While Israel began its operation in Gaza facing an uphill climb, every passing week seems to complicate its task further. Following Friday’s International Court of Justice order to halt the IDF’s military operation in Rafah, the exchange of fire between Israeli and Egyptian soldiers over the weekend, and the Israeli strike on Sunday that killed dozens and injured hundreds of Palestinians sheltering in a tent encampment in Rafah, the total victory that Prime Minister Netanyahu has been promising for months once a Rafah operation is concluded is nowhere in sight. This comes amidst IDF soldiers facing heavy fire in northern Gaza and reports that Hamas has more battalions there than Israel thought, and the continued absence of any progress in getting the 125 remaining hostages out of Gaza. The question now is not whether Israel will achieve victory on the terms it has demanded, but whether it will achieve victory by any objective measure and how much it will have to dial back its conception of what that means.
The Israeli government—and not only Netanyahu—has contended for months that Rafah was the last part of the puzzle, and that without an operation in Rafah, Hamas would not be defeated. None of the events of the previous weeks prove that to be untrue, since there is clearly a significant Hamas presence in Rafah that needs to be militarily confronted. The problem is that, as with the war in Gaza writ large, the Israeli government has viewed things through the prism of Hamas and its capabilities alone without paying attention to the wider context. Even if an absolute victory against Hamas were possible, victory in Israel’s case must be assessed on a number of other factors. And it is here where Israel is losing, and where the military imperative in Rafah is working at cross purposes with other imperatives.
If the Rafah operation continues apace, there will undoubtedly be more civilian casualties and likely more incidents akin to Sunday’s tragedy. What Israel needs to assess is not whether these should be weighed against defeating however many Hamas battalions actually remain in the city, whether it is one or two or four. It is whether defeating those battalions is worth the cost of those civilian lives on top of the costs of the diplomatic tsunami that Ehud Barak warned about in 2011 and that is now coming to fruition. Whether it is worth the cost of more European states following the lead of Spain, Ireland, and Norway in unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and risking European Union sanctions tied to Israeli actions in those territories. Whether it is worth the cost of even worse relations with the U.S. and an even more intense campaign to cut off offensive arms transfers to Israel that will go well beyond 2,000-pound bombs. Whether it is worth the cost of Israel’s global image, the cost of Israel’s economy, the cost of Israelis’ quality of life, and possibly their ability to travel to Europe and Latin America. Whether it is worth the cost of setting normalization with Saudi Arabia back years, risking an actual rupture with Egypt, and chilling Israel’s relations with its new friends in Abu Dhabi and Manama. In other words, the question of what constitutes a victory is not only about Rafah, and not even only about Hamas. It is about what Israel will look like when the war is over, what challenges it will face, and who will still be around to help once the dust settles.
There are many whose instinct is to respond that Israel is subjected to unfair and disproportionate standards, that the war would be over tomorrow if Hamas surrendered, that Israel is fighting a war against a terrorist group that deliberately embeds itself among civilians and counts on the international community to not acknowledge the unique challenges that Israel faces, and that Israel cannot possibly stop so long as Hamas retains any ability to fire rockets or threaten Israeli communities in any way. These are all valid points, and they sadly have no bearing on the situation. It does not matter what is right or what is fair. What matters is Israel figuring out how to win within the rules of the game that exists rather than within the rules of a game that lives only in a fantasy land, and within the rules of the game that is being played on this planet, Israel is in serious danger of falling somewhere between perpetual stalemate and defeat.
Netanyahu has promised lots of things that will be hard to walk back, but Israel needs to walk some things back in order to salvage a genuine win out of Rafah. One way is to focus on the most vital part of the Rafah operation, which is not the Hamas battalions; it is rather the smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. The tunnels are Hamas’ conduit to the outside world, and allow it to smuggle in weapons and supplies and possibly smuggle out Hamas fighters. There isn’t a good way to eliminate these tunnels without actually controlling the Philadelphi road that runs along the Gaza side of the border, which is why some military experts believed in October that Israel should have begun in Rafah rather than left it to the end. If Israel redefines its operation in Rafah as aimed at finding and eliminating tunnels and choking off Hamas’ access to Egypt, that is both militarily critical and also a way to avoid more mass displacement and civilian casualties.
Beyond Rafah, it remains striking how many of Israel’s problems continue to be caused by the humanitarian side of the equation rather than the military side of the equation, including the arrest warrants requested by ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan. There are few scenes more damaging to Israel’s reputation than those of squads of vigilantes setting up makeshift checkpoints and stopping trucks on the highway, interrogating and beating drivers, and emptying boxes of food and supplies in transit to Gaza while sometimes torching the trucks, all while Israeli police stand on the side of the road and watch. It makes Israelis look callous and cruel, and the state itself look either feckless or criminally complicit. This goes double for scenes of settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, ransacking their homes, burning their fields, and killing or attacking their livestock, while IDF soldiers either remain motionless off to the side or intervene on behalf of the settlers when Palestinians attempt to fight back. If the Israeli government will not decisively crack down on this behavior, and does not make sure that it is genuinely doing everything possible to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza, then it can defeat every Hamas battalion down to the last man and empty the West Bank of Palestinians, and it will suffer the consequences of its “victory” for years.
It is also well past time for Netanyahu to acknowledge what nearly everyone else has by this point: Israel needs to work with Palestinians in Gaza to replace Hamas, and those Palestinians are going to be affiliated with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. There is no other way out of the hole that the Israeli government has dug for itself on this issue, and as with Rafah, it means defining victory differently. Having a non-Hamas entity governing Gaza is unquestionably a win, but it is not going to be the Santa Claus win that Netanyahu has been claiming, where there is some mythical Palestinian group other than Fatah that has a shred of ability or willingness to assume responsibility for the tasks that Hamas has been doing.
The total victory that Netanyahu claims is just around the corner and awaits Israel as soon as the IDF is done with Rafah does not exist. The military campaign is accomplishing some of its objectives, but it is creating thorny complications at the same time, not least of which concerns the fate of the remaining hostages. If Israel wants an actual victory, it must start balancing the military aspects with other considerations. Otherwise, Rafah is going to cement Israel’s defeat rather than Hamas’.
Ottomans and Zionists 
The fallacy is the Israel has some obligation to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians at all. This is a false expectation that Israel has tolerated or even encouraged for so long, it now makes it all but impossible for it to win a war. The USA has a similar handicap and indeed has not won a major war since WW2. However, the USA can afford to suffer stalemates and even defeats and withdrawals because the homeland is not under military threat. Not so Israel.
There’s only so many nasty names and so much acrimony the world can direct at Israel before it wearies and moves on. After all, countries that committed the worst atrocities of the 20th century, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Communist China have all moved past that.
If Israel has simply conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and driven all the Palestinians into Egypt and Jordan then, when it was at its peak strength, the conflict would be much less of a concern today. And the world would have “gotten over it.” Sure, the PLO, etc. would have tried to infiltrate and the 1973 war would have still occurred, but Israel would have won that war and the problem would be much more manageable now.
But instead, Israel keeps trying to live in a “high crime ghetto” but act like a decent liberal living in a gated community in the suburbs. The kinds of things Israel has to do to survive in the Arab world are likely to offend Westerners in their cushy neighborhoods. At least until more recent days, when the Western nations are increasingly getting a taste of what kind of trouble can arise from Islamism in their own nations.
Pulling out now and letting Hamas survive is just going to kick the can down the road. The fact is Gaza is probably unsalvageable. The people are too far gone. They need to leave.
The first impressions, all the talk about stone age, and siege, were the correct ones. But they should have been done in a week or two. Hamas should have been given one week to surrender or the Gazans one week to force overthrow Hamas and then Israel should have simultaneously destroyed Gaza and drove the Gazans into Egypt. They could have gotten all the humanitarian assistance they needed there.
From that position of strength Israel could have negotiated as to how many and which Gazans would be allowed back.