October 02, 2024

Israel's New Rules of War

By: Robert D. Kaplan

October 7, nearly a year ago, changed Israeli calculations in ways that are still being revealed. The very bestiality of the event, with its torture, murder, mass rapes, and the like, was an expression of both Palestinian blood hatred and Iranian grand strategy. Soon after the event, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, described October 7 as “great,” “blessed,” “heroic,” and “courageous,” even as his Shiite group rained down missiles on northern Israel, forcing 60,000 civilians to flee south.

Repelling such a war of annihilation is not pretty, especially for a democracy governed by the consent of the governed, which is therefore charged by its citizenry with protecting their physical and material well-being. Indeed, democracy entails obligations that are not always benign. This naturally leads to adjustments in the military rules of engagement. Remember, there is a profound difference between imagining the worst that your enemy might do to you and then palpably experiencing it. October 7 left nothing to the imagination. It would have been both immoral and irresponsible if Israeli military thinking had not evolved as a consequence.

Netanyahu knows that there is no modern world. In the Middle East, there is only the continuation of the ancient. Despite technology, humankind has not morally progressed, even as Israel has to survive.

Up until October 7, Israel had arguably an extreme and, therefore, admirable view on protecting civilian lives and doing everything in its power to get back hostages and prisoners of war. Even when targeting the most ruthless terrorist leaders, it would sometimes use the smallest bombs possible to avert civilian collateral damage and would trade many hundreds of Palestinian terrorists in its jails in return for just one Israeli hostage. But those days are over. Israel is no longer pure, but it remains just.

Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, must live with the fact of releasing in 2011 over 1,000 prisoners—including the chief perpetrator of October 7, Yahya Sinwar—for the return of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas five years earlier. Was winning the release of one soldier worth an October 7? After all, history is not just large, impersonal forces but Shakespearean contingency, and without the fascistic genius of Sinwar, October 7 might not have even happened or might have happened in a less widespread and barbaric manner.

Read the full article from The National Interest.

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