October 14, 2023: Israel-Hamas War

(Date in the title was corrected.)

Good afternoon. There is a great deal to be said about the war. It is going to take a long time to coalesce my thoughts into something coherent—not to mention that events are still unfolding rapidly and that there is a great deal unknown to the public—and so this will be more of a collection of observations than something neatly packaged.

The war began about a week ago with a series of terrorist attacks led by Hamas. Media reports put the number of casualties at around 1300, which would make this the second or third deadliest terrorist attack in world history. Because I want to keep this blog at a PG-13 level at most, I will not describe the incident in detail. There are many other sources that have done so. I think I can safely assume that if you haven’t looked at Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in detail, then however gruesome you imagine the attack to have been, it’s worse than that. This has been one of the most barbaric events in recent world history.

Following the attack, Israel formally declared war on Hamas and has mostly pushed back militants that invaded Israeli territory. Israel’s response, Operation Swords of Iron, has the stated goals of

“clear out hostile forces;” “reinforce other fronts so that nobody should mistakenly join this war;” and “exact an immense price from the enemy within the Gaza Strip.”

The foregoing analyzes the situation from a legal standpoint and concludes that, under international law, Hamas had no grounds to conduct Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and that Israel had every right to conduct Operation Swords of Iron. Whether Israel can be said to be “occupying” Gaza is a grey area.

So far, Israel has conducted air strikes in Gaza and ordered a blockade. There have been limited ground incursions, and as of this writing, it appears that Israel is preparing for a full-on invasion of Gaza. There has been extensive media coverage of the events, and any summary I try to give now be out of date soon, so there is little point in trying to be comprehensive.

Hamas

Hamas was founded in 1987 with the outbreak of the First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising throughout Gaza and the West Bank. As outlined in a 2009 Wall Street Journal analysis, the origins of Hamas can be traced to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who brought Islamist ideology to Palestine and who also established Hamas’ predecessor organization, Mujama Al-Islamiya. These organizations ultimately derive from the Muslim Brotherhood, whose founding in 1928 is considered the seminal movement in the development of worldwide political Islam. I wrote about this briefly after the killing of Ayman Al-Zawahiri last year, and it is a subject for which a more comprehensive overview has been on my to-do list for a while.

According to the WSJ article, Israel initially supported Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was founded in the wake of the Six-Day War (1967) and has also committed numerous acts of terrorism against Israel. The PLO’s dominant faction is the secular, left-wing Fatah. Hamas denounced the 1993 Oslo Accords as a “selling out” of the PLO.

Hamas’ 1988 charter states explicitly,

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).

In more recent years, Hamas has offered some signals that they may accept a truce along the 1967 borders, but such signals are probably now dead on arrival.

In 2006, Hamas won legislative elections in Palestine against Fatah, which was widely seen to be corrupt. Hamas rules Gaza in accordance with sharia law and institutes policies that have been compared to those of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another group involved in this week’s attacks, received $100 million annually from Iran. The United States considers Hamas to be a terrorist organization, meaning that it is illegal for Americans to provide any material support. Many other countries designated Hamas a terrorist organization, but many do not, with Russia, China, Syria, Turkey and Iran among the nations that have considered Hamas’ armed struggle to be “legitimate”.

Some people argue that, regardless of ethics of Hamas’ action, the group should be regarded as a response to the bad conditions in which the Palestinian people find themselves. I’m not so sure about this. Hamas, as documented above, was birthed by the Muslim Brotherhood, encouraged in its development by Israel, and now supported by Iran. Hamas’ animating ideology is transnational Islamism, not Palestinian aspirations. Hamas is well documented to use human shields, or the deliberate launching of rockets from residential areas to force Israel to rack up civilian casualties when they retaliate, which Hamas then uses for propaganda purposes. In 2010, and perhaps now, Hamas has deliberately sabotaged the peace process. It would be less accurate to say that Hamas is an expression of Palestinian aspirations, and more accurate to say that Hamas exploits Palestinian suffering to pursue an agenda that has nothing to do with Palestinian well-being.

Other Players

Hamas led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Other organizations involved in the attack include Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Sunni Islamist organization that, like Hamas, advocates the destruction of Israel, rejects the Oslo Accords, derives from the Muslim Brotherhood, and receives support from Iran; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular, Marxist-Leninist organization that takes a more hardline position than the PLO; the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which split from the PLFP and has similar ideology; and The Lions’ Den, a new, Gen Z led nonsectarian militant organization.

So far Israel has had limited fighting with Hezbollah, such as in the disputed Shebaa Farms region. Hezbollah has threatened to enter the war if Israel conducts a ground invasion of Gaza. Hezbollah receives $700 million per year from Iran, seven times as much as Hamas and PIJ, and Hezbollah’s formal entry into the war would be a major escalation.

All this raises a big question about who would lead the Palestinian territories in future negotiations. Hamas is out of the question, and the Palestinian Authority lacks legitimacy. A recent survey found that 71% of Palestinians support violent groups Lions’ Den and Jenin Brigade. This is a serious problem. Either public opinion would have to change drastically, or peace would have to be imposed against the will of the majority of Palestinians.

Outside Interference

There have, of course, been numerous instances of Palestinian terrorism against Israel over the years, but Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was a major escalation over anything we have seen before. Reports are that Hamas had been planning the attack for two years. This raises two obvious questions: how could Mossad, Israel’s renowned intelligence agency, have failed to see this coming; and were outside powers involved in the attack?

There are no obvious answers to either of these questions. On the first, Americans would be well to remember that their own intelligence apparatus has had many failures over the years. There are reports that Egypt warned Israel that a major attack was coming but was ignored. There are allegations that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignored warning signs and deliberately inflamed the situation. Neither of these are confirmed as far as I know. No doubt, recriminations about alleged intelligence failures will reverberate in Israeli politics for many years to come.

The magnitude of the attacks naturally raise suspicion that Hamas enjoyed some foreign support, with Iran a prime suspect. The Wall Street Journal alleged exactly this last Sunday. However, on Tuesday, Iran denied the report (while praising the attack), and on Wednesday, it was reported that U.S. intelligence had not found evidence of Iranian involvement. John Kirby of the National Security Council stated that, while there is no specific evidence implicating Iran in this week’s attack, Iran is “complicit” due to their sponsorship of Hamas.

On the day of the attack, the Robert Lansing Institute alleged that the Kremlin had provided intelligence and weapons to Hamas and played a direct role in planning. The RLI is a new organization, about which I know little, and I have not seen these allegations confirmed by another source, and so I can’t take this seriously until independent confirmation from a reliable source emerges.

For now, until I have reason to think otherwise, my working model is that Hamas led on the planning of the attack without direct foreign involvement. Last Saturday, the Institute for the Study of War, which I have found to be a good source on the Russia-Ukraine War, considered Hamas’ possible motivations. Many observers, including ISW, have suggested that Hamas is trying to disrupt normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia (more on that below); this is highly plausible but not proven as far as I know. Hamas may have expected that other allies, including Hezbollah and other regimes and militias comprising Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” would join the fight, as happened 50 years ago in the Yom Kippur War. They may be hoping that a campaign of terror against Israel will destabilize and weaken the country.

Iron Dome

Since Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats last year, I have been interested in missile defense and written about it several times. Obviously there are orders of magnitude of difference between defending against Hamas’ Qassam rockets, which are little more than garage projects, and a volley of Russian or Chinese ICBMs, but there are relevant connections.

Iron Dome is Israel’s missile defense system against short-range rockets. Here’s a video of Iron Dome intercepting rockets. Experience shows that Iron Dome is ~90% effective against the usual sporadic rocket launches, though performance is likely worse against a concentrated, large-scale attack such as we saw this week, as the system gets overwhelmed. Wikipedia lists many foreign sales of Iron Dome, as the system is highly regarded internationally, but Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov explains that the system would be inadequate against Russian cruise and ballistic missiles. Iron Dome shares a cost problem with other missile defense systems: the cost of munitions to shoot down a rocket greatly exceed the cost of the rocket itself, perhaps by more than a factor of 100. The aforementioned article is a proponent of directed energy, as am I, but that’s getting too far off topic. Here is another article with more details on how Iron Dome works.

The Arab Response

As mentioned above, a possible explanation for the timing of the attack is that Hamas wishes to disrupt the potential for normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Abraham Accords, a signature policy of the Trump administration, were a normalization between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates in 2020. The Biden administration is building on these efforts and trying to secure the biggest prize of all: Israeli-Saudi normalization. The ultimate goal is to build an Arab-Israeli military alliance, a Middle Eastern analogue of NATO, to contain Iran. Such efforts have failed many times in the past, and even before last week I would not have considered success to be likely.

The cause of Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian rights has a lot of sympathy in the Arab world, but these concerns feel more like “waving the bloody shirt” than actual solutions. Egypt’s closing of the Rafah crossing, at the border between Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, raises questions about the sincerity of their “sympathy”. So does their support of Chinese persecution of the Uyghurs. However, Egypt does host about 300,000 refugees from various countries.

An article in Foreign Policy asserts that, in pursuit of the Abraham Accords, Netanyahu and Donald Trump threw Palestinian aspirations under the bus. There is much to criticize. Netanyahu has made many mistakes, particularly in approving settlements in the West Bank. Trump departed from previous administrations by offering his blessings on those settlements. But to blame this on the Abraham Accords is misguided. Israeli concessions on settlements were part of the Abraham Accords and would be part of any Israeli-Saudi deal.

International Response

Despite the well-known dislike between Joe Biden and Netanyahu, the United States pledged unconditional support for Israel and their right to defend themselves. That support has come in the form of moving aircraft carriers and supplying munitions, particularly Tamir interceptors for Iron Dome (why exactly the U.S. has Tamir interceptors is a question that I wish I could answer). The USS Gerald R. Ford, deployed to the eastern Mediterranean, is meant to deter other countries from attacking Israel and to assist against Iranian ballistic missile attack, should things come to that.

The UN Security Council was unable to agree on a statement condemning Hamas because of Russia’s veto.

The price of crude oil and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had not shown obvious unusual behavior, while the price of gold is modestly up in the last week. These traditional indicators of geopolitical risk don’t show much cause for alarm.

Political Response

Netanyahu has presided over one of the most right-wing governments in Israel’s history, but he has established a unity government for the duration of the war. Americans observed in 2001 that the “rally around the leader” effect in a time of crisis only lasts for so long. Before this week, Netanyahu already faced much criticism over his judicial reform proposal and corruption charges, and now criticisms about the government’s failure to prepare for the attacks suggest that some very serious recriminations are on the horizon.

In the United States, very few people want to be seen doing a whataboutism or saying “I’m against terrorism, but …”. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is an exception, praising the attacks to widespread condemnation of almost everyone in American politics. It would appear that we’ve come full circle from Palestinians celebrating on September 11, 2001 (it should be emphasized that the television broadcasts of that day also represent a very small subset of the Palestinian population).

Donald Trump made a bizarre attack against Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Most commentators have written this off as Trump’s colossal ego, but I wonder if there is more going on. There has long been an isolationist element in the MAGA wing of the GOP, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I wonder if Trump is trying to lay the groundwork for an anti-aid stance toward Israel as well. If so, that would be a radical departure from his stance in his (first) term. It’s nothing but speculation so far.

The United States is and has long been more sympathetic to Israel that most other countries, and many people misinterpret this as indifference to Palestinians. But see this piece from the Council on Foreign Relations for American leadership on the peace process. The article highlights the Camp David Accords (under Carter), the Oslo Accords (Clinton), the Abraham Accords (Trump), and work toward a two-state solution under Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, and Trump.

Elsewhere in the world, Chinese media has taken a one-sided approach, blaming Israel and the United States for the crisis. There is no mention of Xinjiang.

Conclusion

This article has turned out to be much longer than I intended, and I had to cut an enormous amount of material that I wanted to discuss. That’s because the problem is enormously complex. I wish I had an easy solution to offer, a way to insure a good outcome in the war or a resolution to the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I don’t.

Quick Hits

Dale Elton wrote a piece a few weeks ago on the red flags around LK-99, the lead apatite material doped with copper that was proposed to be a superconductor. Had I paid more attention to these warning signs, some would have been apparent earlier. Others require some knowledge of materials science that I don’t possess. Although my article a few months did include some disclaimers, I don’t think they were adequate. One thing I particularly regret is citing prediction markets, which performed very badly. Prediction markets can be useful, but I learned a lesson that I should avoid using them as a substitute for actually understanding an issue.

Ben Southwood write about the flaws of the “induced demand” concept that is often cited against road expansion.

Robin Hanson argues for a massive baby bonus to combat falling birth rates. This idea doesn’t seem very realistic, so I’ll present it as a “food for thought” idea.

Noah Smith’s article, “You're not going to like what comes after Pax Americana”, is a fairly good exemplar of the idealist school of thought in foreign policy. The central point is that the relative world peace since 1945 can be explained by American military dominance. I think he overestimates Chinese military potential in the coming years, though, and several aspects of the story come across as a “just so” explanation of world events.

I haven’t posted anything on X (Twitter) in a few weeks. My frustration about changes to the site and Elon Musk’s unhinged political views has been growing for a long time, and this promotion of an antisemitic account was the last straw. My account is still open, and I haven’t decided what to do with it.