One Year In, Is Israel Finally Giving Up On Its Whack-A-Mole War Strategy?

It's in the self-interest of the U.S. and the West to encourage Israel to abandon its current war strategy in favor of winning a decisive, crushing victory over its enemies.

As we approach the anniversary of Hamas’s grievous October 7 assault on Israel, there appears to be a faint hope that Israel will finally go on the offensive in earnest. Until a couple of weeks ago, we could have concluded that Israel’s lack of resolve had allowed the enemy to remain in power in Gaza, mostly left Hezbollah entrenched in Lebanon, and left Iran undeterred in its support of both. Add Iran-supported proxies across Israel’s border with Syria, chronic ferment on the West Bank, and Houthis lobbing missiles from Yemen, also with Iran’s blessing, and one could have argued that Israel’s position was as dire as a year ago. The recent diminishing of Hezbollah’s powers through the surgical pager and walkie-talkie operations, and the taking out of many of the terrorist organization’s positions in Lebanon is cause for optimism. But as of writing this, Israel has yet to take possession of southern Lebanon, and has yet to escalate its war on Iran, despite the latest missile attacks, so a strategic shift is by no means certain.

What explains the seeming lack of Israeli resolve, not only since Oct 7 last year, but going back decades? The country is rife with internal divisions. Israel has many political and religious factions with different views of how to prosecute this and earlier wars. At one end of the spectrum, hardliners who advocate for total victory without concern for Hamas’s hostages, who reject a two-state Israeli/Palestinian solution and who support ruling Gaza, the West Bank—and perhaps the south of Lebanon—in perpetuity. At the other end, those who favor no end to negotiations to bring home the remaining Hamas hostages alive, who reluctantly are prepared to leave Hamas in power in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and who still hold out hope to someday live peacefully side-by-side with a democratic Palestinian state. And in between, the spectrum is occupied by the multitude with mixed views.

But more than internal strife, I suggest the lack of resolve is moral. Israelis overall don’t have confidence in their moral superiority as representatives of Western civilization over their Middle East neighbors. Many display the same ambivalence to Western, Enlightenment-based values—reason, individualism, respect for and protection of individual rights, limited government and capitalism—as do Americans and Europeans. Israel, like its North American and European counterparts, is a Western-style welfare state with the same moral relativist flaws. Many of its citizens implicitly or explicitly accept that the enemy’s religiously based moral code may be different from theirs, but no less valid. (One exception may be Israeli Haredi (orthodox) Jews who perhaps are free of moral relativism, but whose morality unfortunately is more aligned with the theocratic views of Israel’s enemies than the Enlightenment-based views of the West.) 

As a result, with few exceptions (taking out key leaders, setting off explosives in said pagers and other devices, and occasional strikes against enemy positions), Israel’s strategy has been to largely wage a “whack-a-mole war.”  Instead of decisively defeating the enemy, it has shown great restraint, ensuring minimal civilian casualties in Gaza, mostly abstaining from preemptive strikes against other Iranian proxies in the neighborhood, and, most consequentially, against Iran itself. It has with few exceptions reacted—”whacked the mole”—only in response to direct attacks: rockets from Gaza and Lebanon, attacks from Syria and on the West Bank, and missile barrages from Iran. And when it has gone on the offensive as during the second Intifada in the early 2000’s, in Gaza since Oct 7, and in Lebanon the past two weeks, it has never finished the job.

But the moles won’t go away, just like they didn’t after the conflicts in the decades leading up to Oct 7. They may hide in their tunnels for a while, but sooner or later they’ll rear their ugly heads again with mortal consequences (Note: I’ve nothing against moles of the animal variety. On the contrary, I consider them vastly more preferable to the Islamist kind).  

One may argue that the lack of consistent moral support and military assistance^¹ from the U.S., and the immoral outpouring in the West in favor of Israel’s enemies have contributed to its cautious approach, but I suspect this is of secondary importance. Had Israel confidently routed Hamas from Gaza within the first six months of the war, preemptively taken out Hezbollah in southern Lebanon much earlier, and crippled Iran’s nuclear, military and oil-producing capabilities, the Islamist rodent-infestations would have been dramatically reduced by now. The enemy would have been thoroughly crushed to the point of losing hope of ever dislodging Israel from its territory. In the ideal scenario, Israel—not the U.N. or a league of Middle East countries (which would certainly see the return of enemy buildup)—would by now be in the middle of drafting a plan for reimaging Gaza into a place where the untapped potential of the Palestinian people would be unleashed. A place under Israeli governance and military protection where individual rights, including property rights, are respected and protected and where government is limited, and where Palestinians would foot the bill for Israel’s involvement. A society that someday may become Hong Kong on the Mediterranean (pre-Chinese occupation), with a flourishing economy allowing it to easily pay for Israel’s governance. And the same could be argued for the West Bank, and southern, if not all, of Lebanon.

In reality this will of course not happen, for the same reasons that have prevented Israel from decisively routing the enemy during its entire existence—the lack of moral clarity resulting in unwillingness to finish the job and injecting an unhealthy dose of wishful thinking that the problem somehow will go away. What the future holds is unfortunately anybody’s guess. We can only hope that it will leave the country in a better position than before October 7.  

Israel is a beachhead of Western Civilization in a philosophically backward region of the world where countries are largely ruled or strongly influenced by Islamic fundamentalism. The country has so far with a few hideous exceptions, Oct 7 being the most atrocious, prevented its barbarian enemies from getting inside the gates. It’s in our rational self-interest to do whatever we can to strengthen Israeli confidence in its moral superiority over the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. And we must encourage the country to abandon its whack-a-mole war strategy in favor of winning a crushing, decisive victory, bringing lasting peace to the Middle East. Because if the Islamists are successful in clearing the area from the river to the sea of Jews, they will come for us next.

1. Military assistance to Israel to defeat or seriously cripple Iran would be in the U.S.’s rational self-interest as part of protecting the individual rights of Americans as I’ve argued here and here.