I’m a Former Israeli Officer. AMA
Hey everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster.
My name is Yovel Rom. I’m an Israeli data scientist. I served in the IDF in an elite program called Talpiot, which consists of a physics udergrad and broad military education (basically West Point for technology people, but more elitist), then as a data scientist, and finished my service as a captain. I’m currently at home, since I finished my service two years ago and they don’t need many data scientists right now.
Ask me anything. I’m as updated on the situation as a person with no formal position can be (which might be less than you expect).
EDIT: I will try to cite sources as much as possible, but I might do that in Hebrew since there’s so much more of it. I will only cite Wikipedia, major newspapers and state- funded think tanks, which are reliable.
Not a question, but seems relevant for people who read this post:
Meni Rosenfeld, one of the early LessWrong Israel members, has enlisted:
Source: https://www.facebook.com/meni.rosenfeld/posts/pfbid0bkvfrb3qFTF7U82eMgkZzgMjMT4s3pbGUx7ahgKX1B8hr2n1viYqg9Msz6t3dBUPl (a public post by him)
My utmost sympathy goes out to the civilians (and soldiers for that matter) who have been harmed in such a horrible way. The conduct of Hamas is unspeakable.
My guess is that you most likely do not expect the currently unfolding Israeli response to result in a massive humanitarian tragedy (please correct me if that’s wrong). Do you have any specific response to those who have concerns in this vein?
Specifically, the likely results of denying food supplies and electricity to Gaza seem disastrous for the civilians therein. Water disruption is also dangerous, though I read that water is being trucked in.
Also, Israel seems to be gearing up for a very large scale operation in Gaza, with potentially tens of thousands of soldiers involved. What is your expectation of the casualties—of combatants, for both sides, and non-combatants on the Palestinian side?
I don’t expect it, since historically Israel let humanitarian supplies in during wars. I also sincerely hope it will continue do that during this war.
IIRC (can’t find sources right now) common practice has been to stop electricity for some time, then when international pressure increases supply it interminently.
Yeah, I don’t understand the water situation myself. I hear Hamas complaining about electricity, and not about water, so it seems to be fine for now.
About casualties: That’s extremely difficult to answer in the best conditions, depends on the way Israel will do it, and requires actual expertise and classified information which I lack. I will try to give you the way I think about this question.
The most similar war would be Operation Protective Edge, in 2014. Gazan forces were approximated at 25,000 people. According to Israel [1] in that war 2,125 Gazans were killed, of which 36% were civilians, 44% combatants, and 20% uncategorized males aged 16–50 (probably some are militants, some civilians and some opportunistic attackers who did not formally belong to any organization). Israel suffered 67 soldiers killed. However, the cities themselves were not invaded, and Hamas’s vast bunker system was not directly confronted. Most palestinian casualties were from air strikes.
The most similar purely urban battle I can think about is the battle of Jenin (AFAIK the Israeli version of the events is the correct one). It consisted of 1000 Israeli soldiers vs 300 Palestinians, in a 40k people city. it ended with 23 Israeli soldiers killed, ~25-40 Palestinian militants killed, and 15-25 civilians killed. Direct multiplication would suggest 2,300 Israeli dead, 2,500 − 4,000 militants, and 1,500 - 2,500 civilians killed. In practice it would be more, since Gaza is better fortified and Hamas would not have anywhere to flee, unlike in Jenin.
An additional possibility is the usage of siege tatics. It seems siege directed against civilians is prohibited, but it’s possible if you let civilians out. Therefore, if Israel manages to establish a humanitarian corridor to Egypt where Gazans can flee, without too many casualties for itself beyond the 1,000+ it already has. I find it very unlikely we’ll have a siege without such corridor.
The truth will lie somewhere between airstrikes, urban fighting and siege. I don’t know how Israel will combine the three, and it’s probably being decided right now. We’ll have to wait and see.
[1] I use Israel’s figures because Hamas’ are trivially unreliable, and UN Human Rights Council is an extremely biased body. For instance, after the recent attack on Israel, they held a moment of silence in memory of lives “lost in Palestinian territories and elsewhere”.
Thanks for the response, especially including specific examples.
My motivation for asking these questions, is to anticipate that which will be obvious and of greatest humanitarian concern in hindsight, say in a year.
This is a scenario that I think is moderately probable, that I’m worried about:
Part 1, most certain: Israeli airstrikes continue, unclear if they’re still using their knocking system much. Due in part to deliberate Hamas mixing of combatants and non-combatants, numbers of civilian casualties rise over time.
Part 2, less certain: Israel continues to withhold or significantly restrict electricity and/or food/medical supplies. Civilian casualties rise over time.
Part 3, less certain: Israel proceeds with an invasion/occupation of Gaza. Goals could be restricted to killing known members of Hamas, destroying Hamas materiel, rescuing hostages, or they could be expanded to some kind of occupation or even resettlement objectives.
With part 2 and 3, the possibilities for non-combatant casualties seem largely open ended. The results (if these things happen) will depend not just on Israel’s conduct, but also the reaction from Hamas and the general Palestinian population.
I think that those who are able to consider the situation dispassionately, both inside and outside of Israel, should be clear that the maximally aggressive Israeli response would be tragic and catastrophic. The question, therefore, is how much restraint can be shown; and to a lesser extent, if the response can do any good. As a backdrop to all this, I also consider that it’s as yet uncertain whether, among other considerations, there could be more attacks against Israel yet to come in the near term.
I understand that you might not have much to say about all this since it’s largely speculation, just thought I’d throw in my thoughts about the situation.
Part 1: I agree, it seems they don’t use the Roofknock Protocol for now, and that will be the main source of civilian casualties. It’s a tragedy, but not actually a problem by law of war (see Jay Donde’s post).
Part 2: I generally agree. I don’t think actual food shortage will be a problem (5%), electricity might (10-33%, very uncertain) but I don’t think will cause many casualties by itself. We live in a warm country, and hospitals (and Hamas operatives) have emergency reserves.
Part 3: I agree, and think it depends a lot on Egyptian refugee policy.
Additional possibility is a second front in Lebanon, which adds orders of magnitude more missiles, which are also stronger and more accurate. Israeli civilian casualties will quickly rise, not to mention the possibility of them trying similar tactics to those Hamas tried last Saturday (even though that will probably be less effective, since Israel is on high alert).
Of course such scenario will also deeply impact Lebanon and its citizens.
As for your later point, I think Israel is trying to topple Hamas’s regime, one way or another. The region around Gaza is populated by 70,000 people, who will not stay there if there’s a risk for attacks like the last one. I am not sure whether it will be done by completely occupying the strip, a siege, or something completely different, but I don’t think we’ll return to status quo unless Israel tries and fails to do that.
About the Lebanon situation, I’m much more sure that it will make Palestinian casualties rise than that it will make Israeli casualties rise. My impression (from public information) is that Israel is capable of destroying both Hammas and Hizballah pretty quickly if it is willing to play dirty enough. And my impression about Israel is that it care about ethics, but not enough to allow an existential threat to exist. So in such situation I expect Israel to be super aggressive against Gaza in order to end it quickly and focus on Lebanon.
I agree it will also affect Gaza. Disagree about the effect on Israeli casualties.
Do you think that this conflict is sufficiently similar to the Ukraine war that it can also be considered a proxy war that indicates/reveals the relative power/assertiveness of different geopolitical poles (e.g. the US and Russia/China)? e.g. to what extent Russia and possibly China provided military technology and logistical support via Iran that ended up being relevant to the conflict, even if they didn’t start this conflict itself?
Also, a more distant question I’ve had for a while, did Russia or China provide any kind of technological or logistical support to the major opposing parties of the War on Terror during the 2000s (e.g. the primary Iraq and Afghanistan insurgencies)? Also, before or after the conflict started is relevant.
It’s an Iranian proxy war, and Iran is allied with Russia, but Russia likely isn’t interested in this other than to the extent that it’s an international distraction from Ukraine.
And Russia provided military hardware to groups it supported in Syria, and many of those groups were adjacent to terrorist groups—but not materially more so than the US’s support of groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I slightly disagree with David here: Hamas representatives did thank some unnamed countries in addition to Iran in the last couple of days, which might hint to some Russian involvement and supply. However they don’t want to be publicly associated with all this, so I imagine it’s not too substantial.
I don’t know about the war on terror more than what David said, sorry. It’s a bit far from home, and I was young at the time and didn’t follow it closely.
What interests do you imagine Russia having here? Israel was pretty shy at supporting Ukraine, so from the Russian perspective, Israeli policy in the last years shouldn’t be seen as too bad.
There are many other countries that have motives.
There was a deal with the Egyptian military that in return for the US paying them off, they won’t support the Palestinians. It seems like the US stopped some of the payments in the last years “because of the country’s repressive policies”. It would be surprising if some in the Egyptian military think they don’t need to uphold their end of the deal in response.
The Israel/Saudi deals are hated by many Muslims in the region. There might be people in various Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia who would like that alliance to break up.
The Russian are now close Iranian allies, so it might have been some form of payment.
Could you point me to the exact deal? I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Also, Egypt had three different regimes since 2010, which all had different interests. We have reasonably good relations with the current one.
Sure. Qatar is one other obvious candidate, and there are probably other possibilities.
The Camp David Accords accords back in 1979 where Egypt and Israel signed a peace deal. They are the reason U.S. aid to Egypt was the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel.
The governments of Egypt changed three times since 2010 but military leadership didn’t.
First, the military allowed the government to fall and be replaced by a democratic one partly because the government didn’t do what the military wanted. Then, there was the Democratic government which also didn’t do what the military wanted and finally, the military took over.
When the military took over various groups pressured the US to reduce aid to Egypt. From the perspective of the Egyptian military that’s likely walking back on the agreements on which the peace between Egypt and Israel rests.
Oh, I see. I find it very unlikely. Such actions would border on casus beli, and it just doesn’t seem important enough to risk an actual war with Israel. The US sent ~$80B over the years, which is a bit less than $2B a year, which is 2% of Egypt’s government budget.
The peace with Israel is mainly based on mutual deterrence since the 1973 war, military aid from Israel and more. The US is not a major actor within it.
I would expect very public, very ulikely to escalate actions in order to increase US aid. Not something like this.
The entity that I’m talking about is the Egyptian military and not the Egyptian government.
It’s worth noting here that the Egyptian military is a bit different than a lot of other militaries and does things like olive oil production.
Directly funding Hamas would be a casus beli. On the other hand, there are actions like saying “because you cut the funding we unfortunately can’t afford border patrol at that point where there might be weapons going into Gaza, it’s too bad that we are stripped of cash...”
We are in agreement, then
Hiya Yovel! Q1: How have you been impacted by the recent hostilities? Q2: What do you think are the potential end goals of this newly re-escalated conflict for the Israeli government? (As an naive observer, seems like [occupying Gaza / leave a power vacuum / let the Hamas reorg after] are all rather bad outcomes)
Thanks for your concern! Thankfully I’ve been impacted very little personally. I live in the center of Israel which “only” gets bombed once a day or so. My room is a bomb shelter (as is required by Isreali law to be available in every apartment), so I don’t even have to get out of bed if there’s an alarm during the night!
However two of my cousins are in combat, have enlisted as resrves and will go into the Gaza strip if it’s invaded, so I’m worried for their safety.
In two word: Yes, exactly.
Israel’s strategy since the Hamas took the strip over in 2007 has been to try and contain it, and keeping it weak by periodic, limited confrontations (the so called Mowing the Lawn doctorine), and trying to economically develop the strip in order to give Hamas incentives to avoid confrontation. While Hamas grew stronger, the general feeling was that the strategy works and the last 15 years were not that bad.
I think the genral concensus in Israel right now is that Hamas proved this strategy does not work, and we have to re- occupy the strip and topple Hamas’s regime, then maybe try to establish a non- terrorist regime (maybe by some UN force or the Palestinial Authority). All that might not be possible. We’ll have to live and see.
I am surprised to read the bolded part! What actions have the Israeli government taken to develop Gaza, and did Gaza actually develop economically in that time? (That is not a rhetorical question—I know next to nothing about this.)
Looking quickly at some stats, real GDP per capita seems to have gone up a bit since 2007, but has declined since 2016, and its current figure ($5.6K in 2021) is lower than e.g., Angola, Bangladesh, and Venezuela.
Qualitatively, the blockade seems to have been net negative for Gaza’s economic development. NYT writes:
But that is a news report, so we should take it with a grain of salt.
Sorry it took me some time.
I agree with your asessment. I did say Israel tried to do that, but it’s a hard problem. I didn’t want to elaborate on this point in the original comment since it felt off topic, so here goes:
TL;DR: Blockade is the baseline from which we try to improve, since Hamas are genocidal terrorists and use any aid to military needs. Under that constraint Israel has supplied water, food, electricity, and tried to build more generators and let palestinians work within its borders.
Some links will be in hebrew, sorry in advance. I’ll only use major newpapers, wikipedia or large think tanks.
First of all the background assumption is that Israel is trying to improve the situation in the stip within the constraint “a genocidal terror organization is in reign, and they’ll abuse any aid”. The original raional behind the Separation in 2005 was to let the Palestinian Authority control a relatively large piece of land with a port. All that went to hell after Hamas won the democratic elections in 2006, then killed all other political parties in 2007. Since then work visas from Gaza to Israel were stopped, and the blockade started.
Concrete steps are, for instance:
Letting money donations from Qatar into the strip, which was used to pay Hamas officials and pay for social needs
Providing work permits for 15,000 palestinians in the last years, with hopes of giving more in time. There are 150,000 palestinians workers in Israel from the west bank, 10% of its workforce. Gaza could (and have, before Hamas) have similar proportions.
Provide basic human needs such as electricity, even though the Palestinians don’t actually pay for it.
It is not much. However, keep in mind that everything that entered the strip was used for military needs first, and civilian second: cement for bunkers and offensive tunnels, iron for rockets (couldn’t find a good link, but they’re produced locally and the iron comes from somewhere), and sandbags for bunkers. And that’s the stuff we actually let through, not the military equipment they are constantly smuggling inside, some in civilian guise.
In conclusion: It’s hard. There are no good solutions. We are trying. It’s not optimal, or even the best we could concievably do, but nothing ever is. We are trying to manage our own potential genociders, backed by popular support. It’s an impossible situation, and everyone suffers, but we’re triying to make it better than baseline.
“Economically develop” is only meaningful against some baseline. Israel has had policies that clearly massively harm Gaza’s development, and other policies that somewhat help it. There are also other factors Israel doesn’t control, which probably are a net positive; economies in general tend to develop over time.
So if the baseline is some past year, or if it’s the counterfactual situation with a blockade and no mitigating policies, there’s been development. But if it’s the counterfactual with no blockade and no mitigating policies, I’d guess not so much.
In other words: Israel’s “strategy” has included at least some things that in themselves help Gaza’s development, but Israel has still hurt its development overall / on net.
(I’m not an expert or an insider here.)
Maybe it is more helpful to speak in terms of subgoals: Israel try to achieve security. For that, it try to keep Hammas both quiet and weak. The externality of most ways that we keep them quiet is better life for Palestinians, and the opposite is true for making Hammas weak, with larger effect size.
(I believe most Israelis also care somewhat about Palestinians having better conditions as a terminal value—though probably not enough to effect policy, except for avoiding unnecessary harm. I don’t know from the inside about Palestinians attitude toward Israelis, but public information suggest that many of them wish us harm as a terminal value, even when in expense of other goals)
There are also many Israelies that don’t consider Plaestinians to be humans worth protecting, but rather as evil beings / outgroup / whatever you’d call that.
Also (with much less confidence), I do think many Palastinians want to kill Israelies because of things that I’d consider brainwashing.
Hard question—what to do about a huge population that’s been brainwashed like that (if my estimation here is correct), or how might a peaceful resolution look?
On 1, I agree that there are some Israelis that view them collectively as evil, and would harm them instrumentally without much thought. Hard to put numbers, but I guess that those are ~15% of the Jewish population. I don’t think that there is more that 1% that support direct violence against non-terrorists for its own sake (as opposed to “we really want to kill your arch-terrorist neighbor, and you happen to be there too, and we really can’t wait until you aren’t home”) even in a state of war. I don’t say my opinion about it, just that it is very different from the apparent Palestinian attitude.
On 2 I agree. It seem to be a general argument for judging people relative to their society, but this question is hard in the general case. As an anecdote, taking over the and contra-brain-washing the next generation was very successful in post-war west Germany. It is hard though, and probably work only under very specific conditions.
“I don’t think that there is more that 1% that support direct violence against non-terrorists for its own sake”: This seems definitely wrong to me, if you also count Israelies who consider everyone in Gaza as potential terrorists or something like that.
If you offer Israelies:
Button 1: Kill all of Hamas
Button 2: Kill all of Gaza
Then definitely more than 1% will choose Button 2
I’m not sure whether our disagreement comes from different perceptions of specific populations/parties in Israel, or from you writing about current positions while I meant to write about the positions before the attack. Today, I sadly agree that it is far more than 1%. I hope and expect that the change is mostly temporary, and hope that it will not bring us to do things that we will be too ashamed of in the meanwhile.
Why would you have less confidence that many Palestinians want to kill Israelis when the stated goal of their government is to wipe out all Jews? At least publicly, the Israeli government does not have a policy of wiping out all Arabs.
Government policy does not determine the views of the population.
Getting accurate views of what the Palestinian population thinks likely isn’t easy.
The government was democratically elected in 2006, so it’s not a bad indication.
Elections are complex and there are many reasons to prefer one politician over another.
Besides, according to Google, Gaza’s median age is 18. Most of the people who are currently living in Gaza were not able to vote back in 2006.
My main point here is that good information about the views is hard to access. The fact that you point to information that’s been out of date for more than a decade is a sign that good information is hard to access.
I agree. However I know that it’s widely accepted Hamas is enjoying popular support. I don’t have good public sources to support that statement, it follows from many little anecdotes over the years. A good example is that unlike widely unliked authoritarian regimes such as Belarus, they enjoyed very little protests over the years, and have managed to repeatedly rally people to their needs.
While it’s a defensible position from a “briefely googled this” point of view, I really don’t think people who have been following closely hold this position.
Hamas does provide social services. A short GPT4 summary is:
>Hamas, an Islamist Palestinian political and military organization, has a significant social welfare component. Since its establishment in 1987, Hamas has set up numerous social service institutions, clinics, schools, and other humanitarian agencies in the Palestinian territories, particularly the Gaza Strip. Here are some of the social services that Hamas provides or has provided:
>Education: Hamas has founded and operated schools, kindergartens, and colleges. The educational institutions not only provide basic education but also often include religious teachings and, in some cases, political indoctrination.
>Healthcare: Hamas operates a network of clinics and hospitals in Gaza. These institutions provide medical services ranging from basic healthcare to surgical procedures. During periods of conflict, these institutions have also treated individuals injured in the fighting.
>Charities: Hamas has established various charitable organizations that distribute aid to the needy, including food, clothing, and financial assistance.
>Orphanages and Youth Centers: Institutions have been set up to care for orphans and provide youth with various activities, training, and support.
>Mosques and Religious Classes: Hamas’s roots are in the Muslim Brotherhood, and it places significant emphasis on religious outreach and education. It has built and maintained mosques and offers religious classes.
>Rehabilitation and Special Needs Services: Some facilities have been set up to cater to individuals with disabilities and to help rehabilitate those affected by the ongoing conflict.
>Housing and Infrastructure: After conflicts or due to deteriorating living conditions, Hamas has sometimes been involved in housing projects or infrastructure repair, either directly or by supporting such projects.
>These social services have helped Hamas garner significant popular support among Palestinians, particularly in the Gaza Strip. By filling a void often left by a weak or absent central government, the organization has been able to cultivate loyalty and bolster its political and social standing. However, it’s worth noting that this support comes amidst controversy, as many countries and organizations label Hamas as a terrorist organization due to its military activities and attacks against Israel. Critics also argue that Hamas uses its social services as a means of gaining popular support and furthering its political objectives.
Given how poor Gaza is those services matter and even people who don’t support killing Israelis might support Hamas by because the main thing they care about are the social services.
Lack of protest can be a sign of people liking a regime, it can also be a sign that people are afraid to protest because that has personal consequences for them. Acts like running a Youth Center help with letting the Youth Center organize support rallies.
The fact that Gaza has this repressive environment is one of the reasons it’s harder to know what people actually think.
Yes. Then again, eventfull 17 years passed and minds could change (I don’t think it happened to be honest)
I really doubt that. The Hamas generally enjoys popular support, AFAIK (no good public source).
I really doubt that. The Hamas generally enjoys popular support, AFAIK (no good public source).
On #2, my personal view is that Israel has as much of an end-game strategy in Gaza as the US did after 9/11 invading Afghanistan—essentially none, but so much public pressure to overreact that they will go in and try to take over anyways.
So what’s data science work like in the Israeli military?
Haha not that different from data science in other large organizations, but from time to time you do gruard shifts because it’s the army.
People try to make you do research on problems with next to no data, and there are literal human lives on the line, but you have to convince everyone it’s not possible and you should focus on other, more approachable problems.
Let’s take, for instance, a non classified problem: Automatically detecting people trying to sneak towards you. Seemingly easy: computer vision is a solved problem! However, sneaking tends to happen at night. While wearing camouflage (Out Of Distribution!). Sometimes your cameras are on a plane (OOD!) and/ or cover a large area (very small humans!). Also, there are only a few terrorist attacks a year, only some of them properly saved (until the one that literally kills a thousand people in one day), so almost no test data, not to mention training.
In conclusion: lots of fun, lots of action, but I enjoy civilian life better. It has better data!
I feel like militaries would really want to collect huge datasets of camoflaged military personel and equipment, usually from long distance. If people collected million-image datasets and used the largest models it might be feasible
I imagine the US might have something like that. but if it does it doesn’t share it.
I was a software developer in the Israeli military (not a data scientist), and I was part of a course constantly trains software developers for various units to use.
The big picture is that the military is a huge organization, and there is a ton of room for software to improve everything. I can’t talk about specific uses (just like I can’t describe our tanks or whatever, sorry if that’s what you’re asking, and sorry I’m not giving the full picture), but even things like logistics or servers or healthcare have big teams working on them.
Also remember the military started a long time ago, when there weren’t good off-the-shelf solutions for everything, and imagine how big are the companies that make many of the products that you (or orgs) use.
Has Israel been building capacity for peacekeeping / nation-building type operations, of the sort that the U.S. really wished it had before trying to do that sort of thing?
We have been keeping peace and nation building in the West Bank in the last fourty years or so. It’s far from perfect, but the places didn’t go up in flames in the last 20 years or so. We have less options than the US in Afghanistan so we learn through trial and error. Also the EU tends to send experts to try and help (whether they do is a diffferent question, for which I don’t actually know the answer).
The problem tends to be not that we don’t know how to nation- build, but that we don’t want to. When we tried to build an actual Palestinian country in the 90′s it kinda blew up in our face. The Palestinian Authority became a terror nation which we had to weaken a lot in Operation Defensive Shield back in 2002. It remained a weak, unelected government ever since (last elections were back at 2006, when Hamas started taking over). Nobody knows what will happen when the current president will die and it’s A Problem.
In conclusion: Yes, better that the US did but not very good objectively. We muddled through so far, so… fingers crossed?
What do you mean by “building capacity” in this context? (maybe my English isn’t good enough, I didn’t understand your question)
Like… training people to do policing (or build buildings, or run schools) in occupied territory, when those people could have instead be trained only to defeat enemy soldiers. Or building a stockpile of equipment for providing clean drinking water to residents of occupied territory, in addition to the stockpile of weapons for defeating enemy soldiers. That sort of planning.
I haven’t heard of anything like that (but not sure if I would).
Note there are also problems in trying to set up a government using force, in setting up a police force there if they’re not interested in it, in building an education system (which is currently, afaik, very anti Israel and wouldn’t accept Israel’s opinions on changes, I think) ((not that I’m excited about Israel’s internal education system either)).
I do think Israel provides water, electricity, internet, equipment, medical equipment (subsidized? free? i’m not sure of all this anyway) to Gaza. I don’t know if you count that is something like “building a stockpile of equipment for providing clean drinking water to residents of occupied territory”.
I don’t claim the current solution is good, I’m just pointing out some problems with what I think you’re suggesting (and I’m not judging whether those problems are bigger or smaller).
The World Socialist Website has a number of positions on the current conflict. To name some of their key points:
-What is happening in Gaza right now is a genuine popular uprising on the part of the Palestinians, that evokes the uprising of the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in WWII.
-It is also recognized by millions of Israelis that Netanyahu has staged provocations against Palestinians in order to provoke a violent response that could be used to distract domestic opposition. However, the Palestinian reaction to his criminal schemes has vastly exceeded Netanyahu’s calculations.
-The current Israeli government faces not only the resistance of the Palestinian masses, but also the growing opposition of the Israeli working class. Throughout the year there have been mass demonstrations of Israeli workers and youth against the Netanyahu government and its authoritarian measures. These demonstrations were undermined by the official leadership, which refused to raise the issue of the oppression of the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s declaration of war has also irrevocably exposed the main Zionist opposition leaders, Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid and Benny Gantz of the National Unity Party, who have predictably rallied behind the Israeli war plans.
-For the masses of workers and youth in Israel, it is not the Palestinians who are the enemy, but the Netanyahu government and the Israeli ruling class. The moves to overturn democratic forms of rule within Israel are connected to the extreme growth of social inequality and the intensifying assault on social programs.
-The great historical and political paradox of the present situation is this: The Israeli working class cannot defend its own democratic rights without fighting for the democratic rights of the Palestinian people against Zionist oppression. And the Palestinians cannot achieve their aspirations for democratic rights and social equality without forging a fighting alliance with the Israeli working class. The only viable perspective is not a mythical “two-state solution,” but a unified socialist state of Jewish and Arab workers.
To what extent do you agree with this perspective? Do you believe the socialists are correct, or wildly off the mark? Do you believe a unified state of Jews and Arabs is possible? What do you see as the future of Israel and Palestine?
Wildly off the mark. I’ll try and address your points one by one.
Content warning: discussing slaugter of innocent jews, babies and elderly. Also the Holocaust.
How many babies and elderly Germans were killed during the Uprising of Warsaw Ghetto? Literally zero. It’s a baseless comparison, making analogy between a last stand of people getting slaughtered against Nazi soldiers, and people who slaughtered hundreds of music festival attendees, beheading babies, taking babies as hostages, killing and burning babies (terrible censored image, proceed at your own risk), and that’s just scrolling my feed for a bit, there are more terrible atorcities commited yesterday, murder, kidnpping and rape.
Conditions in Gaza are not good, but they are far from genocide. Population is growing rapidly.
Please actually read about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Wikipedia before saying such things.
We did not do anything unusual in the Gaza Strip lately, AFAIK. Even if we did, see point 1.
Recent Israeli protests were around reforms in the juidical system, seen as an overreach by the executive branch of Israeli govenment, and led by opposition leaders. It was postponed due to external threats. Both pro- and anti- reform protesters are proudly posting pictures of themselves enlisting.
See previous point
The protests stopped due to the war, where mainly Israeli working class were slaughtered. Who do you think is whose common enemy here?
I think we’ll continue to get one messy equilibruim after the other, until we get something stable that’s neither a two state solution nor a one state one. I don’t know how it will look like.
I don’t know what mattposts actually meant by his post, but I thought a plausible interpretation was literally just “what do you make of these socialist positions?” with the context that a number of socialist/leftist orgs have been saying some pretty anti-semitic stuff recently. Like, I want to say suprisingly, but maybe I was just fooling myself.
I agree, which is why I tried to answer to the points concretely. Did I miss anything? I did write “your points” where I should have written “their points”, but I don’t think it’s important enough to edit. I’m not surprised at all, I’ve seen worse. The far left is quite antisemitic.
Nah, I don’t think you missed anything. It was just that you wrote “your points” and I assumed mattposts was giving their own viewpoints at first, so I wanted to check you/others realized that there were two pretty different interpretations of their post.
As Yovel said, wildly off the mark.
Just one minor extra point—the poorer Israeli working class is mostly supportive of Netanyahu. It’s the middle and upper classes who oppose him, who they see as corrupt.
Also the youth is generally more right wing in Israel, and the older generation more left wing.
In general you can’t copy your model of politics from one country into another and expect it to accurately predict what’s going on.
What was the effect of reservists joining the protests? This says: “Some 10,000 military reservists were so upset, they pledged to stop showing up for duty.” Does that mean they were actively ‘on strike’ from their duties? It looks like they’re now doing grassroots support (distributing aid).
They did indeed stop going to reserve. However, basically 99% of them who were of relevant age enlisted now. It’s not actually in our cultural DNA not to show up in emergency. Brothers In Arms also called for everyone to enlist immediately (Hebrew, sorry).
Context: Brothers in Arms Is an anti-Netanyahu group that was pushing reservists to protest.
They only said that they would not come to reserve duty training, but have repeatedly said in case of a real emergency they will all show up immediately.
Is there an overall solution or movement towards a solution that you think is underreported?
Nope.
I don’t think you will be able to get an actual solution in the next 10-20 years (barring SAGI- scale changes), since there’s a sizable fraction of the palestinian population that wants literal jewish genocide and the destruction of Israel [1].
I do think Israeli government is planning to take over the Gaza Strip, so I imagine we’ll get some kind of a different equilibrium after. But I can promise you nobody knows how what will happen in the day after. Some people are trying to promote solutions, such as the Palestinian Authority taking over the Strip, but nobody knows what’s possible yet and much will change in the next weeks.
[1] Couldn’t find a survey, but Hamas won elections handily in the Gaza Strip in 2006 and there were no other elections in the West Bank since because Hamas would win them too. Hamas’s constitution literally called genocide of the jews until 2017 (in Hebrew, sorry), and is still an extremely anti semitic document that aims for the destruction of Israel.
Thank you for responding. I’m sorry for my ignorance, this is something that I’ve followed from afar since ~2004 so it’s not just a grim fascination (although I guess it kind of is), I couldn’t pass up the chance to ask questions of someone on the ground. I have a few more questions if that’s ok..
How often are comprehensive plans to achieve peace reported in the media or made available to the public? Is there anything like ongoing discourse between Jewish Israelis, Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship and Palestinians in Gaza who are all of a similar mind?
My questions here have to do with wanting to understand why the conflict continues. Is it, for example, because of
A relatively small number of people on each side who keep the conflict going
Ingrained ideologies in the majority of both sides
Lack of detailed options/language to discuss solutions
Outside influence/funding
Something else
All or none of the above
Thanks for your question! It’s complicated, and I’ll try to adress it tomorrow.
Do you know why it was now? Do you think this is a symptom of global turmoil caused by recent geopolitical realignments/tensions and unusually rapid advancement in technologies relevant to security (e.g. information processing and information/cognitive warfare technology)?
I think the timing was a combination of ongoing repression and Hamas planning coming to fruition after years of planning and previous attempts—but that wasn’t the proximate cause. The proximate cause for ordering the operation, I strongly suspect, was the US/Israel/Saudi peace talks that threatened Iran (Hamas’s sponsor) with a regional coalition against them, and Netanyahu explicitly saying he was leaving the Palestinians out, and was hoping to neutralize the international support they had by making peace. The cause is particularly critical, in my view, because Israel’s reaction has been exactly what Hamas and Iran hoped for, and seems likely to derail attempts at a Saudi peace deal.
We’ll find out in the coming years what Egyptian intelligence knew, and likely find out how much the attack was directly orchestrated by Iran/Hezbollah via training, but one terrorism expert, Matt Levine of the Washington Institute, noted that the attack tactics were very clearly in line with Hezbollah’s typical approach, rather than being similar to what Hamas has done in the past.
I’m not so sure about that. Hamas don’t actually talk that much about the deal, and as long as Israel doesn’t do anything too terrible in the coming war I don’t think it’ll be affected that much. I also don’t think a deal with the Saudis will do nearly as much damage to the Hamas as will the current attack, which represents a clear existential threat to its regime.
This could be an Iranian plan for the same reasons, since they have less to lose and more to gain from sabotaging the deal, but then I would expect a similar attack from Hezbollah at the same time for maximum effect, which they did not do. I genrally don’t think they were coordinated until after the attack, and might still not be. So far they haven’t joined the war, and might not do so at all.
I think there’s a strong possibility Hamas tried to lead a smaller scale teerror attack, with <100 dead and some hostages, to use as a bargaining chip for prisoners, then succeeded way more than expected and brought war upon themselves.
I think this is a clear blunder by Hamas, so there’s some miscalculation behind it. I don’t know if we’ll ever know that.
I disagree with you about what Hamas’s ultimate goal is—you seem to envision this as a near-term self-promotion and self-preservation organization, whereas religious extremists are often happy to sacrifice themselves and others for their ideals. If Israel makes peace with the Saudis, it cements the status quo in place, makes it impossible to actually reasonably claim that the Muslim world would support the destruction of Israel, negating Hamas’s entire platform and reason to exist.
I strongly agree with you that this was intended to be smaller—I expect that they were anticipating a non-zero level of resistance at the border, and most of the attackers being turned back. But they were inviting reprisals in either case, and the reason they tend to do mount attacks is to manipulate internal Palestinian or Israeli politics in some way.
I don’t see how getting Hezbollah involved increases the impact on the Saudi deal, except by making Palestinians suffer worse casualties. Hezbollah has much less Saudi sympathy than the Palestinians. It is also a more valuable pawn to sacrifice, if your goal is just to get pictures of Israel killing arabs.
What economic effects do you expect to see from
The attacks themselves (I guess direct damage of property from increased rocket strike volume is not that large?)
The following mobilization? (I guess this can be way worse for long term?)
3. Are these current events increasing the stability/popularity of the current Netanyahu government or is it better for the opposition parties?
Historically wars did not negatively affect long term growth in Israel.
Not much, unless maybe Hezbolla joins in and starts seriously shelling us. It has accurate long range rockets which can do orders of manitude damage more than Hamas. However maybe in the long term we’ll frogleap back? IDK.
Not much
I imagine opposition, since it’s seen as a strategic failure by Nethanyahu policy, who was in charge in the last 15 years. However that’s hard to predict, since it might give rise to far right forces who’ll want to retaliate.
Thank you for doing this!
Few random questions, of course feel free to say as much or as little as you want:
Have you been personally to the Gaza strip (or the West Bank) ? If yes—what are your impressions? How do people live there? Is it common for regular (non-military) Jewish people to hang around those places? How common is for Palestinians to hang around outside of Gaza and the West Bank? How common is for Jewish and Palestinian people to mix in everyday life and interact?
I have just recently learned about the Gilat Shalit prisoner exchange (a single captured Israeli soldier was exchanged for over 1000 Palestinian prisoners). What do you think about that exchange?
What is your probability of the IDF knowing about the attack but still letting it happen? If it is near 0, what is your current best explanation for IDF being caught by surprise by such a massive attack?
I was actually born in Netzarim in the Gaza strip, but my parents left when I was one month old for job reasons. I’ve not been there until 2005, when The Separation happened, all jews were transferred from the strip and jewish entrance was prohibited, after which I couldn’t visit anymore.
There are 150,000 Palestinians from the West Bank who work in in Israel, and around 15,000 from the Gaza strip who used to do the same until last saturday. Israelis and Israeli Arabs mix all the time (for instance, I have some Israeli Arab friends), Palestinians less so. Access from and to the Gaza strip is very restricted, and in the West Bank settlements are separate. I live for a few years in the West Bank, and I talked to Palestinians when I met them during hiking and stuff. My dad and I actually saved a Palestinian goat that fell to a water canal during one of our hikes. It’s unrelated to your question, just a funny anecdote I remembered while writing this.
We shouldn’t have payed so much, but I don’t know if it had a long term strategic impact. We definitely gave a lot of talent back to Hamas, who used it well.
Basically zero. My theory would rely on classified information, so I won’t give it, sorry. I imagine there will be some kind of public commission of inquiry after the war. I’ll try and remember to post a link to its conclusion for you when that happens.