What Explains Israel’s Military Tactics in Gaza?

Since Israel’s dismantled its few settlements in the territory, Gaza’s residents have suffered from a blockade and repeated engagements between militants and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), costing thousands of lives. The conflict originated in mid-June, when three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed by an unknown group of Palestinians. While Hamas’ Gazan leadership almost certainly had nothing to do with the kidnappings, the Israeli government used the boys’ disappearance to launch a crackdown on Hamas, first in the West Bank, and subsequently in Gaza. In turn, Hamas responded with an increased volley of rockets directed at Israel.

Israel’s approach to the conflict in Gaza makes little strategic sense. It cannot eliminate Hamas (without a lengthy and unlikely occupation), and doing so would likely only provide an opportunity for even more radical groups to come to power. The initial stated goal was to destroy Hamas tunnels, but Egypt managed to do just that without any kinetic military action. Attacking Gaza has increased the number of rockets heading toward Israel and resulted in the deaths of 31 Israelis.  As Israel expert Brent Sasley argues, Israel’s strategic objective of creating a “quiet” Gaza is vague and likely unattainable.

If Israel does indeed lack a strategy in dealing with Gaza, then what is guiding its tactics in the current conflict? 680 Gazans have been killed by the IDF since Operation Protective Edge began. According to the UN, 74% of those have been civilians (though this is statistic reflects the death toll from a few days ago). Human Rights Watch, while being conservative in its claims, notes there is evidence that Israel likely deliberately targeted civilians. Additionally, there is evidence Israel has used anti-personnel flechette shells. In all likelihood, Israel has repeatedly and intentionally shelled civilian targets.

Hundreds of civilian deaths in a few days is a horrendous record, but it should also be noted that Israel does have the capacity to kill more. Consequently, Israel has walked a fine line between portraying itself as a protector of Gazan civilians and publicizing fairly transparent attempts to deny the category all together. What explains Israel’s seemingly schizophrenic strategy of intentionally targeting civilians (knowing these incidents will end up in local and international news) while simultaneously trumpeting its humanitarian credentials? Why kill huge numbers of civilians while also targeting Hamas? Why not just one or the other?

 

Factors that lead Israel to target civilians

Domestic politics: Going after Hamas has long been popular in Israel, and this current flare-up is no different. The drawn-out saga of the kidnapped teenagers was manufactured to gain public support for the Netanyahu administration, and the subsequent blaming and targeting of Hamas seems to represent a continuation of the strategy. Creating a high body count, be the victims militants or civilians, in a war against Hamas garners public approval, especially among the Israeli right.

Revenge: Some within Israeli’s government and military may genuinely believe Hamas was responsible for the kidnapped teenagers’ deaths or that they deserve to be punished for launching rockets at Israel. This desire for revenge may cloud their differentiation between Hamas militants and innocent civilians. If these officials have the ability to authorize airstrikes, then civilian targets may appear as fair game. In sum, ideology alters strategic perception.

Poor strategy: The IDF may be targeting civilians in the misguided hope this will deter future support for Hamas. While there is ample evidence that Gazan suffering at the hands of Israel increases support for Hamas, a purely militaristic vision of incentives for altering behavior may result in the counterproductive targeting of civilians. The competing role of Israeli institutions also likely plays a role here. As Brent Sasley argues in an interview, despite the rise of impressive government-sponsored research institutes, the IDF still tends to have the final say. Civilian agencies that may tend to favor more dovish approaches are losing out.

Poor intelligence: While the Israeli government would be loathe to admit it, it’s possible that the IDF consistently lacks the necessary intelligence to consistently strike locations containing Hamas members. Commanders are under pressure both from military superiors and political officials to kill militants, and therefore they frequently launch airstrikes against targets that may be of no military value to appear successful.

Malfunctioning technology: Despite lauding its “pinpoint strikes”, it’s possible Israel does not have the ability to hit the targets it intends to consistently. While I am no expert on military technology, this explanation seems unlikely considering the IDF’s ability to warn homes it is about to bombard. I have not come across a case of the IDF warning a house only for them to then miss.

 

Factors That Prevent Israel From Targeting Civilians

International pressure: The extremely unequal casualty rate from this conflict, combined with significant public evidence of intentional targeting of civilians, provides Israel with a significant incentive to halt deliberate attacks against civilians. Even the United States, Israel’s normally staunch ally, has quickly called for a ceasefire. Israel is already fairly isolated internationally, and it risks becoming even more so.

The remnants of strategy: Simply, removing Hamas militarily will only lead to an even more radical alternative. Prior to the conflict, Hamas was at its weakest point in recent years and its unity deal with Fatah meant it would likely play a subservient role in any future Palestinian government. While political calculation seems to have generally won out over strategical concerns in this conflict, it’s possible those within the Israeli government concerned about the conflict’s bolstering of Hamas are encouraging a lower body count.

Fear of Israeli deaths: While the Israeli government has recently shown itself to be fairly willing to escalate conflict to suit political needs, it may also fear a backlash if too many Israeli soldiers and civilians die in the conflict. Killing Gazan civilians will only increase Hamas attacks, and this presents a dilemma for Israeli politicians and military leaders.

 

Conclusion

While there are factors pulling Israeli military tactics in multiple directions, there is one element that may be doing both simultaneously. Israel’s long-term strategy for dealing with military threats has been an attempt to manage, rather than destroy, them through periodic engagement (or “mowing the grass”, itself a deeply unsettling term). This strategy emerged out of Israel’s earlier conflicts with conventional Arab armies, but Israel is now much stronger and its enemies much weaker. Mowing the grass may have made strategic sense in 1967 and 1973, but in the present day it is highly counterproductive. However, it may be nothing more than strategic inertia that causes Israel to engage in semi-regular medium-intensity conflicts. Killing a few hundred civilians is a part of mowing the grass, and if Israel’s strategic logic does not evolve, a similar conflict will erupt a few years from now.

All of these factors likely play some role in determining Israeli behavior, and I’ll leave it up to those that know more about the conflict than I do to identify the more influential ones.

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How Civilians Protect Themselves Nonviolently During Mass Killings

*This post summarizes my undergraduate thesis.

International interventions in mass killing episodes often fail to adequately protect civilians.

The UNMISS peacekeeping operation in South Sudan is a case in point. Bureaucratic, political, and financial constraints consistently inhibit the deployment of well-staffed interventions, and often prohibit them outright.

Therefore, many civilians must survive without external assistance, but we know surprisingly little about how this occurs.

No scholar has produced a work combining empirical examples of civilian self-protection with a theory of the mechanisms that allow it to function during mass killing or even conflict more broadly. The lack of focus on civilian self-protection is symptomatic of a larger issue of how scholars envision violent conflict.

Check out the rest of the article at the Monkey Cage. You can read the entire thesis here.

The Girls That Brought Themselves Back

The #BringBackOurGirls campaign began with a crescendo of indignation, only to fade as those paying attention quietly accepted that the girls were probably never coming back.  Since then, good news in northeastern Nigeria has been hard to come by.  Fortunately, that changed two days ago.  U.S. media outlets began reporting that approximately sixty-seven women kidnapped by Boko Haram in mid-June escaped their captors and fled to safety over the weekend.  It seems that these are not the individuals originally kidnapped in mid-April, but the news nonetheless is a bright spot in an exceedingly bleak saga.

The recent history of online humanitarianism seems defined by a number of sponsored campaigns that find traction very briefly, punctuated by the occasional cause célèbre–sometimes sponsored, sometimes not–that lingers in the public imagination.  #BringBackOurGirls was the first landmark campaign since Kony 2012 able to permeate into political, humanitarian, celebrity, and public circles.  The campaign, though less centralized than Kony 2012, was likewise able to achieve concrete policy changes.  The US sent a team of consultants to aid the Nigerian government, while the public pressure forced the Jonathan administration to acknowledge the kidnapping had taken place and launch a search effort.  Even though, unlike most humanitarian campaigns, #BringBackOurGirls successfully altered policy, the policies themselves have had no discernible effect on status of the kidnapped women.  Additionally, the campaign risked increasing the domestic and international support for a brutal counterinsurgency strategy that has killed thousands of civilians.  #BringBackOurGirls has succeeded in providing some degree of democratic accountability where it is sorely lacking in Nigeria, but it has failed to achieve its primary objective.

Despite the international cooperation, the extensive search effort, and a willing public, the kidnapped women themselves proved the most able to ensure their own survival.  Those cast as the least powerful did the most good.  The concept is simple, really.  Those at risk of violence have both the most motivation to protect themselves and the information to make it happen.  Outside forces face political, logistical, and financial barriers to civilian protection, which even solid intelligence often cannot surmount.  This incident should give us pause about the wisdom and effectiveness of top-down humanitarian interventions, especially in politically and geographically remote areas.  It is not that outside solutions have no place in global humanitarianism; such an attitude would amount to throwing out hands up in the air.  However, we must remember that the most effective actors at pursuing civilian protection are also the likely victims of violence.  Aiding them to do what they are able to do most effectively, rather than working to save their lives from the outside and without their assistance, is usually the best we can do.

Killing in Vain: “Unstrategic” state-led mass killing during wartime

*This post originally appeared on the Center for Genocide Prevention’s blog.

For all the hatred, fear, and chaos they produce, mass killings are, at their heart, strategic endeavors, as Benjamin Valentino so persuasively argues in his landmark study Final Solutions. Leaders with extreme political goals only settle on mass killing when other, less costly means have been eliminated. Just because mass killing is an instrumental process, however, does not mean that it’s always successful. There are many examples of states carrying out mass killings during wartime, only to lose power through military defeat; Nazi Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda come to mind.

The correlation makes sense. Committing mass killings risks sparking international and domestic opposition, and requires massive financial and human resources that could be used to fight armed opponents. Mass killing also frequently has corrosive effects on the perpetrating organization, a point frequently made by Daniel Solomon. This presents a puzzle: why do some states carry out mass killings when they are “unstrategic,” or in other words, clearly detrimental to a war effort?

Three influences can explain this phenomenon: ideology, misperception of the effectiveness of mass killing, and intra-organizational competition. Any one of these factors can cause a state to carry out an unstrategic mass killing, but they may also all be present in a single episode.

The first factor, ideology, is really at the center of the three cases mentioned above. For these regimes, their extremist goals mean that even during wartime, certain ideological projects (such as creating an ethnically pure society) supersede military success, even when facing an existential threat. Valentino’s logic is consistent here. Mass killings are indeed instrumental process, but the specific goals of perpetrator organizations shift their perception of what actions are “strategic”.

The misperception of mass killing’s effectiveness is itself a result of two potential influences: ideology and an increased potential of military defeat/attrition (which are likely interrelated phenomena). Just as extremist ideology can shift perpetrators’ goals during war, it can also make perpetrator leaders excessively paranoid. For example, Hutu extremists before the Rwandan Genocide came to believe that all Tutsi were actively assisting the RPF, and therefore the only way to preserve Hutu life was to indiscriminately target Tutsi. Though the Genocide certainly played a role in hindering the fight against the RPF, for Hutu extremists, one front of the war could not exist without the other.

States frequently begin or enter wars believing victory will be quick and easy (the “planning fallacy”), but the reality of violent conflict is often quite different. When states face either the prospect of defeat or an extended entanglement, they often seek to quickly change their fortunes. Mass killing becomes an act of desperation. Alexander Downes writes, “Even if leaders did not previously believe in the efficacy of civilian victimization or think that they would use such a strategy, the costs of the fighting convince them that something must be done to win the war but also limit losses. Civilian victimization is a promising option on both counts.”

The third factor, intra-organizational dynamics, can be a powerful driver of unstrategic mass killing. Wendy Pearlman, writing in the compiled volume Rethinking Violence, argues applying the strategic logic of an individual to a group is empirically flawed. Instead, violent actors—in this instance, states—should be viewed as interactional organizations with complex structures and hierarchies. Decision-making power is diffused throughout the institutions, but to varying degrees depending on the organization. Consequently, in the right context, a mass killing may result because some individuals (who may not be formally recognized as leaders) see it as beneficial to their own goals, rather than the objectives of the entire organization.

Intra-organizational competition is another potential driver of unstrategic mass killings. Especially in a regime without a solidified power structure, different factions will vie for power. During wartime, these aspiring factions may see killing civilians as a low-cost method of proving themselves militarily and gaining political prominence.

A similar dynamic operates during counterinsurgencies. Selective violence, as Kalyvas writes, is unquestionably more effective, but a certain amount of intelligence is needed to carry out selective violence. To gather that intelligence, commanders must either expend significant human and financial resources or use selective violence to coerce it. If commanders are either unable or unwilling to commit to the slow and expensive process of intelligence-gathering, a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma ensues. And, lacking the ability to commit selective violence, commanders may choose mass killing to avoid appearing inactive or ineffective, even if indiscriminate violence is ultimately strategically counterproductive.

Mass killings are primarily instrumental processes directed by leaders with extreme political goals, but individual mass killings emerge through a wider range of dynamics. Mass killing is, at its core, a strategic endeavor, but ideology, misperception, and intra-organizational dynamics can detach mass killing from its military objectives.