It is true that a ceasefire now would represent a defeat for Israel, and a win for Hamas. I cannot blame any Israeli or any Jew for rejecting it on those grounds. The question, though, is when a ceasefire becomes the best available defeat for Israel.
If the invasion and the present siege cannot extirpate Hamas — and this seems to be the conclusion of every military expert who has looked at the problem, including, apparently, most of the Israeli ones — then the war will end in an Israeli defeat anyway, just as the Vietnam war ended in an American defeat. All the guerrillas have to do to win is to survive, and to be left on control of the ruins of Gaza. So, how to minimise that inevitable defeat? What can be salvaged from it?
In this analysis I am taking for granted that victory in war is measured by the resultant peace, when you can ask two questions: “Is the new peace more advantageous to our side than the peace before the war?” and “Would every other outcome have been worse for our side?”
First, I can’t think of any plausible peace that would follow this war in Gaza which would be better for Israel than the situation the day before Hamas attacked.
This is of course a matter of judgment. Niall Fergusson, for one, concedes that an assault on Gaza will be a disaster for Israel, but thinks the answer to that problem is for the US to start a war with Iran and fund an Israeli assault on Hizbollah as well. Somehow the Gazan problem will disappear in a greater Middle Eastern conflagration, and Hamas will magically stop fighting. This appears to be quite a widespread view on the American Right. I think it’s insane and it makes me dread the next American elections even more.
A more grownup version is supplied by Gideon Rachman, in the FT, who argues that no one in power in the Middle East wants a general conflagration, but all of them may stumble into one.
So we’re left looking for the least worst outcome to the Gaza war.
That outcome, I think, is one that minimises civilian casualties even if it leaves many Hamas fighters alive. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that Hamas fighters can be replaced so long as there are young men and women alive in Gaza; and every civilian killed produces another fighter and another sympathiser in the outside world. Killing everyone in Gaza is not an option for Israel, even if killing everyone in Israel remains a widespread aspiration in Gaza.
The second is that the mass killing of civilians is always a war crime, and justifiable only when it is on such a scale as to be genuinely shocking, terrifying, and deterrent, so that it ends the possibility of further fighting. From Drogheda to Dresden and from Guernica to Hiroshima people have justified the deliberate mass slaughter of civilians on the basis that it prevented many further deaths. Whether this justification succeeds in any particular case is left as an exercise for the reader.
The only moral justification for a war crime, then, is victory and a subsequent peace tolerable to the surviving losers. That may not be sufficient, but it is certainly necessary. This is why nuclear deterrence can be defended: it makes no sense without a monstrous, unimaginable war crime — the threatened destruction of all civilisation, possibly of all human life. But it has so far achieved its political aim, of maintaining peace, at least between nuclear powers.
But if Israel cannot win in Gaza then it cannot justify the bombing and collective punishment of the civilians there. That can’t be justified either morally or militarily. The longer it continues, the more expensive the ultimate defeat.
"It is true that a ceasefire now would represent a defeat for Israel, and a win for Hamas. I cannot blame any Israeli or any Jew for rejecting it on those grounds."
I also cannot blame any Israeli or any Jew for rejecting a ceasefire on those grounds. But: I don’t think that’s exactly the grounds on which they reject a ceasefire.
I think the October 7 massacre was deeply traumatic for both Israelis and for the Jews of the diaspora, conjuring up ghosts of the Holocaust, and of the pogroms under Tsarist Russia. This wasn’t just another “let’s launch some more rockets against the enemy” (just business as usual, sadly, between Gaza and Israel), it was something up close and personal, and aimed at the Jews as Jews, and designed to inflict the maximum amount of cruelty and torture and suffering upon its victims. There’s no need to rehearse the sordid details: girls and women were raped; babies were brutalized, and yes, sometimes beheaded; entire families were burned alive.
Most Israelis don’t really care about scoring a victory over Hamas, they just want to not be subject to such medieval pogroms.
And I’m sorry, but there is no other people or nation on this earth of whom a “ceasefire” would be demanded, after such a brutal massacre, and before they had even responded! The Jews aren’t even allowed to bury and mourn their dead, apparently, before being convicted of “war crimes” and “genocide” in the left-liberal court of public opinion.
That said, I don’t know the answer, and I’m pretty sure we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, on the brink of World War Three…
Waist deep in the Big Muddy.