[Image By Ecrusized, influenced by user Rr016. – Own work, NYT, WSJ & Template map. Made using OpenTopoMap data., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138599659]
Ho Chi Minh, in a warning to French colonialists, said this in 1946: “You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”
I believe that the more populist militant wings of the Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonialism and apartheid have taken this adage to heart.
This is a tactical/geostrategic analysis of the ongoing attacks by Hamas and its strategic partners against the state of Israel, Israel’s response, and a cursory look-see at the leadup to this flashpoint, and what the future might hold. It’s numbered to maintain a modicum of guardrails. Please note that I have completely removed all personal sentiment and moral outrage with regards to the tragic loss of innocent life in structuring this analysis. If this will make it difficult for you to read, please don’t subject yourself to it. Also, I’m atheist and have absolutely no religious bone to pick with the whole my-sky-father-better-than-yours side of things. I’m just looking at the military and geopolitical side of things, with my biases clearly laid out for anyone to deduce. The opinions in this piece are mine and mine alone:
(1) This is likely a spectacular failure of Israeli intelligence, but not in the way one might traditionally think. It feels like a false flag operation gone wrong. There is no way that the entire intelligence apparatus let their guard down so spectacularly. It smells like a false flag operation, via active negligence, that perhaps a small coterie of power brokers and power actors within the Israeli state apparatus have partially lost control of. They must have had prior intelligence of the goings-on, letting it go for their own rationales of maintaining power. However it also feels like Hamas and their allies have pulled the rug from right under Israel’s feet. Why?
(2) It simultaneously feels like a spectacular victory of operational security by Hamas and their allies. There is no doubt that Iran is involved, so is Hezbollah by proxy (to what extent is yet to be determined by whether or not they open up a battle front in the Northern part of Israel). But perhaps Syria as well? And maybe even some other Arab nations. The one time when the Arab nations where not getting the ever loving crap beat out of them by Israel was 50 years back in the Yom Kippur War. The fact that this attack happened almost 50 years to the day, can hardly be a coincidence. However, I do believe this is only the beginning in many ways. You see…
(3) Israel is a lot more isolated geopolitically than one might think. The citizenry of the West do not have much of an appetite for war, nor do they have any appetite for funding someone else’s war when they are themselves reeling from inflationary pressures. I do believe a lot of Arabic and Islamic power actors, especially those that have direct hands in the Palestinian cause, have also made this observation. Poorer nations generally have a greater chunk of the population ready to fight, simply because of the economic rationale that soldiering provides to get a poor family out of poverty. Even now, for all its economic growth, the Indian military have young people tumbling over themselves to be recruited, with way more applicants than jobs. While in wealthy countries like America, they have the exact opposite problem, a shortfall of young people wanting to join the military. Now Israel is a wealthy country, with conscription, but it has a far more unified and visceral national ethos binding the Jewish majority, than all other countries of the Western world. Even this has it’s limits because…
(4) The Palestinians and larger Arab population can afford to lose more people and still gain a lot of concessions from Israel, thus able to claim a decisive victory. This war is already a loss for Israel. The current situation is untenable. The Arab and Muslim world is much more powerful than 50 years back. Israel will have to make major geopolitical concessions. Because…
(5) This Palestinian militant uprising is not going anywhere. They have had enough. The occupation, the apartheid, the colonial apparatus has only increased and gotten more brutal under this increasingly fascist Israeli regime. The world really doesn’t give a crap as much as it used to, partially because the mainstream Western narrative has become a little more balanced, thus ironically enough taking away a little bit of the romanticism away from the Palestinian struggle. There is every evidence to suggest that flashpoints in the West Bank could well blow up into full-fledged urban guerilla warfare. Who’s to say about potential uprisings from Israeli citizens of Palestinian ethnicity, a population that has long been considered a potential 5th column within Israel? What about Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistance hanging out in Lebanon? There have already been a smattering of rockets fired on an Israeli military installation in the North of the country. Israel cannot afford to open up a second front in this war. As this piece is being written…
(6) 48 hours into the war, the losses on Israel’s side seem to actually be higher than the Palestinian side. Even Hezbollah weren’t able to achieve that in 2006. This will of course change as Israel counter attacks, and Palestinian losses start mounting drastically. But even here, Hamas and their allies are using the tactic of disproportionate value in citizenry between oppressor and oppressed (exactly what Ho Chi Minh alluded to in his quote above), to ensure great leverage over Israel. They’ve done this with their kidnapping of Israelis and spreading them across Gaza to ensure hesitancy on the part of Israeli air raids, as well as their effective use of suicide terror squads, with great technological upgrades, in the initial incursion into Israel. A final point on asymmetrical warfare…
(7) Easily accessible technology is leveling the playing field between the military haves and have nots. This is going to have very interesting ramifications for the development of warfare and very likely result in an ever decreasing patience on the parts of the citizenry of wealthier nations for the same.
More on this as it develops.
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Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 10 2023
love liberation struggle 