Bulletins and News Discussion from December 4th to December 10th, 2023 - The Legacy of Kissinger - COTW: Laos

I think the broad analysis is correct, but the given timescales are too short. During the Ukraine War, we repeatedly saw speculations that some high-up figure in the US government has given only a limited amount of time to Ukraine to fulfil its objectives and that funding or military supplies simply could not be supplied beyond that point, and those deadlines came and went without even the slightest indication of a change in pace. I think we will, similarly, watch January roll on by while Netanyahu and his cabinet say that, actually, they need another month or two to really wrap things up - they're 95% of the way there, they just need a little more time! This will repeat until either Israel's government as we currently conceive it no longer exists (which seems plausible but not in the short term), Hamas is destroyed (which currently seems unlikely), or everybody in the region is irradiated by a hundred nuclear bombs.

Israel - or, more specifically, Zionism - is facing an existential threat. So is Hamas, and Palestine more broadly. They are in contradiction - they can no longer co-exist. Negotiations may occur, but that central issue cannot be resolved without one side being defeated - not necessarily total defeat, but effective defeat. Israel could say that Hamas has been destroyed and then retreat to the pre-war borders, but if that didn't actually occur, Hamas would almost certainly retain the ability to fire rockets into Israel and even potentially do military operations outside the fence, and so that's not really an option in practice. This isn't even getting into Hezbollah, who I think is the actual major threat to Zionism here and has been largely ignored by the Western media.

At current rates of attrition, I don't think Israel can be meaningfully defeated for at least a few more months. I have absolutely no idea what the state of Hamas' stockpiles are, nor the state of their tunnels, but out of the 30k fighters that most people seem to believe exist, I have a hard time believing that even in the absolute most pessimistic view of the war, that more than 10% of them have been killed so far, and I think it's probably in the 5% range. Hamas fighters seem to be sufficiently trained, prepared, self-sufficient, and... whatever the opposite of demoralized is. Moralized? that to defeat them, you'll either have to kill almost all of them or use up all their weapons. Either way, a long war. Israel's current status is some ways easier and also harder to analyse, because while more is immediately known about how anti-Hamas they are (very, obviously), it's difficult to determine how strongly held that viewpoint really is throughout the country. For example, white South Africans under apartheid were, I believe, quite strongly pro-Apartheid under the pressure on them became too much, and the government and population fatigued of the conflict, and there was a very significant minority (even a majority according to some analysis I saw) of white South Africans who still held positive views about apartheid years after it ended - but apartheid did, nonetheless, end, because it was forced to end, regardless of what its supporters thought or how in favour of it they were. A similar thing could occur in Israel, but only, I think, if Hezbollah joins in, because the Gazans alone simply cannot cause that pressure throughout the populace and the economy, even if they're being quite effective in taking down the army. Guerilla warfare without external help have a depressing rate of success, but guerilla warfare with external help can actually genuinely work, as we saw in Vietnam. The death rates are always dismal, though. To pull a figure out of my ass, I think we'll see somewhere in the realm of 200,000 to 500,000 dead Gazan civilians before this is over (e.g. similar to the 20% of the North Korean population killed during the Korean War, in which there was a similar campaign of total destruction of every single above-ground structure in the country).

In a Gramscian way, I believe that the worst case scenario will occur, and that the Resistance will nonetheless overcome it.

So the question of "when will the war end" is partially linked to "when does Nasrallah deem it necessary to give the command to attack, whatever an attack even looks like from a sorta-guerrilla, sorta-state military force," and I have absolutely no idea and I don't think Israel does either. It could be tomorrow, it could be in March, it could be in September 2025. The answer could, if you're a pessimist, be "never". And I think Nasrallah likes the ambiguity that way.