We know who caused the atrocities in Israel. We need to ask who benefits from them.
Like you, I was horrified and sickened by Hamas’s attacks on Israeli concertgoers and kibbutz residents near Gaza on Saturday. In Operation Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Hamas killed more than a thousand Israeli, European, and American Jews in attacks from land, air, and sea. Babies were slaughtered. Children, young women, and Holocaust survivors were taken hostage. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. There’s no justification for the mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of noncombatants. That’s what terrorism is. Hamas’s goal is the eradication of Jewish people from the Levant, and, if given the option, the planet. After decades of tolerating this campaign, Israel has dedicated itself to ending the threat of Hamas. As a Jewish person, I understand and share this anger.
Possibly also like you, I woke up Monday morning dreading what I’d see on the internet. The Israeli military response—Operation Swords of Iron—was just as brutal as I imagined it would be. Entire sections of Gaza City are in ruins, with noncombatants paying the biggest price. Israel has killed over 1,500 Palestinians, including more than 400 children. The Israeli Defense Forces have cut off water, electricity, and food supplies, hampering relief efforts. At least 16 relief workers for the UN and the Red Cross are dead. Three hundred thousand Palestinians have been displaced, with Israel telling one million people to evacuate North Gaza with nowhere for them to go. One of the poorest, most deadly, and least hopeful places in the world became poorer, more deadly, and less hopeful in the blink of an eye. And, I expect, the desire for revenge among some there grew. As a human being, I can understand that desire too.
Hamas is threatening to execute an Israeli hostage for each building Israel destroys. Netanyahu doesn’t seem fazed, telling his people they are in for a “long and difficult war.” It will have many casualties, prospects for peace first among them. As I write this, Lebanon has joined the fight against Israel. Everywhere in the world is now less safe for Jews and Arabs.
I have been awash in reactions since Saturday: shock, anger, fear, resignation, hopelessness, and shame at all these things. It has taken me till now to write anything at all about it. I’ve found some resolution in returning to a style of writing I “retired” from after Biden took office: analyzing the world’s problems through game theory. These events roused me to return to this writing style. I’m going to tackle this incredibly fraught situation by trying to figure out what it’s all about, and in the process trying to find my center in it. If you’d like to walk it through with me, read on.
The person in me looks at the violence on Saturday and what followed and thinks: who caused this? That’s a tremendously useful question, because it tells me who to blame. Once I decide that Hamas is to blame, I can direct my rage toward them. I can focus on the bloodbath at the Supernova Music Festival and seethe at Hamas, an unrepentant terrorist organization who would kill me if they saw a minute’s advantage to doing so. I can be delighted at the news that, say, commanders of Hamas are killed in the war. I can also use the answer to direct my sympathy, not just to the victims of the violence on both sides but to those around the world (and in my immediate circle) that are grieving and fearful.
But there are limits to that approach’s utility. My blame isn’t going to move the needle much. What matters is the ironclad rule of the Middle East: Everybody blames everybody else.
While this specific horror is squarely on Hamas, the conflict in Israel has blame enough for everyone. If you blame the Arabs, I’ve got a list of Israeli war crimes in Palestine that you can’t wish away. If you blame the Jews, I’ve got a list of Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist actions you can’t ignore. Heck, if you blame the Nazis — which is a pretty good place to put the blame — I can push you back even further in time. The region has hosted outrages since the Book of Joshua, and probably well before that. As long as the “right to exist” is based on seizure of holy lands, someone will want to kill someone else in the Fertile Crescent. It’s complicated.
But for every “it’s complicated” argument, there’s a “it’s not that complicated” corollary. These arguments were made about South Africa, with the U.S. government squarely on the side of the white-skinned people suppressing the non-white people. Yet things changed. Spurred by young and Black protestors at home and abroad, white Americans turned on their apartheid-sponsoring brethren in South Africa. In Congress, the pressure was led by the guy who’s now our president. The Botha regime fell, the homelands were disbanded, and a new government arose. It’s not all good, not for everyone, but it’s a lot better. Like the Middle East, South Africa was complicated, far too complicated to solve, until it wasn’t.
Peace—not just a ceasefire, but a lasting, durable peace—is a possibility. South Africa tells us that. So, there must be a reason we don’t have peace. That reason, quite obviously, is that there are actors who want war.
So, the game theorist in me doesn’t stop at who caused this? The game theorist asks another question: who benefits from this?
The answer to that question is manifold, but I’ll do my best to let you know who I think wants war. You can do something with that knowledge: You can work to counteract their efforts to promote war, at least in the long term. Or you can work to make sure war prevails over peace. But whatever you decide, you will know what side of the peace-war game you’re on.
But remember as you read this: what these people want is not necessarily what will benefit them. That is, just because they believe they will benefit doesn’t mean they will. For in the peace-war game, even if you want war, you lose the game when you are completely eradicated from the battlefield. In this situation, that is a very real possibility.
OK, let’s start with the obvious participants and work our way to some less obvious but maybe just as central ones.
Hamas wants war.
Hamas is the governing body of the Palestinian Territories, established after the first Intifada and elected to a majority of the Palestinian parliament in 2006. Since that year, they have lost zero elections in Palestine. That is because there have been no elections in Palestine since then. Hamas is a dictatorship, and its main commitment is to genocide against Jewish Israelis.
On governance? Not so much. Since Hamas came into power, the living situation in Gaza has deteriorated. With Gazan unemployment at a staggering 46%, two-thirds of Palestinians there live in poverty. Hamas does not help. Hamas routinely diverts humanitarian aid from the people who need it to Hamas’s military branch, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. It seizes food and fuel, selling it to fund its terrorist ambitions. Hamas focuses a full 55% of its budget on its military, and invests less than 5% of the costs of the rehabilitation of Gaza. It is a military operation masquerading as a government. (There are different views of this.)
Hamas did a stellar job of tricking the Israeli government that it didn’t want war. Since the May 2021 war, Israel believed it was containing a war-weary Hamas, who said they wanted to focus on economic stability. There was a peace between the two governments. It was a sham. All the while, it seems, Hamas was drilling soldiers for a breach of the Iron Wall, the barrier that separates Gaza from the rest of Israel. Part of the attack was aimed at military targets: soldiers, tanks, Iron Dome (more on that later). If that was the limit of the attacks, we might be in a different mindset today. But another well-planned element was aimed at civilians, in the most horrific way. Israel rightly feels this is its 9/11, and Hamas could not be more thrilled to have caused such a thing.
A military operation needs military triumphs to survive. Preferably with lots of casualties. Hamas does not care who suffers, especially not its own people. It is committed to war for war’s sake.
Why I might not be right about this: How’s al-Qaeda doing these days? How about ISIS? Or, if you just want to focus on political parties, how’s the Ba’ath Party doing? No matter what your goals, getting the international community to rally around your complete destruction is usually a mistake. And Israel is pretty efficient at destruction when it puts its mind to it. It is not at all clear that Israel will win a war against terrorists in a densely packed urban environment. That’s hard. But betting on Israel to shirk from something hard is rarely smart. This was likely a fatal play for Hamas, and they may realize it and pull back from the fight. Maybe.
The Palestinian people don’t want war.
Hamas is betting on the Palestinian people supporting their war. I don’t think they took a poll before they launched Saturday’s attacks. They probably should have.
Hamas commands a slim majority of Palestinian support over its opponents, the Fatah Party, which governs the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank. That’s the authority that is obligated to work in peace with Israel, given the conditions of the Oslo Accords from three decades ago. The last poll I saw gave Hamas a 58% majority in Gaza, but only 42% in the West Bank, which is a lot bigger and more populous. That edge is fragile. The kind of thing that could shake a hold like that? Relentless death and destruction caused by your attacks on civilians.
Most Palestinians don’t want war, because the imbalances are too high. On annual defense budgets, Israel outspends Palestine by $20 billion to $100 million — note the letters in front of -illion there. There are 170,000 active Israel Defense Forces members and 465,000 typically in reserve; the Palestinian military is 80,000 soldiers including reserves. Israel has 1,650 tanks; Palestine has 60. Israel has 650 self-propelled artillery units, 1,600 military aircraft, 65 military vessels, and a bunch of nuclear weapons; Palestine has none of those. This is not a fair fight.
Also, there’s this horrific imbalance.
Whoever wins the new war, the casualties will disproportionately fall upon the Palestinians, especially those who don’t want to fight. There are noble reasons to fight a war where you will suffer more than your opponent. The living conditions in Gaza are so bad that you could imagine Hamas convincing some folks that the Saturday attacks were justified. But a very long war against a far superior opponent? That’s going to be much harder to maintain support for. Palestinians who support a full-scale war with Israel will come to regret it. And they won’t be the only ones.
A major humanitarian crisis is already underway in Gaza. Hospitals are already at capacity. Egypt has blocked the refugee corridor. IDF forces are massing to invade. This is still the first week. This is bad for all the Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom don’t deserve it. They need a way out.
Why I might not be right about this: Then again, Israel’s total-war response could swing it the other way. Create enough martyrs and you’ll create another cadre of terrorists. Palestinian support for Hamas is highest among the young. That’s ominous. When you drop buildings on civilians, you do not win yourself converts to peace. You just guarantee more blood. And what if Hamas wins the war? It’s not out of the question. Palestinians could come to believe that their horrific losses were worth it. I can’t easily put myself into the mind of a terrorist, but that might be the goal of terror.
The Netanyahu government wants war.
Let’s remember where the Netanyahu government was just a few years ago. Netanyahu had gotten through four full terms as prime minister, supporting a two-state system and liberalizing the economy. But in 2015, he advanced the long-debunked conspiracy theory that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, gave Adolf Hitler the idea for the Holocaust. Netanyahu did that in Israel.
After that point, everything started to unravel for Bibi. Two corruption cases, “Case 1000” and “Case 2000,” were filed against him in 2017, with indictments on bribery and abuse of power in 2019. The only thing that held off his criminal trial was a worldwide pandemic — and also the fact that he was heading the government. In this span — basically, his buddy Donald Trump’s presidency — power-jockeying among conservatives got Bibi through a year of four failed elections until he finally lost to a coalition government. After 12 years of corruption rooted in racism and fear, the Netanyahu government was taken down by its own pointless fearmongering and corruption. It takes a lot to get the hopelessly divided Knesset to agree on something; that thing was that Bibi was finally just too sleazy and too willing to provoke the country into war.
The 11-day war in May of 2021 was the final straw. A crisis over the Israeli Supreme Court’s evictions of Palestinians boiled over into the Israel Police storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Hamas gave Israeli forces an ultimatum to leave the Temple Mount by May 10; Netanyahu chose not to accept that ultimatum. Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched rockets at Israeli targets; Israel responded with airstrikes that destroyed nearly 100 buildings. At the end of the war, Palestinian rockets had killed 13 Israelis; Israel’s airstrikes had killed over 250 Palestinians, including 66 children. Amid considerable international pressure to end tensions, Netanyahu rejected the proposed ceasefire. Finally, on May 19, a U.N. Security Council resolution was accepted by both sides, but it was too late for the dead, and, as it turned out, too late for Netanyahu.
But in case you thought there was justice in the world, Netanyahu — under an ongoing criminal trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust —was returned to power by Likud in December 2022. Since then, he’s been a disastrous choice. He has promoted the government’s efforts to strip the judiciary of its power and, not coincidentally, of its power to try him. This in turn has prompted widespread protests and international condemnation. Facing jail and removal, Bibi was on a bad path last week.
This week? It looks a bit different for Netanyahu. The protests are all on pause, with its organizers encouraging full support for the military. World leaders are ringing up Netanyahu offering whatever he needs. He’s a wartime leader now, and wartime leaders usually prosper. Peace made Netanyahu an unpopular tyrant. War makes him a justified tyrant.
Why I might not be right about this: This only works for Netanyahu if he’s a good wartime leader. The fact that the attack was a surprise is not a great sign for him. But even more troubling is that Egypt may have warned Netanyahu about the attack, and he was reportedly not concerned about it. He denies that report, of course. The Israeli paper Haaretz squarely blames Netanyahu for this disaster. Four out of five Israelis blame Netanyahu for the attacks this weekend and say he must resign following the conclusion of Operation Swords of Iron. (This assumes Operation Swords of Iron concludes.) If he becomes the face of Israeli incompetence at a time when they must be the most competent, he’s history. And that means jail for sure.
Israelis don’t want war, but they’re warming up to it.
I didn’t say “revenge.” Israeli Jews most assuredly want revenge. It’s hard not to want that after you see atrocities committed against your most vulnerable citizens. If there were a way to wish Hamas out of existence, many Israeli Jews would be wishing hard for that today.
War is another matter. Military service is compulsory in Israel. Now, 360,000 reservists have been called up. That’s as many reservists as the United States has. Israel can inflict punishment on Gaza from the air without Israeli Defense Forces casualties. It cannot invade Gaza without IDF casualties. This word “invade” is important. Gaza is part of Israel. The IDF would not be invading a foreign country. There are many people inside Israel with relatives and friends there. This is a civil war, and civil wars change countries forever.
Today, Israel has the moral high ground. International support for Israel is high. Will it stay there when the IDF invades Gaza? International support for the United States military was high in the 1960s. Then events like the My Lai massacre happened, and we lost the Vietnam War at home before we lost it abroad. I’m not saying I know this will occur for Israel. I’m saying that Israel’s track record in Gaza doesn’t rule it out.
The war will shine a spotlight on the ugliness of Israel’s systematic occupation of the Palestinian Territories. You will get pushback from all corners on whether it’s fair or foul to call it “apartheid.” Structurally, the situation bears a lot of similarities to how South Africa governed its territories. Regardless of where you stand on this argument, there is no way to look at the situation in Gaza and call it humane. You can’t keep two million people in an open-air prison and expect things to go your way. You just can’t. A free Palestine is in the best interest of the Jewish population, both morally and tactically. At least in this Jew’s opinion, anyway.
For years, there was a growing willingness inside Israel to do something about this. Up to this weekend, Israel was enjoying a short period where it looked like coexistence with Palestinians was possible. But support for that was fraying at the edges. This year, for the first time, support for a nondemocratic regime is stronger than support for a two-state solution among both Jews and Palestinians surveyed. That is, for the first time, a majority favors unequal rights between Israelis and Palestinians. Trends among young people are especially depressing — only 20 percent of Israeli Jews aged 18–34 are in favor a two-state solution. A large majority of both groups rejected the other side’s claims to the land in the region.
But the same poll showed that a large majority of respondents respected the other side’s religion, and believed that peace between the two groups is possible and preferable. Now, thanks to the actions of a terrorist group, that’s gone. War is here, and just like the Palestinians, ordinary Israeli Jews will pay the price. We’ll see if they are willing to bear it in the name of revenge. As horrible as this weekend was, things may get worse as further deaths and atrocities from both sides rack up.
Why I might be wrong about this: Well, Netanyahu is back in power. Certainly there are a lot of Israeli Jews who believe, as he does, that “Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people — and only it.” I have never seen protests in Israel like the ones against Netanyahu — but I’ve also never seen them vanish either. Maybe something fundamentally changed in the Jewish consciousness on 10/7. It certainly changed in ours on 9/11, and it took years for many of us to accept that everything we did after that point was morally suspect. It could be that war is just what the Israeli Jewish people want right now, and right now is when it matters.
Most of the Middle East doesn’t want war.
I’m not going to tell you I know how to resolve tensions in the Middle East. There isn’t enough game theory in the world for me to know how to fix that. All I know is that it takes hard work, international pressure, and a whole lot of luck. As far as I can tell, that was actually happening between two longtime enemies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as with other more “moderate” Arab governments. (Here I mean “moderate” in the sense of “pragmatic, but still fanatical and dictatorial.” Yeah, I know.)
These moderate Arab nations don’t always get along. For example, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates spend a whole lot of time sniping at each other. But they don’t shoot at each other, and everyone there seems to like that. This relative bout of peace was something the US government capitalized upon, first with Jared Kushner’s schemes to enrich himself and his family and coincidentally drafting the Abraham Accords. First Israel and the UAE signed a deal, then Israel and Bahrain, then Israel and Morocco. On January 6th, 2021 (!), Sudan signed on, though not directly with Israel, and the US dropped its designation of Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism. This was a path toward peace and prosperity. Israel and the UAE even played a rugby match!
Less focused on personal gain, the Biden administration advanced the process greatly. The photo of Biden fist-bumping with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was a tough pill to swallow, but it led to further normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as the UAE, Iraq, and Egypt. Bin Salman described it as “the biggest historical deal since the end of the Cold War.”
Largely absent from this flurry of progress was any meaningful consideration of the Palestinian people, other than through increased trade with Israel. It was not the first time that the rich countries of the Middle East ignored their poorer brethren. The Saudi relationship with the Palestinian National Authority has badly deteriorated. Egypt hates Hamas and closed its border with Gaza.
The last thing any of these profit-minded countries wanted was the plight of the Palestinians to become a headache for them. Yet this is what they have. The Saudi government issued a statement that did not condemn Hamas, saying that the occupation of Gaza has predictable consequences. But it also did not endorse Hamas either. The US and Saudi Arabia continue to work on their trilateral efforts with a very distracted Israel. For now.
Why I might be wrong about this: Israel is a rich power whose goals do not align fully with the Arab League’s. That’ll put these relationships to the test. There’ll come a point when Hamas needs cash to continue its war against Israel. MBS stressed to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that Saudi Arabia stood with Palestine. Not necessarily with Hamas, though, because they’re a terrorist group. Saudi Arabia is not designated a state sponsor of terrorism, of course. The Bush administration made sure to clear them in connection with funding 9/11. For now it seems like staying away from Hamas benefits these governments, but if Israel presses its slaughter of Arabs, I don’t think we can count out a renewed connection here. You know, if they ever sponsored terrorism, that is.
Iran and Russia want war.
Not every country in the Middle East is rich. There’s a clear outlier even among the oil producers, and that’s Iran. When the Saudis and Israel are buddy-buddy, Iran feels left out. Left out is not how Iran likes to feel.
Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. It has been designated so for almost four decades. That designation and its pursuit of nuclear capability has brought on crippling sanctions, ruining Iran’s economy.
It’s even been suspended from OPEC, with its return only promised when all sanctions are lifted. It was actually getting somewhere with that. In March, Saudi Arabia and Iran announced they would end years of hostility and restore diplomatic relations, in a deal brokered by China, the world’s #2 oil consumer. (Guess who’s #1.)
Iran has a much more important ally in Russia. This makes Iran an international pariah, squaring it more with North Korea than Saudi Arabia. Russia is the player in all of this who has the most to gain from Hamas’s attack on Israelis. For over a year, Russia has been mired in a losing invasion of its neighbor Ukraine, and is now completely cut off from international business. Vladimir Putin needs something to break his way. A second front that occupies the military engines of the West would do the trick nicely. Even better if it’s a US ally that invades a neighboring territory, potentially undercutting the moral high ground of Ukraine’s supporters.
So, it will shock—shock!—you to discover that Iran, normally more allied with Hezbollah in Lebanon, has been training and aiding Hamas in Gaza for the last year. It’s still unclear how involved Iran is in the attack, but it’s not “not involved.” They’ve provided tens of millions in weaponry and technical aid in rocketry and drones to Hamas. Hamas is skilled at terror campaigns, but does not have as much experience as a strategic war machine. Iran, on the other hand, has decades of hard-won skill battling Israel and Iraq. We don’t know for sure that Iran helped plan this attack, but it’s not hard to imagine where Hamas got help from.
Why I might be wrong about this: Netanyahu is an unstable leader with a nuclear array and a great desire to stay in power. If Iran is clearly linked to the 10/7 attacks, Iran might have a new, very hot war on its hands. I’ve talked about going to war with Iran before. It’s not going to be something the US and Israel would relish. This advanced nation of 80 million people can hit Rome with its rockets. But does it want to? The US ended the regime in Iraq in a couple months. Iran’s a much tougher nut to crack, but it will crack. Iranians have little interest in this outcome. At a soccer game the day after the attacks, Iranians loudly rejected the unfurling of the Palestinian flag. Iran may support bloodshed in the Middle East, but I’m not sure Iranians are too fired up about hosting Operation Desert Storm II.
I have no idea what Hezbollah wants.
One clear indication of Iran’s fingerprints: the second front opened up by the terrorist organization Hezbollah in Lebanon yesterday. While Iran helps Hamas behind the scenes, it directly funds Hezbollah. It’s probable that Iran prompted Hezbollah to create problems on the Israeli border.
That said, I don’t think Hezbollah knew on Friday that Hamas was planning to attack on Saturday. If it had known, it would have joined in when Israel was caught flat-footed. Coming in later, when the international community has its gunships headed to back up Israel, is much more dangerous. Israel’s not going to hesitate in laying waste to Hezbollah encampments. It’s occupied Lebanon before. Israel knows how to win there. And it doesn’t care about niceties like the Geneva Convention.
Hezbollah does have one thing that Hamas doesn’t have, though: a territorial cession by Israel. The only place Israel has invaded and left is Lebanon. In 2000, incessant combat with Hezbollah weakened Israeli resolve, and they retreated to their side of the UN border amid chaos and humiliation. If any member of the Hezbollah military is still around from 2000, they may be spreading the message that they can beat Israel, especially if it’s occupied in Gaza.
It’s a confusing situation. Hezbollah runs the risk of being wiped out if Hamas is. It gains nothing by trying to do so, since it’s not going to be allowed to move into Israel. I guess they just want to kill some Israeli Jews. They should be reminded soon that their casualties were 10-to-1 compared to Israel’s the last time they fought.
Why I might be wrong about this: Unlike Hamas, Hezbollah doesn’t run a government. It had a majority in the Lebanese parliament until 2022, but has been eclipsed by Saudi-aligned Sunnis. It cannot be sure the Lebanese people will back a war with Israel. Over 1,000 Lebanese civilians died in 2006 war. That can’t be something they’re looking forward to repeating.
US and Israeli military war profiteers want war.
Like Biden this week, every president in my memory has said some variation of “Israel has a right to defend itself.” It’s hard to argue with that. But Israel hasn’t defended itself. Israel has the best-trained soldiers on the front lines and the best defense tech companies in the world. That’s very important. But, just as importantly, it’s our money.
The U.S. has invested more than $146 billion into the Israeli military, our biggest foreign aid contribution to anyone. We used to give non-military economic aid too, but since 2007 the military has gotten nearly every dollar. Our military aid comes with a condition: a minimum of three-quarters of the aid must be invested in buying our tanks, planes, and other weapons. If some get blown up, they’ll buy more with our money. This suits our interests on many levels, the most important of which is that Israel remains our most trusted ally.
There is exactly one area where Palestine has more of a military resource than Israel, and that is rocket projectors (currently about 100 for Israel and 250 for Palestine). In the Second Lebanon War of 2006, Hezbollah and Hamas fired twelve thousand rockets into Israel, killing 44 people and forcing 250,000 Israelis to relocate. With more than a million Israelis in rocket range, Defense Minister Amir Peretz approved a $200 million investment in a system that might prevent the next hailstorm of rockets on Haifa. It’s called Iron Dome.
Iron Dome fires projectiles over Israel to stop projectiles from hitting Israel. A combined force of mobile land units, fixed point batteries, and Sa’ar class corvette ships uses Israeli-built radar systems to fire Tamir interceptor missiles. When rockets are detected from anywhere within 70 kilometers, the batteries triangulate through a secure wireless system and interceptor missiles are deployed. Each battery can cover 150 square kilometers, with these sectors overlapping each other as needed.
Iron Dome was built by the Israeli firms Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Elta, and Israel Aerospace Industries — but they got one heck of a boost from the U.S. firms Raytheon and Boeing. In all, the $2 billion of Israeli funding for the development of Iron Dome was supplemented by more than $1 billion approved by Congress and President Obama from 2010 to 2014. We have paid even more to maintain it since its deployment in 2011, developing the Arrow and David’s Sling missiles as well. (I am not the first to note the mournful irony that Israel continues to associate itself with the plucky David, when it is most assuredly the Middle East’s Goliath.)
You can see the attractiveness of Iron Dome. It feels like divine intervention. Instead of hellfire raining down on you, the weapons clash in the sky, like a war between rival thunder gods. In the 2012 clash called Operation Pillar of Defense in Israel and Operation Stones of Baked Clay in Palestine, Hamas fired nearly 1,600 rockets at Israel; only 58 hit urban areas, killing only 4 Israelis. In November 2019, following Israel’s assassination of a senior Palestinian commander, Hamas fired more than 400 rockets at Israel; 90 percent were stopped from reaching their targets. In the 2021 war, Hamas fired over 4,300 rockets at Israeli targets. In the first barrages, the Dome stopped only half of them, killing 6 Israelis. But the system got better over the conflict, holding its 95 percent effectiveness rate against the 1,500 rockets headed toward populated areas.
To the US military, these clashes between Palestine and Israel are playtests. In game design, a playtest is the test of a system under specific conditions. When we make a game, we test as many different play scenarios as we can. If it works under one circumstance, we change the circumstances and try again. We do this over and over until you get a pattern of systemically stable results. And we can’t just test it ourselves. We give it to others to test, without our help. We call that “blind testing” (not the most inclusive phrase, now that I think on it), because we can’t influence it. We just set things in motion and watch the game from behind the safety glass.
Iron Dome got at least six solid tests from 2012 to 2021, all with astounding results. Numbers like “90 percent effectiveness” thrilled the military in both Israel and the US. That led to sales. Azerbaijan bought the first batch from Israel in 2016. The next year, India agreed to purchase a couple Iron Dome systems. In 2018, Romania signed up. In 2019, the big fish bit: The United States — the country that helped launch the system for Israel — dropped $373 million to build an Iron Dome of its own. NATO and South Korea were both nibbling around the edges of a deal too.
Iron Dome is big dollars for those who make it. If it gets tested and holds, US military contractors will make bank. War is good for business.
Why I might be wrong about this: An Iron Dome isn’t foolproof against dedicated opponents. As many as 1,000 rockets got through it in 11 days in 2021. It’s not clear how many got through this time, but they’re still coming. If Iron Dome is overwhelmed by persistent attacks, it—and the bloodshed from this war—will be a lot less profitable for the profiteers.
Republicans want war.
The United States stands with Israel. That’s our official position, and it’s broadly held on both sides of the political spectrum. And yet…
When the Republican Party says it stands with Israel, it means is that Islamophobia is the official platform of the GOP and they want to capitalize on that. Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican Party, described the horrific events of the weekend as “a great opportunity for our candidates.” Senator Lindsey Graham screamed the quiet part out loud, encouraging the Israeli military to “level the place.”
By embracing the most violent of solutions, the GOP hopes to contrast itself with the Biden administration’s so-called “weakness” on the Middle East. Anti-Islam sentiment has been a real winner for the GOP over the years, so the strategy makes sense, even if it leads to the deaths of thousands of brown people who couldn’t vote for them anyway.
The GOP is also home to the apocalyptic crazy faction which supports Israel solely as a way to engender Biblical armageddon. They want people to die in the Middle East, preferably in the brightest nuclear blasts possible. Who knows how serious they are about bringing about the end times? My mom told me to never bet on crazy, so I can’t rule it out.
Of course, a war in Israel gives the MAGA wing of the GOP a way to look tough while kowtowing to Putin on Ukraine. Of course, the House GOP is in its own chaos as I write this, having ashcanned its speaker with no heir apparent. The Biden administration wants to tie Ukraine aid to Israeli aid, which further splinters the GOP hardliners from those who want to fund both Ukraine and Israel. It’s a mess, predictably. But there’s no one in the GOP who won’t vote for war. It’s just in their best interests for people to die.
Why I might be wrong about this: No US president has ever lost an election in wartime. That’s when American boots are on the ground. How confident can the GOP be that US forces wouldn’t be engaged in a house-to-house sweep of Gaza next year? This is not NATO, where Article 5 guarantees that an attack on one is an attack on all. But if Israel asks for American troops to help hunt terrorists? I think we’re there. That’d bode ill for a Republican candidate for president in 2024—especially one facing 91 felony counts who just bashed Israel and praised Hezbollah for being “very smart.”
Democrats want limited war, if at all.
Pretty much every Democratic senator, representative, and governor has expressed support for Israel. An aid package for Israel would pass the House nearly unanimously, if the House ever gets a speaker. President Biden called the attack an “act of sheer evil.”
There are American hostages in Palestine. The Biden administration is going to do everything to get them home. On a military front, our warships and aircraft are on their way to Israel. We’re committed to helping Israel.
That said, many Democrats have little appetite for war crimes committed by either faction. It’s been an interesting dance for some of them. Many have deftly condemned Hamas’s attack but also warned that an atrocity is an atrocity, no matter which government sponsors it. Others have been … less deft. The GOP has capitalized on Palestinian American Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s conflation of Hamas’s war crimes with Israel’s war crimes by filing a censure resolution against her. (The countervailing argument is that Hamas committed its crimes during “peace,” whatever that is in Israel.)
Being for something as nuanced as “a surgical attempt to eliminate Hamas leadership while minimizing civilian casualties in Gaza” is a tougher position to sell than “level the place.” So far, despite statements that Israel must abide by the rules of war, the Biden administration has not set any red lines that Israel cannot cross. Appearing to be less than full throated in support of Israel—a country whose politics were already open to grave criticism on the left—risks charges of antisemitism. Yet this is the position Democrats have to take. With Republicans fully embracing the dysfunction of the Trump era, the Democrats are the “rule of law” party. War crimes are violations of law. They’re also morally reprehensible.
Democrats will endorse arming Israel to the teeth while politely urging them to be careful with those armaments lest innocents suffer. That’s a subtlety that Netanyahu might not hear when he revs up his new murder machines. We’ll see if Democrats stay the course.
Why I might be wrong about this: Biden is a master negotiator. The world looks to him as the moral center in the Ukraine conflict, and may do so here. We are a year and a half into war in Ukraine, with no end in sight. If Biden deems Israel’s aggression worthy of support, the Democratic Party may move closer to that position. Biden also knows wartime presidents don’t lose elections here. That second term is far from locked down.
Antisemites and Islamophobes want war.
Despite the voluminous casualties in the Middle East, the battle for Gaza will be won in the streets of America and Britain and Europe and around the world. How much support Israel gets will depend on what we think of their war. This is what we think now.
That’s the Brandenburg Gate. Germany—a country notoriously reluctant to support military adventurism after… well, you know—is supplying Israel with drones. For now, most of the western world stands with Israel.
What it doesn’t stand with is swastikas. This happened in the streets of New York this week.
Swastika-man here is poisoning the well. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Times Square take on a different character when the chant “from the river to the sea” rings out. That slogan means to expel all Jews from the Middle East. Mayor Eric Adams, Governor Kathy Hochul, and many others condemned this rally, though it was not clear how many people attending harbored such sentiments.
This rally at Foley Square was less challenging to figure out.
You stand next to that guy? Yeah, you can be “proud” somewhere else.
This is a tremendously nuanced situation, but you can count on America’s racist fringe to suck all the nuance out of the room. The majority of people who back Israel and Palestine don’t want genocide. But those who do are having a great week.
Why I might be wrong about this: I shouldn’t say I know the majority of westerners don’t back genocide against Muslims. There were seventy one million votes for Trump. Thirteen million for Marine Le Pen. Four and half million for Alternative für Deutschland. In no case was that a majority, but it is too close for me to be confident.
I don’t want war.
When I started writing this piece on Wednesday, I didn’t know where I’d end up. I was angry at the bloodshed on both sides of the Iron Wall. I despaired for victims of the terror attack and those in the rubble of Gaza City. I wanted vengeance against Hamas, but I didn’t want Palestinians to die. I was in shock. I couldn't say where I stood.
Then I wrote this analysis of who benefits, and clarity was easy to come by. The people who want war the most—Hamas, Netanyahu, Iran’s regime, Putin, war profiteers, the GOP, antisemites, Islamophobes—well, I despise all those folks. What would I be doing if I agreed with them?
Here’s where I stand: Hamas believes in genocide against Jews like me. We should find ways to eliminate the terrorists among Hamas, if we can, and marginalize them if we can’t. But dropping buildings on children? Blowing up mosques? Cutting off electricity and water to pediatric wards? Indiscriminately leveling city blocks? The forced moves of a million people? That’s genocide too.
We’re Jews. Genocide is not our thing.
Jews didn’t deserve what happened on 10/7. But that doesn’t give us any right to become what we condemn. If we’re going to live in lands that other people claim as their own, we need to commit to coexistence. Palestine should be free. The Iron Wall should come down. We cannot denounce concentration camps and run them at the same time. We certainly can’t destroy them with people in them.
As I said about South Africa, it’s complicated until it isn’t. Peace is an actualizable thing. We must mourn our dead and free our hostages. We should round up as many actual terrorists as we can find. Then, if we can find the strength, we can get back to working for peace and prosperity.
Last weekend, most of the world gave us its sympathy and support.
Let’s be worthy of it.
This is the 71st installment of a series on politics and game theory. It has covered impeachment of Trump, Russian collusion, white supremacy, abortion, guns, nuclear war, debt, Colin Kaepernick, sexual harassment, the Mueller probe, taxes, Trump’s first year, the Clinton Foundation, immigration, parades, the Democrats, hope, family separation, trade wars, the midterms, the Times op-ed, Justice Kavanaugh, Speaker Pelosi, lame ducks, the GOP legacy, the stock market, the Democratic field, shutdowns, third parties, the Virginia scandals, in-party impeachment, the Trump mafia, college admissions, William Barr, Brexit, Iran, the Mueller Report, Joe Biden, Oregon’s standoff, the environment, Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s lies, Pelosi’s strategy, the impeachment inquiry, political outsiders, Rudy Giuliani, the Berlin wall, protest art, Boris Johnson, religion, engagement, Bernie Sanders, progressive unity, the Democratic nominee, the pandemic, unemployment, rioting, the Klan, the Confederacy, the GOP 2020 strategy, Biden’s strategy, the wildfire crisis, civil war, Kamala Harris, Trump’s COVID diagnosis, Biden’s case, Native Americans, the Capitol insurrection, Blizzard, and election delegitimization. Most of these appear in my book Game Theory in the Age of Chaos, which you can get on our store now.
