In all the endless torrent of hot takes, this post is the first I’ve read that seriously challenges us. Hamas started the firefight. There’s a limit to how much I can expect our soldiers, as they move through alleyways under a hail of bullets, to be precise with their aim. I was in the infantry. I even found myself in a couple of urban engagements over the years. It’s hard to convey the sense of chaos and confusion. That’s actually the central challenge of this kind of warfare: maintaining focus and unit cohesion under this kind of fire. All the hand-wringing about civilian deaths is absolutely correct about the scale of the tragedy but completely ignores the battlefield realities that led to those deaths, and therefore cannot offer a serious moral argument against the operation. Hamas, not the IDF, forced a gunbattle in a civilian area specifically designed to produce civilian casualties. Hamas’s basic strategy is Palestinian civilian deaths. That’s hasn’t changed. But then there’s this. “However, Hamas’s operational security protocols likely ensured that most civilians in the immediate vicinity/proximity had no idea that hostages were being held there; this means there truly were innocent, uninvolved civilians near the hostages who, for no fault of their own, were eliminated by the IDF.” I agree. Hamas’s astonishingly competent compartmentalization – the very thing that made October 7 possible – is one major factor that robs us of the ability to lay the entirety of the bloodshed at Hamas’s feet. I’m not innovating here. If Hamas’s basic strategy is Palestinian civilian deaths, our basic strategy needs to be, and needed to have been from the start, to avoid those deaths. That’s a first principle, obviously. It’s morally necessary irrespective of good strategy. But it’s also a strategic necessity. And as far as I can tell, at the larger scale, that’s what happened. For many decent observers witnessing terrible images of suffering and death, that assertion can be hard to believe. But it’s true nonetheless. The basic Israeli war-fighting methods in Gaza - at least after the first battle of Gaza City, with its emphasis on the air war - meets this strategic and moral necessity at the broader scale. The death toll actually proves that, whatever our enemies, whether out of well-meaning ignorance or simple malice, may say. That’s especially true when you take into account that any Israeli strategy must be implemented in a battlefield specifically designed by Hamas to increase the death toll. But this brings me to my point: this larger scale isn’t enough. In countless small, tactical ways, we can do better. There are no hard dichotomies in war. Only the totally ignorant and inexperienced (many NGOs fall into this category) make absolutist moral claims about warfighting methods. In real life, war is a series of choices that lie on a spectrum from bad to worse. But from that seemingly exonerating truth flows another: It is always possible to move along that spectrum, to do better. It is always possible to tweak a tactic in a way that saves 2% of the lives that would otherwise have been lost, or sometimes 20%. The IDF has proven itself a profoundly successful learning organization in this regard. The battle of Rafah is two orders of magnitude less destructive for Palestinian civilians that the battle of Gaza City was. The IDF of June 2024 knows how to things in an urban battlefield - exacting higher costs from terrorists and lower costs from civilians - that the IDF of October 2023 didn’t know how to do. My IDF, the army of 25 years ago, couldn’t hold a candle to today’s army when it comes to these capabilities. The trend, in other words, is in the right direction. But it’s can always be improved. By definition. And if it can, it must. Hamas’s strategy demands of us a miracle: To filter out of a civilian population a military force bent on denying us that distinction. But this is the IDF. Our goal must be this miracle. https://bird.makeup/@afalkhatib/1799930677892395307
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