The UN General Assembly voted on Tuesday to call for an immediate ceasefire. That resolution passed 153 in favour versus 10 against. That day, Joe Biden said that Israel "risked losing international support". I mean I don't get it. The international community voted 153 -10 against Israel, what "international support" does it have to lose?
For a point of reference, the previous vote on October 26 for "humanitarian pauses" passed 120 - 14. Among the countries that abstained in October and voted for peace this time around are Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - who issued a joint statement earlier that day. India, Japan, the Philippines, Poland, Greece, Finland, Sweden, and Iceland are also amongst the group that moved from abstention in October to supporting a ceasefire this week. So - what does Biden mean that Israel "risks losing international support"?
The stated goal of Israel includes the destruction of Hamas. The humiliation videos and pictures of men stripped to their underwear is part of Israel's narrative spinning here. Israeli ministers and IDF officials have been telling a story of Hamas fighters surrendering - evidence that "Israel is winning" and that Hamas is broken. Yesterday, the "broken" Hamas fighters executed a complex multi phase ambush - where they attacked a patrol and trapped them in a cluster of three buildings, held them there and waited for reinforcements to arrive, trapped the reinforcements in the same area, and then set off IEDs which dropped the buildings onto the soldiers. This happened in Gaza City, in the neighbourhood of Shejaiya where the IDF had claimed that they had secured and where they had largely disrupted the command and control of the fighters.
The Times of Israel article has a lot of details about what happened. Notable in the list of killed IDF soldiers are their ranks: a colonel, a lieutenant colonel, 3 majors, a captain, and 3 sergeants. Maybe Israel just gives out officer commissions like candy at Halloween, I dunno. Still, this looks pretty bad to me. And it does really put a question mark on how "broken" Hamas is. Maybe it was just really bad luck that resulted in an ambush that killed 6 officers including a colonel and lieutenant colonel, and no one below the rank of sergeant.
The losses to the IDF also raise another point about how much Israel is "winning" this war. 115 soldiers killed (although technically, 20 of them were killed by friendly fire and not Hamas) is bad, but still pretty low considering how much fighting has been going on. But adding to this toll is in the number wounded, which is not small. As of December 10, the IDF was acknowledging 1,593 wounded (892 minor injuries) - which is bad, but doesn't seem terrible. But as we know, the IDF lies. Haaretz looked at hospital numbers and they think it's over 3,000.
Yes, this is quite minor relative to the scale of destruction inflicted on Gaza - a campaign based almost entirely on air strikes will look like that. But I'm pretty sure that this is not a price that Israel was expecting to pay. And what have they gotten for all those dead and broken bodies? Hamas is still as functional and capable as they were before. The flag of Palestine and the keffiyeh have become global symbols of resistance to occupation. Sure doesn't seem like this war is going according to plan.
One more thing to add to the pile. The Israeli government is dead set against a Palestinian state. Much of Netanyahu's strategy for decades has been to weaken the Palestinian Authority (by supporting Hamas) to break any solidarity between the Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinians in the West Bank. They were actually very successful at this and PA President Abbas is one of the very few leaders in the region that is less popular than Netanyahu. But this too is vanishing - only instead of Israel's nightmare of the PA becoming the voice of all of Palestine, it looks like it is Hamas that's taking the role. The sympathy for Gaza is only a minor part - that Israel has stepped up it's violent terrorist activities in the West Bank, that's won it no friends. And it has unsurprisingly pushed the people of the West Bank towards Hamas. So that seems counterproductive too.
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