Why couldn't Israel just... ?

Let's discuss some bad faith or just bad arguments

The recent assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh naturally prompted a number of reactions that reflect some combination of bad faith and ignorance.

The Precision Argument

I’d like to address two. The first goes like this: If Israel can so precisely kill one guy even in Tehran, why has it nonetheless conducted itself in Gaza in such a way as to kill lots of presumably innocent people? Surely it did not have to caused so much destruction, therefore that was a choice. Thus, Israel wanted to kill all those people.

I’ve seen many examples. Here’s one from a Stanford University scholar and former member of the European Parliament:

Does Schaake know nothing about warfare? Is she just another antisemite who imagines Israel to be on some Shylockian quest for vengeance and consuming children’s blood? I have no idea, not having ever heard of her until seeing her tweet. I prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is a decent and intelligent person who’s ventured into a field she knows little about. She’s a cyber expert. I don’t know jack about cyber.

Yet I might have hoped that a well educated Dutch woman might know more about what happened to her fellow citizens in World War 2. Thousands died under Allied bombs, or when Allied armies smashed their way into her country in 1944. Possibly as many as 10,000 were killed during the week-long Market Garden campaign (estimates vary, and it seems no one really knows, or perhaps wants to know). An astonishing number (18,000 - 22,000 ?!?) starved to death in the winter of 1944-1945.

Nijmegen, NL, in the aftermath of Market Garden, 28 September 1944.

Schaake might have understood that warfare, especially urban warfare, is a bloody and destructive business.

Perhaps her retort might be, yeah, but that was then, when precisions weapons were the stuff of Science Fiction. Surely we can do better now that modern militaries have the ability to put cruise missiles fired a thousand kilometers away through specific windows. Hell, on 3 March 1945, the Royal Air Force attempted to bomb the Gestapo headquarters in the Hague but hit the wrong neighborhood, killing over 500 civilians. That kind of thing can’t happen again, right? Well, actually, it can and has, but that’s besides the point.

The key thing to understand are the differences between targeting a single point at a known location and the use of firepower in combat, especially in an urban setting in which the enemy has deliberately placed himself among or literally beneath civilians.

Getting a single bad guy with a clean shot that hurts no one else requires many things to align. It requires above all knowledge about where the person is at a given time, what and who surrounds the person, and what kind of weapon can do the job. One must then have the right kind of weapon on hand. If one knows a bad guy is in a specific car at a specific time, one can destroy that car. If one knows he is in a specific room in a specific building, it might be possible to hit that room alone and be certain of killing the intended victim. Reportedly, the Mossad killed Haniyeh using a bomb it had placed in a specific room months ago, in the expectation that one day soon someone like Haniyeh would be in that room, and the Mossad would know it. This was not done in the heat of battle. It was more akin to duck hunters waiting in a hide.

Sometimes one lacks precise or timely information. Sometimes speed is of the essence—one has to eliminate a threat NOW, using whatever means are available. Sometimes one does not have the luxury of being able to target a single room, or perhaps one has no idea if targeting a single room will do the job. What if one knows the thing that needs to be destroyed is somewhere in a building, but one does not know precisely where, or perhaps that thing is deep under the building, or secured by reinforced walls. In that case, the best option might be to level the whole building. Or maybe all one has on hand at a precise moment is a bomb that will destroy the whole building (there has been a move by many air forces lately to develop smaller bombs for precisely this reason).

Caen, France, after some renovations curtesy of the British and Canadian Armies, 1944. Urban warfare cannot be done without massive destruction.

In the heat of battle, where people are shooting at each other with automatic weapons, rockets, and anti-tank missiles, all armies behave more or less the same way, by responding to fire with fire and destroying threats with whatever means are on hand, now. The more careful one is to limit firepower to the absolute minimum and target precisely, the more likely one is to suffer casualties. Generally speaking, the greater the firepower one side uses, the lower the casualties it will suffer. In the Second Battle of Fallujah, the US Marines initially took heavy casualties whenever Marines entered homes and got caught up in close quarters fighting. Then they learned: Once they knew enemy combatants were in the homes, they flattened the homes, sometimes with bombs, sometimes with bulldozers. They’d have M-1 Abrams fire their big cannon into houses from just a few yards away. One can safely assume that if there was anyone else in those buildings besides the intended target, they died as well.

Indeed, the safest way to ensure zero casualties on one’s own side is to stand back and blow everything up. Israel could nuke Gaza. Or carpet bomb it. Or drop large thermobaric weapons. Russia does stuff like that in Ukraine. The United States did it in Vietnam. Israel could, but does not. Israel could commit genocide, but does not. One consequence is that the IDF has suffered relatively heavy casualties.

All militaries seek to strike a happy medium between the two extremes of using no force and willingly accepting casualties at one end and, at the other, chucking giant bombs from a safe distance. One can legitimately argue that the IDF needs to dial back the firepower and use it with greater restraint. This might be true. The strike that hit World Central Kitchen volunteers in April (which involved a precision weapon with a limited blast) is a clear example of someone being too quick to pull a trigger. That said, there are no objective standards for the right amount of firepower in a given situation. As a general rule, if an army can do something that hurts the enemy more while protecting its own people more, it will. Within reason. But where does one draw the line? And who is to do that? A field commander calling for air support? An arm-chair analyst with a Twitter account? Human Rights Watch? If the target is buried deep beneath a building, and the only way to get at it is with a weapon that will obliterate the building, which might contain civilians, does one just walk away? Maybe? Sometimes? According to whom?

The “Why Doesn’t Israel Just Stick to Targeted Assassinations” Argument

I’ve seen this a lot on social media. I get the appeal, given that targeted assassinations tend to cause little in the way of collateral damage. My answer is two-fold: “If only that would work,” and, sometimes, “I don’t really believe you.”

It doesn’t work if what one needs to do is destroy a threat that’s well-entrenched in a geographic location. Israel in this case needs to destroy Hamas’s ability to fire rockets and launch organized attacks like it did on 7 October. Targeted assassinations can weaken an enemy and cause disruptions and disorder, but at the end of the day, someone has to enter a territory, seize it, and perhaps occupy it. It’s really that simple. Israel in the past has balked at invading Gaza at scale and preferred to “cut the grass” with targeted assassinations. We can see how well that has worked. It might be a necessary component of a ground campaign, but it is never sufficient.

Often I believe the argument is made in bad faith. For as long as I’ve been watching Israel-Arab conflicts (since the 1980s), I’ve seen that literally everything Israel does to defend itself meets with international disapprobation, sanctions, condemnations, and claims of genocide. Folks condemned the Entebbe raid as an aggressive violation of Ugandan sovereignty. Folks condemned the raid that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. The UN went ape when Israel rounded up Hamas’s leadership and deported it to Lebanon in 1992. (Under intense pressure, Rabin let them in. They then were responsible for suicide bombing campaigns.) People howl when Israel tries to protect its people with walls and check points. And yes, they’ve howled every time Israel conducted targeted assassinations. So now those same people say that they’d be fine if Israel only did targeted assassinations? I don’t believe them. I can only conclude that the only thing much of the world would accept would be if Israelis elected to die.

So, sorry, the ability to kill a few people with great precision will never obviate the need to attack territory. And there is no way to do that while avoiding destruction and sparing all civilians (one can and should, of course, try to minimize their suffering). Anyway, people always seem to forget that Palestinians have agency. They, too, can choose to surrender. Or build shelters for civilians. Or prevent Hamas from setting up shop among and beneath them. Also, maybe people can stop freaking out anytime anyone talks about letting Gazans leave the combat zone. That’s a war crime, they say. So Israel must fight among them. That’s a war crime, they say. In other words, it’s a crime for Israel to fight at all. Which means it’s a crime for Israelis to live. To cite my great-grandmother, herself a Jewish migrant from the Habsburg Empire, “Pheh.”