Losing hearts and minds: Israel's futile way of war

ISRAEL'S war in Gaza has revealed a growing gap between the Israeli and the American ways of war in the Middle East, and Israel's way does not look good in comparison.

The Israeli way of war — using painful and disproportionate force to impress upon an enemy that the price of fighting is more than they can bear — is on display once again in the devastated landscape of Gaza. Much has been made of Israel's sophisticated "pinpoint" weaponry, but the war has been decisively heavy-handed and disproportionate, destroying much of Gaza's civilian infrastructure and killing more than 1,000 Palestinians, while Israel has suffered fewer than 15 dead.

It is clear that in addition to targeting Hamas, Israel is also exacting pain on civilians in the hope that it will turn them against Hamas.

By contrast, it took the U.S. years in Iraq to figure out the fundamental lesson of counterinsurgency warfare in the 20th century: that the population is the prize, not the target. Learning from the French defeat in Algeria and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, Gen. David Petraeus and his group of counterinsurgency intelligentsia charted a new way of war. The U.S. largely de-emphasized brute military power in favor of providing population security, raising standards of living and addressing political grievances related to its occupation, which contributed to a major decline in violence and created space for a political process among Iraqis.

Israel appears to have learned nothing from its failures in the 2006 war in Lebanon or from the American quagmire in Iraq, which clearly illustrate that brute military force will never work against a civilian-based insurgency.

Israel has violated nearly every counterinsurgency principle in its Gaza war. Israel's bombings of police stations, mosques, universities and buildings in the world's most crowded patch of land have inevitably, if not intentionally, killed and maimed the very population that it should seek to win over. Moreover, Israel offers no political avenue for the population to turn to other than Hamas to address enduring Palestinian political grievances against the continuing expansion of Israeli settlements and Israel's stranglehold over Palestinian daily life.

Yet as the history of counterinsurgency has repeatedly shown, Israel's reliance upon excessive force to internalize defeat in its enemies will no more bring it lasting security or peace than its previous war experiences. The war will not destroy Hamas as a political force and it will not make Palestinians more amenable to Israel's settlements. And while it may reduce rocket fire in the short-term, it will only deepen the desire among Palestinians to find new means to surmount Israel's military advantages and exact revenge.

So why does Israel resort to what most military historians and now even the U.S. military consider a counterproductive war paradigm?

Some have speculated that Israel's resort to such disproportionate violence — the homemade Palestinian rockets fired on Israel, while clearly reprehensible, had killed only four Israelis in all of 2008 — was driven by the electoral needs of Israel's ruling coalition and by the desire of Israel's military to exorcise the ghost of its Lebanon debacle through a decisive show of brute force, thereby restoring its fabled deterrent capability.

Regardless of the motive, it is time for Israel to abandon this shortsighted and counterproductive way of war. The only chance Israel has to strike a blow for its own long-term security, as well as provide a basis for lasting peace, is to learn from the history of counterinsurgency warfare and change its war paradigm to one that recognizes that the Palestinian population must be the prize and not the target.

In addition to doing all it can to improve the horrendous living conditions of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, this would also mean accepting that Hamas, like all previous groups who used terrorist violence for their cause, such as the FLN or the IRA, can only be moderated through inclusion in a political process that addresses fundamental national grievances.

Long ago, the Romans once ruled a large empire through a combination of political benefits and brutality — carrots and sticks — but the empire fell when the Romans relied only on the stick. "They make a wasteland and call it peace" was the bitter complaint of a Scottish chieftain whose tribe was brutally dispatched by the Romans.

By razing Gaza, Israel has only shown the stick. It has made a wasteland, and there is little chance it will bring peace.