Contributing Factors in the Israel-Hamas War

I am old enough to remember two general Middle Eastern wars, the second of which started right after I had begun my undergraduate studies in Minnesota. With Israel’s victory in these wars, the Jewish state had acquired an aura of invincibility, despite the enmity of its numerous and much larger Arab neighbours. 

On October 7, almost 50 years to the day after the latter conflict, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel from its stronghold in the Gaza strip, ruthlessly kidnapping and murdering innocent civilians near the border. Not surprisingly, Israel has responded by besieging Gaza, cutting off power, water and food to the enclave and preparing for a more coordinated response.

Many Israelis are asking how their government could have been caught off guard by the attack, given the legendary strength of the Israeli Defence Forces and the seeming omniscience of their country’s intelligence apparatus. Yet Israel is a severely divided country, and it had been paralyzed by months of popular protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms. It seems likely that this protracted domestic turmoil had deflected the government’s attention away from its longstanding foreign and defence problems. At least for a time, this fresh attack has submerged internal divisions and led to the formation of an emergency government between Netanyahu’s coalition and opposition leader Benny Gantz’s liberal Blue and White alliance.

What next? One assumes that Israel will move to reoccupy Gaza and eject Hamas from its enclave.

Yet even if it does so, Israel’s overall position is unlikely to improve. Three structural factors make the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict almost perfectly intractable.

On shaky ground

First, Israeli elections are governed by a fairly pure form of proportional representation (PR), in which voters cast ballots for a party rather than for individual deputies in the Knesset, Israel’s single-chamber parliament. While the Knesset thus accurately reflects a severely divided polity, PR accentuates the power of extremist parties such as Religious Zionism, which favours annexation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, thereby further encroaching on Palestinian territory. Because no party is large enough to make a majority, the major parties need the votes of these smaller parties to form a government. This typically produces fragile short-lived governments, which are virtually incapable of making the hard decisions needed for coming to terms with the Palestinian Arabs, most of whom are left effectively voiceless.

This situation could be improved by establishing a threshold for parties to enter the Knesset. Germany puts the threshold at five percent. If a party receives less than five percent of the party list votes, it receives no seats in the German Bundestag. Israel sets its threshold at three and a half percent, which is far too low to exclude extremists and to encourage a minimal level of co-operation. Hence Israel regularly elects shaky governments structurally incapable of moving the country beyond its current difficulties.

Second, Israel lacks a written constitution. There is no document that prescribes the basic structure of government and assigns responsibilities to the several institutions within the larger political system. In this respect Israel is similar to the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and nine of Canada’s provinces. The United States Constitution describes itself as “the supreme law of the land” (article 6), which means that it takes priority over ordinary statutes of either federal or state governments. Our Constitution Acts have the same relationship to federal and provincial laws, implying thereby a court system functioning as referee. In Israel the courts have taken on the role of referee without such a document, which is a major reason for Netanyahu’s proposed reforms.

Are Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms a needed counterbalance to an overreaching judiciary? Or are they an attempt to end judicial independence, as protesters believe? Israel badly needs a written constitution. But because a constitution represents a consensus on the basics of political governance, and because Israeli society is so divided, such a consensus seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.

Enmity to Israel

Third and finally, Israel is beset by terrorist groups that openly threaten its existence and have no qualms about inflicting cruelties on a massive scale to achieve their ends. Over the decades Israel has successfully made peace with several Arab states, beginning with Egypt in 1979 and, in 2020, with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. But it is much more difficult to deal with nonstate actors, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which are hardened in their enmity to Israel and make a practice of hiding their operatives amongst innocent civilians in Gaza and elsewhere.

Behind all this, of course, is Iran, sworn foe of Israel whose adherence to jihadist ideology will not permit it to come to terms with its existence. But Iran’s Islamist regime is itself on increasingly shaky ground, as its population wearies of the harsh rule of the mullahs and fewer Iranians are willing even to profess the Muslim faith. What Iran might look like under a different regime is hard to see at present, but that’s a topic for another time.

This late in history, it seems that both one-state and two-state solutions for Israel and Palestine face insurmountable obstacles to their realization. Thus the current status quo, unjust as it is, looks set to last indefinitely. Whatever Israel decides to do in the near term will cause suffering on all sides, making its own position that much more precarious, even with respect to its western allies.

Those of us outside the region can offer material relief to those affected by the conflict, but in the meantime we do well to join with the psalmist in praying.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!

    “May they prosper who love you!
Peace be within your walls,
    and security within your towers!”

Psalm 122:6-7