Ezra Klein and the Problems of Vox: Day 27

https://www.vox.com/2023/10/20/23919946/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-ground-invasion-strategy

The one thing I absolutely don't want this journal to become is another echo chamber on the internet: another place where another writer nobody reads responds to articles nobody cares about except policy nerds, and becomes just a secondary leech on a policy wonk who is already a leech on the actual policies. The amount of intelligence wasted in the political sphere on punditry could power another first world country: it's instant gratification is a bad substitute for the patience required for books - reading them and writing them.

If only I had the patience myself....

But I think there's something useful in responding to this particular article, because it shows exactly where I think modern liberalism, and particularly my generation, lost our way. It became more an ideology than a pragmatic response, and little by little its idealism helped set us on the path to today's militant gridlock. It was obviously unwitting, and it was a reaction to the conservatism's shameless powergrabs, but it was an affirmative answer to the cynical rage of places like Fox News, declaring 'no, we can make the world work.' As we grew up in the right wing noise machine which clothed corrupt cynicism by making excessive virtues of personal responsibility and vigilance, we were determined to be earnest, daringly optimistic about human nature, and believe in community. We were clearly oriented by the mores of our generation. We grew up thinking we were 'boomers squared' in the 'end of history', and we thought we were free to follow our bliss to an extent no generation ever yet had. How naive that seems now...

For those who know who don't know who Ezra Klein is, he is the most important, influential Washington policy intellectual of my generation. In the same way William F. Buckley revolutionized the political right, Ezra Klein revolutionizes the left, and in the same way the right got away from Buckley's genteel patina on militant conservatism in ways that were entirely predictable, the left is getting away from Klein's overoptimism before his revolution is even over, ways that I suspect Klein always knew would happen, and, like Buckley, encouraged to a certain extent.

I was obviously never part of the Ezra Klein crowd. I wouldn't be pontificating on facebook if I was... but I had three or four friends and acquaintances who moved in his circles, and as always in Washington, the electricity of being once removed from 'power' gave a vague thrill to even the paeans among us.

Klein is two years younger than me. When I was in college he had a blog for the two minutes when people took blogs seriously, and was considered something of a 'prodigy of public health policy' (god Washington is weird...) during the period when liberals drew universal healthcare as their line in the sand. Nearly as much as anything an Obama official did, it was Klein's nitty gritty detailing of universal healthcare's benefits that pushed us over the line to Obamacare after 100 years of trying to get universal healthcare. Klein was also connected to what we once referred to as the 'netroots'. I've already half forgotten what 'netroots' are but what's still obvious is 'netroots' set us on the path to 'grassroots left' campaigning which first gave us Barack Obama, and then Bernie Sanders.

In 2014, Klein cashed in on his clout by founding Vox, an online magazine clearly meant to make left ideology respectable. Let's be clear, Vox makes the left respectable by advocating for 'very soft left' policies, much more economically progressive than socialist, realistic in how dovish foreign policy can get, and sympathetic to intersectionality rather than advocating for it. . During a period where nobody wants to be liberal, Vox moves the dial a little to the left and recasts liberalism as progressivism.

In the modern era, it often seems all these political concepts come back cyclically: liberalism, progressivism, socialism, communism along with their various right wing equivalents. Like liberalism, progressivism used to mean something very different than it now means, but the end effect is roughly the same. 100 years ago, progressivism was adapted from the 19th century traditions of aristocratic Tory conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury. During a period when liberalism meant unregulated economics, it was conservatism which advocated any policies that looked after the poor. By 1900, progressivism meant implementing the best possible government, administered by the most informed experts, with solutions administered on faith that the experts have enough knowledge to implement the best policies on a massive level, even before they've been empirically tested. Then as now, progressivism has a terrible weakness for embracing fashionable ideas before they're empirically tested. Eventually, some progressive ideas prove themselves loathsome.

Along with all its good ideas and ideals, the progressivism of 100 years ago embraced imperialism, eugenics, temperance, and compulsive sterilization. Woodrow Wilson, the 'progressive President', imagined a world where Europe was free to self-determine along the lines of nation states, and in so doing, created a power vacuum that enabled the rise of Hitler and the vast expansion of the Soviet sphere.

In the same way that 1910 progressivism has its roots in the conservatism of British aristocrats, the 2010 progressivism has its roots in the unfinished projects of mid-20th century American liberals: Roosevelt's economic bill of rights and four freedoms, Johnson's Great Society before conservatives tried to gut it. It sees itself as the liberalism which Roosevelt and Johnson strove for, but it forgets the terrible compromises both of them had to make along the way, and how their progressive visions were accompanied by some reactionary ideas modern progressives would find repulsive - the most obvious example is probably their support of bloody right wing dictatorships to maintain stability and prevent war from spreading around the world again (moreso).

Just like the progressivism of 100 years ago, not to mention the liberalism of 60 years ago, we don't know which ideas progressives have today that will seem risible in 50 years, but I would imagine they're there among the good ones, and I have guesses which are which that I won't mention here.

But with those flaws, it inevitably followed that the old progressivism eventually found some common causes with fascism. There is a reason Henry Ford found a home among progressives. And in the same way, the progressivism of today finds common cause with socialism.

OK... so let's be clear before we go on: there is no American socialist politician today who can be considered anywhere near as dangerous as the progressive fascists of 100 years ago, but these processes are dynamic and, to a certain extent, you can see where things trend pretty well. Even by Vox's founding in 2014, the dial had moved past where Klein advocated, and while Klein launched himself into New York Times podcast ultrarespectability, the left still embraces the subversion Klein used to represent, and by 2016 took up the banner of Bernie Sanders as their mainstream.

So... well... look at how unpopular Biden's Israel policy is. Look how much protest it engenders in the younger generations, look at how quickly Biden's support went down in the polls, and you see exactly where the generations after Klein and me trend.

Just like Netanyahu and Hamas depend on each other for power, today's American left depends on our right for power too. Obviously, it's 50x less extreme an example, but given the stakes, it's a much more dangerous game. Just like the progressivism of 100 years ago enabled a leftward trend that eventually embraced Lenin and Stalin, the progressivism of today enabled a rightward trend that embraces... well we'll see but we all know that something dreadful may come.

The Hamas attack proved what my generation of Democrats wants to disbelieve with all its hearts: that the world often has no good options, and it's an exercise in misfortune to pretend there are. So often in its history, progressivism refuses to acknowledge that sometimes, you can only move the dial towards good by making evil a little bit less evil. You just have to choose the lesser evil, resign yourself to the nausea, and reign in the hotheads who want to put emphasis on violence rather than violence's effect.

The problem with maintaining this more realistic view of foreign affairs is that it can so easily curdle into its opposite: a lazy form of neoconservatism that grows its own form of idealistic delusions about how well it can maintain its own security so long as you maximize the blood and minimize the due process. One of my heroes, cold war liberal thinker Isaiah Berlin, said the quote realists should have posted on their office walls: "When a man speaks of the need for realism one may be sure that this is always the prelude to some bloody deed." Well, Berlin aligned himself with national defense often enough that he was surely speaking this as a warning to himself as much as to anyone else. The watchers always have to be watched, and realism can just as easily grow high on its own delusions. War is always an option for which one has to be prepared, but peace must always be offered, because if there are no roads or offers to peace, the lack of moral credibility only strengthens the enemy. If Israel won a series of mid-20th century wars, it's partially because Israel was the only belligerent sensible enough to sue for peace. So long as Israel abandons thoughts of peace, it must resign itself to losing wars.

So that brings us to this article in Vox. I won't get into its writer. I know I used to know something about Zach Beauchamp but my Washingtonspeak is twelve years dated. It criticizes Israel stridently, but for all the wrong reasons. It makes a conspicuous point of not embracing the Israel boycott and consulting with all sorts of Israeli counterterrorism experts, but it is Obama era policy for the Age of Trump and the nascent Age of AOC.

This article, advocating Israel embark on a more moral path, is the state of denial that put us on this path.

So now we have to get into some nitty-gritties of policy. It'll get lengthy and to a certain extent, this is for the 'advanced class.' So drop off here if you don't want to get minute and grim:

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So let's go through a few choice quotes of this article, starting with these short paragraphs:

Two things are true: Israel must do something, and what it’s doing now is indefensible. So what’s the alternative?

I put this question to anyone I could think of: a large group ranging from retired Israeli officers to Palestinian intellectuals to counterterrorism experts to scholars of the ethics and law of war. I read everything I could find on the topic, scouring reporting and the academic literature for better ideas.

The answer that emerged was deceptively simple: make the right choice where America made the wrong one. Israel should launch a targeted counterrorism operation aimed at Hamas leadership and the fighters directly involved in the October 7 attack, one that focuses on minimizing both civilian casualties and the scope of ground operations in Gaza.

Yes, this solution is deceptively simple, because it's genuinely simplistic. This IS the targeted counterterrorism operation they advocate for, and behold the result. Targeted counterterrorism still means crossfires with Hamas terrorists in crowded civilian areas - like targeted bombings of weapons stockpiles in the most delicate places - like residential areas where Hamas deliberately doesn't let residents leave.

How can one rogue 'Islamic Jihad' missile cause an explosion that kills 500 people rather than two dozen? The most obvious explanation is that there were other weapons in the building and the missile set them all off. How did the explosion in Jibaliya cause so many deaths? It's because they hit an underground bunker where an entire batallion was based - killing 50 Hamas soldiers who deliberately placed all their munitions underneath a refugee camp.

You can argue that Jibaliya refugee camp is a war crime, and it is a legitimate argument, but it's an unprovable argument, and furthermore, whose war crime? The Israelis did exactly what these experts suggested: it was an extremely precise counterterrorism hit aimed to minimize casualties, and it was a complete success. It was a direct hit, it got rid of 50 terrorists, and still, more than 200 people were killed.

This is the price of war, the most hellish place on earth where crimes are legalized.

So let's look at a longer excerpt now:

Yet this kind of periodic time-buying has historically been substituted for a broader political approach to Hamas by Israeli leadership. The theory, euphemistically called “mowing the grass,” went like this: you weaken Hamas through bombings, they get stronger, you have to fight them again, repeat ad infinitum.

Under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in power for 13 of the past 14 years, “mowing the grass” created the room for an inertial political approach to Gaza. His governments mostly left the foundations of Hamas rule alone, even propping them up, to maintain the status quo of a divided Palestinian leadership that foreclosed the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict.

Periodic terrorist attacks and even low-scale conflict was a price that Israel was willing to pay for a freer hand in the West Bank and normalized relations with Arab dictatorships. Palestinian suffering under Israel’s blockade and periodic violence was, in this thinking, not really Israel’s problem.

The October terrorist attack has shattered this illusion, exposing the false security on the Israel-Gaza border for what it was. Most Israelis have concluded this means they can’t tolerate a Hamas regime in Gaza — which is, in a deep sense, correct. But military force alone isn’t a good strategy for ending Hamas. To truly defeat the organization, you cannot play its game of escalating brutality. You need to address the political grievances that, per polling, underpin its support in Gaza

.“Hamas grew and was strengthened when Israel was occupying Gaza on the ground for 38 years,” says Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian American political scientist. “The stated goal of eliminating Hamas is unlikely to be accomplished. But even in some fairytale world where this happens, unless you address the underlying political conditions that brought us here, you are effectively just rewinding the tape on this horror film.”

Put differently: while destroying Hamas might not be a feasible military objective, it is (on a longer time horizon) politically possible. Hamas need not be the eternal and inevitable leader of the Palestinian people; other factions could rise and displace it, including ones with genuine commitments to peace and mutual coexistence.

Many things have to change for this to happen. But the first, and arguably most important, is that Israel must change its approach to the West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), and the moderate Fatah party that controls it, is sclerotic, corrupt, and authoritarian. It is increasingly seen by Palestinians as an Israeli quisling, giving rise to recent mass demonstrations in West Bank cities where protesters chanted for the fall of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

Israel can help the PA in one obvious way: by releasing its grip on the West Bank. Under Netanyahu, and especially his current far-right governing coalition, Israeli settlements have expanded and settler violence has increased. Israel’s military occupation, always suffocating, has increasingly become a noose around West Bank Palestinians’ necks.

Part of the thinking, stated explicitly by current Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is that Israel can snuff out Palestinian resistance by destroying their hope for a state.

“Terrorism derives from hope — a hope to weaken us,” Smotrich argued in a 2017 paper. “The statement that the Arab yearning for national expression in the Land of Israel cannot be ‘repressed’ is incorrect.”

It’s now clear that effect runs in the other direction. The more Israel represses Palestinians, the weaker its moderate leadership becomes — and the more support for violent resistance rises. Smotrich’s approach has not only failed morally, but it has failed strategically: the single worst terrorist attack in Israeli history happened under his watch, as he used his powers to implement his desired policy in the West Bank.

This would all be sensible in a world with sensible people, but sensible people don't get into a hundred year war. After the attack last month, Israel is less likely to embrace a two-state solution than ever before. If there was any time to implement something like that, it was before the Hamas attack, and that time is now over. Even if Netanyahu is out of power soon, replaced by a vaguely center-leftist like Benny Gantz or Yair Lapid, both of them will be on the shortest possible leash. A few suicide bombs could provoke more panic than a large scale massacre, and scare Israel into the dirty hands of people who make Netanyahu look like Rabin.

Regarding the Palestinian side, it's probably true, most Palestinians are no less reasonable than most Israelis. Polls in the 90s showed that as many as 80% of Palestinians supported recognizing Israel if it meant peaceful coexistence, and if Israel's control relaxes in either the West Bank or Gaza, that will win over a significant amount of the Palestinian population, but just as one-third of America will not relinquish Trump, there will still be somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of Palestinians who will never recognize Israel's legitimacy, and among that subset, if even one in a hundred of them pursues active violence, a two state solution will not work any time in the next generation or three.

What is true for Palestine is also true for Israel - the more Palestinians embrace violent militancy, the more inclined Israel will be to embrace the same. Authoritarianism provokes terror, terror provokes authoritarianism, and both provoke each other until the price is too high not to pursue peace. Believe it or not, the price is nowhere near too high yet, it may not even be close. The two state solution is still the solution to this conflict, but we have to resign ourselves to that it may not happen in our lifetimes, and to get there, might cost amounts of blood still unfathomable.

Whatever the near-future of Israel, Israel's mid-future is likely to involve people like Betzalel Smotrich. However incompetent he is, however incompetent people of his beliefs can't help but be, a Prime Minister far even to the right of Netanyahu is almost sure to get his time in the chair. Hopefully he'll only be there a few years, but the nature of far right leaders is to stretch their few years into decades - as Netanyahu has.

So even after this, especially after this, the grass mower approach is still the best we can hope for. Every few years, when an organization like Hamas gets too ambitious, you have no better option than to go in and narrow their ambitions. Or, at least that was the best option. Now, Israel has to entertain whether letting Hamas have control of Gaza will invite further attacks like this one.

Nobody yet knows how Hamas got through Israel's defenses, but it's hard to believe they did not have help - be it from Iran, or (I fear likely) from some larger superpower trying to distract the US from its own military campaigns. Hopefully, this other power (you can guess) will otherwise be too occupied with its own quagmire to worry about Gaza again any time soon, and we can all go back to the good old days of grassmowing...

The last and longest quote:

The 9/11 attacks were designed to provoke the United States into overreaction, pulling it into unwinnable foreign conflicts and bleeding its treasury dry. Some experts on Hamas think the point of the militant group’s attack, the sheer brutality of targeting entire families, was to have a similar effect on Israel: to provoke an overly violent response that could widen the war to a regional conflagration designed to elicit a response so ‘disproportionate’ from Israel that it would draw international condemnation and overshadow memories of Hamas’ own violence, the operation could — by Hamas’ reasoning — bring others to its side,” writes Devorah Margolin, a fellow at the center-right Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Such escalation could include a potential war with Hizballah in the north, uprisings in the West Bank, internal struggles fomented by Arab citizens of Israel, and targeting of both Israeli and Jewish targets abroad.”

Any regime change operation, then, will drag Israel into a nightmare: an occupation, measured in many years rather than months, that will lead to more of its soldiers dead and sap huge amounts of military resources that could be deployed elsewhere. It would turn the conflict with the Palestinians, already a serious security problem for Israel, into a regional nightmare with no end in sight. This will do untold damage to Israel’s standing on the global stage, potentially supercharging the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement it so fears.

So if not regime change, then what? Yagil Levy, a scholar of the IDF at the Open University of Israel, suggests “the obvious conclusion” is “to draw up far more modest aims for a ground operation, and preferably to avoid such an operation entirely.”

The objective would not be toppling Hamas, but rather severely weakening its military capabilities, deterring it and other organizations from near-term attacks, and taking away Hamas’ leverage by rescuing Israeli hostages.

Accomplishing the first two goals requires similar means: killing Hamas fighters, especially its leadership, and blowing up its weapon systems and tunnels. The more Hamas takes damage, the harder it will be — in literal organizational terms — for it to launch any more terrorist attacks in the immediate future.

And the more it suffers, the more likely it will be deterred from trying anything else in the near term — as hard as it is to imagine an organization that conducted the October 7 attacks being deterred by anything.

Groups like Hamas have to make strategic calculations about their capabilities to function as an organization; its leaders have to make calculations about how much of a risk to their own lives their decisions create. This imposes a degree of means-ends rationality on even organizations with millenarian or genocidal end goals — part of why Hezbollah, which has no shortage of enmity toward Israel, has not launched a full-scale war in the north. Deterrence is possible with Hamas too, albeit not easy.

“For deterrence to work, Hamas casualties need to be very high,” Byman tells me.

The third goal, bringing home hostages, may prove especially difficult given Israeli intelligence weaknesses. The best hope lies not in an overwhelming invasion — which would telegraph to Hamas that Israel is coming and give them time to execute their prisoners — but through surprise special forces raids. No one should delude themselves: the odds are not good for such a strategy to bring home most of the hostages. But again, it’s better than a full-scale regime change invasion.

Put these together, and the broad outlines of an alternative to regime change becomes clear. Israel should not try a full ground invasion that aims to put tanks in the streets of Gaza City. Instead, it should employ airstrikes and special forces targeted at high-value Hamas targets paired with limited mass ground operations — if any.

This strategy will depend heavily on Israel ensuring it has high-quality intelligence about what’s going on in Gaza. It will still involve significant airstrikes, which will inevitably kill civilians — the kind of death that has already outraged people around the world. Israel has both a strategic and moral imperative to keep this to a minimum, which is why taking the time to ensure it has the best possible intelligence is essential.

Victory can still be defined as “destroying Hamas,” but understood less as eradicating the organization entirely than as eliminating the elements of Hamas responsible for the attack. Specifically, this means the killing and capture of Hamas’ top leaders as well as the vast majority of foot soldiers who perpetrated atrocities on October 7, alongside parallel efforts to rescue as many hostages as possible.

Such accomplishments would not only be symbolic victories for Israel, but practical ones: with that many Hamas leaders and soldiers dead, the group would have difficulty executing another major attack anytime in the near to medium term.

The Hamas attack is not 9/11. Would that it were. What we're dealing with is like the Cuban Missile Crisis if it ended with Cuba firing a single nuclear missile into Miami. It would be one of the three greatest disasters in US history (slavery and the Civil War), but tempered with the awareness that still much worse could happen. It would demand a draconian response, not just to prevent Cuba from firing any more, but as a message to Cuba's sponsors not to implement something still much more deadly. It would not demand a permanent occupation of Cuba, but it would demand as complete a dismantling of the Castro regime as could be arranged and the reinstatement of someone like Fulgencio Batista as the 'President.' If the Cuban population is provoked to another revolution, that's the price to be paid, and the US would deal with the next insurrection when it had to. Once again, the grassmower approach would be the only thing that works until such time as the sponsor regimes fall, and when they do, Palestine and/or Cuba could either embrace new possibilities, or go back to resisting with rocks.

Hamas is exactly as awful as they seem, but they are the least powerful of Israel's mortal enemies. Hezbollah has twice the weapons stockpile that Hamas did even before this war, while Iran and Syria obviously have still more. Israel doesn't have to kill all of Hamas, but getting those high value targets is exactly what Israel's doing now, and that alone is enough for Israel to be thought indefensible by rank-and-file liberals who underestimate just how difficult these operations are.

Anyone who believes this article is kidding themselves that you can get to high value targets with just special forces. We saw the results of precision attacks with Jabaliya, even those cost 150 innocent lives. So the only response is to get rid of as many Hamasniks as possible in as little time as possible, accept the casualty number will be revoltingly high, install and impose Fatah on Gaza, get the fuck out, and hope that the less authoritarian government will make a majority of Gazans less inclined to fury.

The American left is now significantly to the left of Obama and Ezra Klein. For the moment, the left seems willing to completely break with Biden for his Israel support, but Biden understands foreign policy, they don't. World safety, even national safety, depends on making friends with people who do disgusting things. If you want to prevent Israel from doing something truly awful, you have to bind them closer, not push them away. If Israel faces its problems alone, with an emergent far right that finds Netanyahu weak, the chance that some far right PM would level their enemies to a crater becomes likely.

The time is coming when Boycott, Divestment and Sanction picks up traction, and soon. It likely will have exactly the opposite effect from what the left wants it to have: it will only stew Israel further in its resentments. If BDS spreads from the Left to the Center, Israel's educated class would leave en masse for promising opportunities abroad, leaving an assortment of right wingers alone with their WMD's.

Whatever you feel about Israel, we're stuck with them. Unless (or until) there is an outright genocide of more than, say, 100,000 dead in a single campaign, maybe 150,000, we have no option but just go quietly to the bathroom and throw up. Just like Rabin did with Arafat: we shake the Israeli government's hand, however many times we have to; but even while you shake it, look like you're going to go to the bathroom right after the photo op to wash it off.