The First War Between Israel and the Second: Implications for the First Seven Years of World War II. Israeli Militia In Gaza During the 1948-2019 War
Israel has ordered more than a million people to leave northern Gaza, presumably to prepare for an imminent ground offensive. Its military strategists appear to be planning the depopulation and reoccupation of at least part of an area home to around 2.3 million people — nearly half of them children — and most of them descended from people driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Humans are at grave risk, not just numbers.
Israeli forces have attacked Gaza six times from 2006 until the recent siege, killing well over 4,000 people. According to the Jerusalem-based human rights watchdog B’Tselem, that figure includes 405 in 2006, 1,391 in 2008 and 2009, 167 in 2012, 2,203 in 2014, 232 in 2021 and 33 in 2022. Each time, casualties for Palestinian civilians have outnumbered combatants.
When the decision was made to invade Iraq, it was an initial sin that could never have come out better than it did. It cuts off an effort to understand what happened and why.
Poor planning and insufficient resources will always fail to secure peace in the postwar era, despite being firmly attached to America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is so crazy that anyone could be surprised by this. But the lessons of postwar Germany and Japan that led to their prosperous democracies today, including well-resourced physical and political reconstruction and the time to succeed, were utterly misunderstood and misapplied by Washington in 2003 and 2004. Israel has faced its own forever war since 1948. Planning and resources are the two enemies of yours.
Military victory is an asset whose power decreases as time goes on. If and when Israel succeeds in defeating Hamas, use that limited time wisely. It has to lay the groundwork for constructive steps, not chaos, to follow if you decide to prioritize what you get done. It is almost impossible to recover from the disastrous decisions made at the beginning, such as the creation of the Sunni insurgency and the removal of tens of thousands of Saddam Hussein loyalists from government jobs.