Waiting for Rafah

The biblical war that Israel is waging against the Palestinians, as was easily foreseeable, is reaching its limit, without having achieved a single objective. Naturally, Zionist propaganda - and Western propaganda to back it up - deny everything deniable: the huge military losses, the flight from the country of Israelis with dual citizenship, the socio-economic crisis resulting from the war, the failure to free Israeli prisoners in Gaza, the the impossibility of dismantling the Resistance's tunnel network, and of course the fact that the IDF was unable to inflict losses greater than 20% of its fighting force on it.
But obviously denying reality doesn't help to transform it, and what's more it doesn't last long.
What has happened in these six and a half months is that the army considered for half a century to be one of the most powerful in the world (as well as "the most moral army in the world", in the words of the current Zionist leaders) has lost its honor ; the military one, proving incapable of defeating an enemy infinitely inferior in terms of armaments, and the human one, behaving increasingly like a gang of war criminals.

To understand Israel, one must look at its history and its society, and the Israel Defense Force is not only a fundamental element of Israeli society, but is also a mirror of it. In a certain sense, what is traditionally a very present division in Western societies (between civilians and military) is almost non-existent in Israeli society, not only due to the fact that the (compulsory) military service is long (three years) and extensive to both sexes, but because society itself perceives itself as constantly under arms. The fact that, rather than being threatened by external enemies, it is itself a constant threat to its neighbors and to the populations of the region, is something that has to do with subjective perception - well fueled by Zionist ideology.
This osmosis between army and society has meant that, historically, many of Israel's political leaders have been senior IDF officers, since – in a warrior society – military successes automatically become a political springboard.

Although, for purely propagandistic reasons, Israel tends to represent itself as an extremely homogeneous society (to the point of recently proclaiming itself as the "state of the Jews"), the reality is very different. The first myth to dispel is that Jews are a race, or at least an ethnicity, and not simply the followers of a religion. In this, the observation of Israeli society offers a clear key to understanding. In fact, Israeli citizens of the Jewish religion belong to at least four different ethnic groups. Although it is not well known, there is a community of Ethiopian origin (the Falashas), whose immigration was largely favored in past decades, precisely to make up for the demographic gap between Jews and Arabs. And even less known - and indeed even smaller - there is a second community of Jews of Indian origin.
However, the two largest Israeli Jewish communities are the Ashkenazi (i.e. Jews of European origin) and the Sephardic (Jews of Arab North African origin).
To these two communities correspond, in broad terms, also two different roles in society, and two different visions of the same.

Traditionally, Israel's political elites belong to the Ashkenazi community. And they have long been an expression of the social democratic and (later) liberal wing of Zionism. While a more conservative attitude prevails among Sephardim.
Both communities are significantly involved in the colonization of the occupied territories, and starting from this reality a process of both political radicalization (towards the far right) and religious radicalization (towards a messianic Zionism) has been produced.
Furthermore, this double radicalization adds to the greater prolificacy of settlers compared to urbanized Israelis, which therefore increasingly reflects on the different political and electoral weight; in a fairly small population (there are less than eight million Jewish Israelis), it doesn't take much to tip the balance one way rather than another. And all this also has an immediate impact on the armed forces, which as mentioned are a conscript army.

The characteristic of the Israeli army, therefore, is that its strong connection with society shapes it in many ways. In fact, since Israeli society is small, it needs its human resources to be fully committed to making it grow and prosper; and this translates into the fact that, while practically all citizens [1] serve in the military, very few continue a military career. This produces a very unique phenomenon, compared to the armed forces of other countries. While in fact in these is the officer corps that the non-commissioned officers (i.e. the hierarchical infrastructure) are almost completely trained by career personnel, in the Israeli army they are mainly conscripts. It is therefore not uncommon to find officers, even high-ranking ones, who are very young. This leads not only to less control along the chain of command, but obviously also to less experience at various levels thereof.
The fact that a growing number of young soldiers come from the colonies of the occupied territories, and are therefore radicalized in a political and religious sense, is immediately reflected in the attitude towards the Palestinian enemy, as well as in the fact that a large part of the hierarchical line is covered by the same young people, which in turn translates into the fact that the officers share this attitude, and put no brakes on it.

This is what Alastair Crooke [2] defines as "hot eschatology", that is, the political and military manifestation of that part of society which considers itself the true interpreter of Judaism, and which tends to literally and slavishly apply the Old Testament as a basis normative and behavioral. In this sense, what is emerging is a transformation of Israeli society in a fundamentalist sense, almost prefiguring a sort of Jewish ISIS.
The practical consequences of all this, on the battlefield, are all in all quite evident.
Military units made up of young and very young soldiers, non-commissioned officers and officers, with no combat experience, but at the same time full of a strong nationalist political-religious ideology, who found themselves catapulted into an already extremely complicated war situation, they are predictably reacting the wrong way.

One of the interesting aspects of this conflict is that it is in some ways developing according to a pattern already seen in Vietnam [3]. When Pentagon strategists began to realize that the American army, with all its firepower, was unable to overcome the Viet Cong guerrillas, they began to think that they should try to apply a different strategy. Since the political directive was that it was necessary to win, and on the other hand the generals had no desire to leave there defeated, they imagined an approach capable of routing out the guerrillas, and started the "search and destroy" program, which consisted of dividing the territory into sectors, and proceed to clean them one after the other. The result was that the chain of command demanded results, and these ended up being expressed by the number of Viet Cong killed. So the various departments of the US Army basically killed all the men in the villages, then classifying them as guerrillas. Exactly what the IDF is doing, which identifies practically all the adult males it kills daily as Hamas fighters.

In fact, behind the strictly military problem, there is the political one. Caught off guard by the attack of the Palestinian Resistance on 7 October, Israel in fact reacted with anger and ferocity, but without any strategy, that is, without achievable objectives and without an idea of how to achieve them. All complicated by the fact that the head of government fears ending up in prison as soon as he loses office, and therefore has every interest in keeping the conflict open for as long as possible. The IDF thus quickly found itself fighting in a situation for which not only it was not prepared, but in which it does not have a clear path to pursue, and in which instead - despite the military and technological preponderance at its disposal - it is the all the forces that make up the Axis of Resistance to maintain the strategic initiative.
Consequently, losses - both of equipment and personnel - have become increasingly high, despite the inconsistency of military successes achieved. Which, of course, could only produce frustration among the troops in the field. As an inevitable consequence, the front line units lose control, abandon themselves to looting, indiscriminate roundups, torture and summary executions.

In this context, Israel is forced to once again move forward the reckoning with itself (with its own military and political failures), and therefore - since the attempt to widen the conflict simultaneously to Iran and the United States is failed miserably – he doesn't have many other chances available, other than to continue the operation on Gaza. The attack on Rafah is the last resort, and something must come from this that can be used as a result capable of giving meaning to everything.
Squaring the circle, however, is more complicated than ever. Washington has given the green light, but it absolutely needs that the operation does not turn into yet another mass extermination; the electoral deadline is approaching, and the climate is already heating up in the country, with the universities and Muslim and Black communities revolting against the Biden administration's pro-Israel policies. Thinking of destroying Hamas, after failing to do so in almost seven months, is a pious illusion. The chances of freeing at least some prisoners are decidedly slim.

Furthermore, it is easily predictable that the attack on the last city in the Gaza Strip not yet completely razed to the ground will provoke a reaction on all fronts from the Axis of Resistance. We can expect an increase in attacks from Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. And the Resistance not only has the strategic initiative, but also the tactical ability to modulate its military action in such a way as to prevent the escalation desired by Tel Aviv, while maintaining strong incisiveness. All this unfortunately leads to the prediction that, as much as the war cabinet would like to avoid it, the only visible result that the IDF will be able to achieve by entering Rafah will be to carry out a new, large-scale massacre of Palestinian civilians.
This, of course, is simply horrible, and tragic. The price that the Palestinian people are paying for their stubborn refusal to submit – that is, to be expelled from their territory – is enormous. But it is important to understand that the issue is broader.

For Israel, this is obviously a step towards realizing the dream of Eretz Israel. And to make it happen, we must first of all break the resistance of the Palestinian people, and transform into reality what was Israel's founding double lie: "a land without a people for a people without a land". Double because not only did a people have that land and have had it for thousands of years, but because there wasn't even a people without land, but the followers of a religion who intended to abandon the lands in which they lived to appropriate that of others (a typical case of colonialism). Therefore the ongoing genocide is a measure of mass terrorism, which together with the systematic destruction of Gaza (not only of its homes and institutions, but also of everything that can constitute cultural heritage and connection with the land), and hunger as weapon, aims to push the Palestinians into a mass exodus, a second – and larger – Nakhba.
But for the United States there is more than just maintaining a presence in the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict today is also a test to understand how the rest of the world reacts to its hegemonic policies, taken to the extreme.
In this sense, Israel plays the role of proxy just like the Ukrainians with the Russians. And one of the things that matters most to the US is that today “Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms of war” [4].

In the Western perception - or rather, in what the propaganda narrative has made the Western perception become - war is an increasingly technological issue, and even when it becomes hybrid it is to be understood as played on other levels, different from the battlefield and therefore less bloody. But the reality - which all contemporary wars give us back, from Ukraine to Palestine, from Sudan to Myanmar - is that instead they are still massively made up of men of flesh and blood, and that the human factor (the ability to mobilize and engage manpower ) is still crucial. For this reason, the possibility of freeing war from that set of rules that seek to limit its effects - one might say, to untie the ties that keep it tied - becomes a terrain to be explored with interest, for those who see war as the first and the last resort with which to try to maintain global dominance.
In this sense, therefore, Rafah could also be seen as a great experiment, to understand if, what and how it can be done, going further.

Notes

1 – In Israel, at least until yesterday, small communities of Orthodox Jews were exempt from military service, but a recent law now imposes it on them too, which is arousing strong protests from them. It should be noted that even among these communities there are significant differences; there are in fact some who are strongly Zionist, and others who, by virtue of their interpretation of the Torah, not only consider Zionism an aberration, but even deny Israel's right to exist as a state, and consequently are pro-Palestinian...

2 – “Will zionism self destruct?”, Alastair Crooke, Strategic Culture

3 – See “Gaza: The Strategic Imperative”, interview with Michael Hudson, reported on his website.

4 – Ibid