street to street fighting against urban guerillas raises the odds of it. There is also the element of personal vendettas, as given the small size of the country many IDF soldiers will no doubt know someone who was slain, tortured, raped, kidnapped, or otherwise brutalized in Saturday’s attacks.
For all that I don’t think there will be soldiers running amok on the scale that one sees in the sack of ancient cities or the Rape of Nanjing. I’d even be mildly surprised by something on the scale of the My Lai massacre. There were fewer prying eyes in the jungles of Vietnam.
I do thinks thousands will die, including those who die fighting for Hamas. Absent some massive external intervention against the Israelis, it seems the fate of that organization is to be ground into powder. And in dying the organization will likely take a sizable chunk of Gaza’s fighting aged men with it. I can’t fathom the long-term strategy behind Saturday’s attacks, unless it was a large-scale suicide mission.
As for the rest of the populace, I don’t know. One option I’d expect to be attractive to Israel is expulsion — sending the people there to live elsewhere outside of Israels’s borders — though the difficulty would be finding a country willing to accept them.