War is not a game. It must be won.
The State of Israel is self-constrained by a combination of two things: international laws of war and a pathological need to seek approval from others.
The need for approval is a pathology similar to what is sometimes found in battered women, who are sure that if they show their abuser how good they’re being and how hard they’re trying, the abuser will cease his abuse.
We see this most recently in the incessant bragging by both the Israeli government and the Israeli military that we have the lowest civilian-to-combatant ratio in any urban warfare situation ever. Which, while it is true, comes across at the umpteenth hearing as more of a plea than a brag. “Please, oh nations of the world, don’t hate us! We are throwing away the lives of our own children in order to spare enemy non-combatants.”
(And that is what we’re doing, of course. We are sparing them from paying the price for electing terrorists to lead them, for supporting — actively and passively — their attempts to murder us, and for celebrating them whenever they succeed in this evil intent. Yet despite their demonstrated evil and hatred, we continue to throw away the lives of our own children, hundreds of whom would still be alive if we had simply dealt with the enemy from the air instead of sending them into buildings on the ground, lest an enemy, who desperately wants us dead, but happens not to be holding a weapon at this precise moment, get hurt.)
This article is not about that pathology, because there’s no cure for it but new leadership that doesn’t suffer from it.
Laws of war
War is not a game. War is not some Marquis of Queensbury ruled sport where you can sit back in your easy chair and periodically comment, “Oh, too bad, old boy!” or “A touch! A veritable touch!” The only excuse for war at all is as a response to someone who has launched it against you, and the only moral way to wage it is to make sure they can never, ever, repeat the offense.
The following is an excerpt from a book that expresses this far better than I can:
“The humans of Earth keep developing ways to limit the damage of war — pacts about what constitutes a war crime. Banning poison gas, for instance. The formal agreements only last until someone wants to break them, of course, but a surprising number of the agreements lasted for a while — just because of intelligent self-interest. Mutually assured destruction. But eventually, they go back to total war, because any other policy turns war into a game, and games only last as long as both sides play by the rules.”
“No rules in war,” said Olivenko knowingly.
“No rules in a war you want to win,” said Loaf. “As long as winning doesn’t matter, then you can have rules and make a game of it.”
“Why fight a war if you don’t intend to win it?”
“When armies benefit from being perceived as necessary, and war provides a means of gaining prestige and leverage over the government,” said Loaf. “Then victory ends a very profitable game. So you play the game of war only fervently enough to keep your military budget high. Nations can get used to a fairly high level of combat attrition without noticing or caring that nobody’s actually trying to win, and nothing but the lives of a few soldiers is at stake.”
–From Ruins, by Orson Scott Card (under fair use)
This describes the military-industrial complex of the United States quite well, and it’s part of the reason that they are so intent on preventing us from winning. But while it may apply to some groups or individuals in Israel as well, this doesn’t seem to be the reason the IDF refuses to win. Rather, the very concept of winning has been stricken from the lexicon of the IDF for so long that they almost instinctively rebel against it. To the point where the elected Prime Minister of Israel has had to fight with them throughout this war to get them to take steps towards victory.
We complain about the fact that we keep having “rounds”. That we keep on “mowing the lawn” and waiting for it to grow back and result in the next attack, because in 1993, with the signing of the Oslo Accords, we conceded that the other side is right. That we are the aggressors and the occupiers, and that the only reason we’re fighting is the very practical reason that we don’t want to be killed because of our choices.
We refuse to win, because we don’t believe we deserve to. Or that’s been the reason until now, at any rate. Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to have decided that he’s not going out without winning this war, and winning means ending the threat. It doesn’t mean that we will never be menaced by anyone ever again, but it does mean that the Forever War that began in 1948 must finally end. And since the only ending the Palestinians will ever — can ever — accept includes the end of the Jewish state, we have to choose an ending that they don’t accept, and implement it by force.
This precludes obeying the “laws of war” in every instance, because the Palestinians, largely due to the advice they have received from disloyal Jews, have learned to game the system to the extent that those laws have become weapons to use against us.
We must not shrink from doing what is necessary to end the Arab war against our existence that has persisted since 1948 (and well before). We must stop begging for acceptance and approval from the nations of the world, and do what is necessary. Recent history has shown that when we ask permission, the answer is always no. But when we go ahead and go into Gaza, go into Rafah, go into Lebanon, kill Haniya in the heart of Tehran itself, ignore the sovereignty of enemy nations and kidnap terrorist commanders from Syria and Lebanon, when we do things like this, the world doesn’t bother with false outrage. They suck it up and accept it as a done deal.
We need to make staying in Judea/Samaria or Gaza conditional on a public oath of loyalty to Israel, as a Jewish state, and everyone who is unwilling to do this must be relocated. Expelled, as a clear and present danger to the lives of every single citizen of Israel. Taken to the border and put across whether they, or the country on the other side of the border, like it or not. And once we have eliminated everyone who will not comply, we need to annex these parts of our land and finally put an end to the War of Independence — not with an armistice this time, but with victory.
Finally, we have to make it very clear to our neighbors that any hostile action taken across our border will result in that border being moved 100 meters outward. Fire a rocket at us, lose 100 meters of land. Fire ten? Lose a kilometer. Losing land is the only thing the enemy recognizes as defeat, and as Moshe Feiglin has pointed out time and again, this is why it must be what we recognize as victory.