Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.
Q. Why, indeed? After all, Israel has fought Hamas and Hezbollah, non-state actors, before. It has fought Fateh. And it has fought enemy coalitions. So what aspect of this war is different?
A. Israel has never before fought a war against a coalition of seven non-state actors. It has never actively fought Iran, a sovereign non-Arab state that has created that coalition, known as the Axis of Resistance. With the exception of a few Soviet, Pakistani and North Korean pilots between 1967 and 1973, Israel has never before fought non-Arab combatants. It has never actively sought out and assassinated enemy leaders like Nasrallah and Sinwar.
There is no rule book for this war. That is why it is so different.
Q. Why do non-state actors like the Yemeni Houthis, Iraqi pro-Iranian militias and Hezbollah form such a different category than Israel’s Arab-state enemies of old?
A. The Houthis, Hezbollah and the Iraqi pro-Iranian militias do not represent the states whose territory they inhabit. They are not in the United Nations and not subject to internationally-agreed rules of warfare, for example regarding treatment of prisoners. Hamas, alone among them, controlled a parcel of land, the Gaza Strip, that could be deemed a geopolitical entity. They are terrorists who target civilians deliberately.
One consequence of this ‘non-state’ status is that none of the generally accepted practices of war apply. Does Israel negotiate ceasefire and demilitarization arrangements with Hezbollah, which prior to the war controlled Lebanon’s border with Israel, or with Lebanon, which ‘owns’ but does not control the land of southern Lebanon? Is Iraqi President al-Sudani the person to complain to regarding missiles and UAVs launched from his sovereign territory, or is Iran, Iraq’s neighbor, the real ‘sovereign’?
Then, too, Israel’s Islamist terrorist enemies refuse to negotiate directly with it, unlike Arab states that have ended their wars at the negotiating table.
Q. But haven’t Hezbollah and the Houthis really ‘hijacked’ sovereign state territory?
A. Yes, and they are the dominant military force in those states. But their leaders are not in the phone directory of the United Nations. They don’t take orders from the recognized leaders of Lebanon and Yemen, respectively (who in fact are incapable of enforcing whatever orders they might like to give Hezbollah and the Houthis).
Q. What is different overall regarding the Arab side?
A. There is far greater third-party Arab involvement in this war than in past wars. Arabs--Egypt and Qatar--are for the first time mediating between Israel and an Arab enemy, Hamas. And in the midst of war, not at its conclusion.
Because there are so many Arab civilian casualties--another precedent--international legal institutions based in The Hague are getting involved and Israelis in uniform and in government are being accused of war crimes. An Israeli IDF veteran was just arrested in Belgium and accused of war crimes.
Loose (and appalling and dumb) Israeli talk of ‘starving the enemy’ and the like, itself without precedent, is coming back to haunt both politicians and generals. Indeed, there is an entire category of Israeli messianist politicians and retired generals whose every other sentence is fodder for the lawyers at The Hague.
Those civilian casualties in Gaza are multiplying because an entire Arab armed force, Hamas, is using its civilian population as human shields. We witnessed something similar in southern Lebanon in earlier wars, e.g., against the PLO in 1982, but nowhere on the scale of tens of thousands of dead.
In Israeli eyes, Hamas is deliberately sacrificing its civilians, then accusing the IDF of murdering them. There is no precedent in Israel-Arab wars for this weaponization of The Hague.
Q. And the Israeli hostages? Also a new feature of war?
A. Israeli civilians were captured and interned by Jordan during the 1948 war, but they were treated more or less ‘by the book’. Hamas has no rule book; from its standpoint, the hostages are an instrument of warfare. By the same token Israel, having allowed the hostages to be captured through abject security negligence and failure, has ever since varied wildly in its approach to freeing them.
To many Israelis, freeing the hostages is THE top moral and national priority. To the Netanyahu government, bereft of a guiding strategy and manned in part by messianist fanatics, the hostages are secondary to somehow ‘winning’ the war. We can be certain that any future war against non-state enemies like Hamas and Hezbollah will feature enemy attempts to murder and capture large numbers of Israeli civilians precisely because the trauma inflicted on Israeli society has paid off in terms of dysfunction.
Q. New weapons?
A. UAVs, or drones. We witnessed their wholesale introduction to warfare earlier in the Azerbaijan-Armenia war and in Ukraine. Here we see them used against Israel in a coordinated manner on multiple fronts, simultaneously: Yemen, Iraq, Hezbollah, Iran. To be sure, Israel deploys them too. The warfighting manuals will have to be rewritten after this war.
Q. Losses?
A. Death and grieving are very different in this war, and in more than one direction, meaning in attitudes toward our own losses and attitudes toward the enemy.
Regarding Israel’s losses a year into this war, so heavy is the sense of trauma that it is painfully evident in the obsessive way Israel’s media dwells endlessly on themes of suffering, sacrifice and heroism, literally 24 hours a day. You can’t object: people have every right to grieve. But grief was never this obsessive even in the two past wars that were just as long (and heavy with casualties): the 1948 War of Independence and the 1969-70 Egypt-Israel War of Attrition. I believe the difference today is primarily the growing cultural and political influence of National Religious and Haredi Jews.
As for the enemy, and in sharp contrast, the Israeli public by and large refuses to contemplate the massive scale of Palestinian civilian deaths. The major news networks simply blot them out, as do social media. Of course you can switch to Arab TV stations or even CNN to get a shocking eyeful, but few Israelis do.
This is particularly vexing because the IDF does have defensible explanations: it warns civilians, it takes pains to avoid hitting them, Hamas and Hezbollah deliberately implant their forces amidst civilians, etc. At least in theory, Israel also investigates its own mistakes and shortcomings, though the Netanyahu government is reluctant, to say the least (another precedent).
Israel’s refusal to contemplate the enemy death toll prevails until, of course, the death of someone like Yahya Sinwar. The Hamas leader’s gruesome final moments and death ‘mask’ were plastered and broadcast everywhere for the Israeli public, children included, to celebrate over. This is unprecedented, and deeply disturbing. Here is former Labor leader Shelly Yachimovich in Sunday’s Yediot Aharonot, “Confronting the screams of delight, it remains only to impale Sinwar’s skull on a pole and parade with it. This is repugnant and frightening. This empowering of a death ritual filters down in a thousand ways to the public-at-large.”
Q. Apropos Sinwar, and again uniquely regarding this war, could his death possibly be leveraged to end the war?
A. I doubt it. Death, particularly in battle, means martyrdom to militant Islamists, to be celebrated. Israel can be generous and offer Hamas concessions--Netanyahu’s speech last Thursday after Sinwar’s death hinted at as much--but Hamas may be in no mood to entertain renewed indirect negotiations.
Besides, who is now in charge of Hamas? Are they accessible? Is there a central authority that controls the Israeli hostages in the Gaza tunnels? Is there even a central authority among the ranks of Lebanese Hezbollah?
Does Iran have any influence left in Gaza? If so, is it positive or negative with regard to ending the war and freeing the hostages? Lest we forget, Israel has committed in the coming days to launch another retribution attack on Iran.
Q. Bottom line?
A. Sinwar’s death, like Nasrallah’s, may end up as a footnote rather than a turning point in the history of this war. But the many unique features of the war itself will almost certainly influence the course of future conflicts.