The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Timothy Clancy. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Timothy Clancy. Timothy is an assistant research scientist at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. He specializes in studying wicked mess problems. I suspect that means he ain’t never going to be out of work. We got plenty of wicked mess problems, and that includes studying violence and instability as complex systems. If you like what you hear here and want to learn more about Timothy and his work, you can find it at infomullet.com. And as always, that link will be on our episode page at jimruttshow.com. So Tim, good to have you back. Timothy joined us on current 057 where we talked about the Russia, Ukraine situation, and I think I did five podcasts in about three weeks, and I’ll give Timothy the blue ribbon for best forecast. Of course, he was kind of smart. He laid out five scenarios where he had five lottery tickets in the draw of the five people, I think he was the closest to right that we were all wrong to a substantial degree. Anyway, welcome back Timothy.
Timothy: Jim, appreciate you having me today. Thanks for the opportunity. Just a normal disclaimer, I’m not speaking on behalf of any government, university or other agency. I’m just speaking my own opinion here. Again, always a pleasure to talk to you about terrible things, and I’ll be sure to turn that blue ribbon in for a award coupon at the end of the day. Thank you.
Jim: Maybe a gift certificate in your next life as a cool dude or something like that. Yeah, so today we’re going to talk about the Israel Hamas conflict post October 7th.
Timothy: I’ve been asked a ton about this, and usually I like to start to frame, with a lot of these conflicts people tend to characterize them, and this may be something you and I can talk about, as sort of perpetual unending conflicts or unique to the region or it’s always going to happen here. And I take a little bit of a difference. For context, I look at system structures and how they deal with violence. And whenever you have an empire that is in place for a long period of time, think of the structure of an empire. You have an external force that is holding together a bunch of ethnicities, nations, religions, cultures. Almost by definition an empire is multicultural, multi-state. And you look at the Roman Empire, you look at the British Empire, this top-down pressure contains local rivalries and disputes and kind of mutes it.
However, all empires fall, and when they fall, without that top-down pressure coming from external sources, bottom up pressures begin exerting themselves. And you have this sorting out period, which is where local power players, local ethnic groups, local religious groups, local states, they begin fighting one another and working out where are the boundaries of our nation states and our countries. And you can look at the end of Rome and you have several hundred years in the dark ages where this is constantly … Look at just the border of Germany and France. It’s been fighting there for literally hundreds of years. Likewise, in the Middle East where we’re talking about you have the Ottoman Empire, which was providing a top-down pressure for almost hundreds of years since the fall of the Byzantine Empire, and then replacing them when they collapse after World War I, there was a brief slice, relatively speaking, a few decades of the British Mandate with the British Empire, so the British Empire releases this.
It’s in 1948, and what I put the context of what we’re about to talk today is an ongoing settling of where borders lie. We’re going to probably talk about more than just Israel and Hamas. We might talk about Jordan and Lebanon. This entire region is doing exactly what all regions do after an empire collapses, which is they fight it out for a long period of time. And we tend to look at these regions and we say, “ow, we went through the same things in Europe when we were settling out from the Roman Empire.” You can see the same thing in the Balkans happening today. So I like to put this context that it’s not unique, atypical, nor is it persistent violence over the entire period of the empire. It’s this post-empire period where these regional conflicts get hottest. You can see it in Africa after the British Empire. So that’s a little local context from the macro scale before we jump into the specifics.
Jim: Yeah, I would point out that that’s just the last round. If we can go back ways, the indigenous languages of Palestine are not Arabic. And the indigenous religion is not Islam. About 640 AD the Islamic Arab army swarmed out of the desert of the Arabian Peninsula and conquered all kinds of places. And one of the earliest places was Palestine, right around 640 AD. And then of course, in response to that, eventually the Christian West Institute of the Crusades came back and conquered Palestine, held parts of it for up to 200 years, including Jerusalem for about 100. And then Saladin occurred, led a coalition of Islamic groups to basically throw the Crusaders out around 1200 AD, a little bit later than that when the last ones were finally kicked out. And at that time the Ottoman Empire came in. So a little bit later than that, actually not expose, not until actually after the fall of Constantinople. And was it 1454 if I remember correctly.
Timothy: 1453.
Jim: 1453. Oh, I was off by a year, motherfucker. So, you can say this is the breakdown of in some ways post-Ottoman Empire, but this area as the crossroads between Asia, Africa and Europe, has been a perpetual battleground. In fact, I have a dictionary of battle someplace, and the place with the most battles in the history of the world is Jerusalem. There’s been more fights there. Adrianople was number two, but Jerusalem was well ahead.
Timothy: Yeah, I think I grew up with that dictionary, and if I remember, it’s a scattered plot with a little cross swords everywhere there was a battle. And in Turkey down in the Palestine Jordan area, the valley area, they’re just a ton of clustering, because you’re right. Eurasia meets Europe, meets Africa, all in that area, so there’s a geographical concentration as well.
Jim: Yeah, I think from a complex systems approach it’s a geographic attractor essentially, where people going to go conquer A to B are going to be contesting this area, because it’s the corridor that links Egypt to the classic Middle Eastern kingdoms and empires, and then later to the Europeans.
Timothy: Even back to the Hittites, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and all those groups way back when before the Romans.
Jim: Let’s not forget our favorite, the Assyrians, the inventors of imperialism, basically.
Timothy: Yeah.
Jim: So we have that framing, that’s good. What does that tell us about today?
Timothy: I think that’s a good framing for understanding that this local conflict with Hamas via Israel has to be understood in this broader sense of a contest between different regional partners. And there’s a tendency often to broad brush, and I know you won’t do that here. But to broad brush, it is just Israel versus Hamas. That means just Jewish versus Islam, or Palestinians versus Israelis. It’s really actually very complex. Because you have Egyptian interest, for example, that view Hamas with suspicion because they have, we can go in the history of Hamas and Egypt, they’re an offshoot of the Muslim brotherhood. Even within Egypt, this who has power has been an ongoing thing for several decades, even though its borders haven’t changed, you’ve seen this internal tension between Sunni Islamists and the military structure. You have the Kingdom of Jordan, for example, established after the British mandate or as part of the British mandate.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. You have Iran, you have all of these different players who are going to be involved in one way or another, this conflict, and come up when we talk about, it’s important, because we talk about ceasefires and things like that. They’re players in both the conflict and the solution. And when I think about, I use this framework as a scorecard. For any one of these players, there’s three questions you can ask. Can you start a war? Can you finish a war? And can you win the peace? And those three may have different answers for each of these players. And a lot of those answers are going to be based off their particular interest in this grand settling. What do they see for themselves? What do they see for their national interest? Where do they see it?
And someone who might not be able to start a war or win a war might be able to win a peace better than someone who can win a war. This is true wherever you look at conflict. Who can start a war? Who can win a war? And who can win the peace if what we’re talking about ultimately is settling the area to some sort of new equilibrium?
Jim: Yeah, it’s a very interesting way to think about it. I think one of the missed opportunities, truthfully, I haven’t dug into it enough, don’t know anything about it actually. But after the 1967 war where the Israelis basically routed their enemies on all fronts, Jordan, which had controlled the West Bank, was not willing to take it back. And that struck me as a tremendous missed opportunity. Jordan has got a substantial Palestinian population. The Hashemite kings are actually descendants of Muhammed, or one of his close dudes. They’re a core Islamic country and militarily pretty strong for their size and a good ally of the United States. If they would’ve just taken back the West Bank and policed it, the Israelis would’ve been far more willing, I think to relinquish the territory.
Timothy: And this gets into these local complexities. I do something called the Bed Shell Test, which actually comes from writing on movies. If you see a movie where there’s two characters who are women and they don’t have a conversation about their own interest, that doesn’t involve the male love interest, it fails the Bed Shell Test. When doing foreign analysis, I always look at the Bed Shell Test is who are the two local actors and what are their agencies? When we look back at 1967, there are local, and I admit, this is not my primary of expertise, so I want to tread a little bit carefully here on thin ice. But there are local actors with local concerns at that time who in their own perspective thought this was a good idea for the reasons they had or the constraints they had. Looking back, we may say, “Well, it would’ve been easier for the Palestinians if the Jordans had taken them back or the West Bank had taken them back.”
But the question is, at that time, do those local actors with all their local contingencies and conflicts and power politics and dynamics, does it make sense for them? And at the time Jordan had just accepted a whole bunch of the Palestinian refugee population. And is sort of, this is a crisis period for Pan-Arabism, right? This is the, and you see this across, not just Jordan, but everyone’s rethinking, “This was not a good idea. We thought this was going to be something we could do. We thought this would do it.” And it really sort of gave him an existential shock to the system with how quickly that war went south on them.
Jim: No, I do recall that, that was the issue that Jordan had taken in a bunch of Palestinian refugees and they didn’t want to have their numbers tip over to a majority of the people in their country. Because Jordan is very deserty and not heavily populated, and you brought the more populist West Bank into it, you might be at more than 50% Palestinians. And the Jordanian royal family didn’t want that presumably. So yeah, there was a missed opportunity. Let’s focus in a little closer into the conflict post October 7th. How did we get there?
Timothy: As we’re approaching, so let’s just jump in real close, several months before seven, because I like to use analogies and if I can give an analogy for your audience to understand what happened on October 7th and how it’s configured the aftermath we’ve seen. I want people to think of it as Netanyahu’s Barbarossa. And that’s a callback, for those who don’t know, Barbarossa was the German invasion plan of the Soviet Union. I want to be very clear. Germany had agency and chose to invade the Soviet Union. Stalin, on the other hand, ignored so many warnings and was so unprepared that Germany was able to get much further, much faster, caused much more damage. And provokes this response that is much more severe, because the Soviet unit has suffered much more. At one point Stalin thought he was going to lose his regime. So, that’s Operation Barbarossa.
Netanyahu’s Barbarossa is the missed signals, I think. So, this is not the first time Hamas has planned an incursion into Israel where their goal was to capture some hostages, military or civilian, maybe do a raid. My belief, and I can explain the details, but I’ll keep it high level. Leading up to this, I think Netanyahu was focused on normalization with the Arab states. He was post-Hamas, he was not seeing Hamas as a threat anymore. There was obviously internal tension with his government between him and the military and the Shin Bet. They’re all not seeing on the same page, signals are missed. And because of that, Hamas never intended, I don’t think, to get as far as they did and as long as they did. And as a practical consequence, they cross the border and it takes not minutes. My guess is they were expecting Israel military response in minutes.
And you go to any military history, pull up your dictionary battles, pick a random one. If you get militants who have a high level of grievance and are amped up on something and they go in a battle situation in civilian areas where there is no opposition to them, or there’s light opposition or not as much opposition, they run amuck. And now obviously, Hamas planned some of this, but my guess is they had five to six hours extra than they were originally planning, which caused the horrific casualties. And I don’t want to diminish that at all. This was a massive massacre of unbelievable portions, not just in human casualties, but to the psych of the Israeli people and their sense of confidence. That is on Hamas. Hamas did that. They intended that.
But part of that is on Netanyahu, and we again go into details of the signals he missed or the military re deployments he did. As a consequence, going into post October 7th, there is now not just, how do we remove Hamas as a threat, but there is how do we recover the sense of security? Because Netanyahu’s political lifespan has been, “I’m the one who’s going to protect you from Hamas. I’m the one who’s going to protect you from these.” And because he didn’t do that, I think that has tailored the response and sort of shaped the response to seeing this massive, massive response. Now, there was going to be a large response, no matter what, that was kind of in the cards. But I think a lot of what’s going on is fueled by this psychic shock of the level of damage, the level of atrocities that was done. Again, Hamas is guilty for crossing the border, but Israel defense forces were not in place to counter them like they should have been, and that’s why I call it Netanyahu’s Barbarossa.
Jim: Interesting. Yeah. When you first said Barbarossa, I said, “Wait a minute, you got the polarity reverse.” So, you’re actually making Netanyahu be Stalin in this case?
Timothy: Yes, yes.
Jim: Where it’s amazing, because I do know a lot about the eastern front of World War II. And Stalin was whistling by the graveyard on that one forever, right? There were so many signals, and yet the military was so poorly deployed. As you say, they’re almost lost.
Timothy: We can go into the details. I’ve got the information about not just signals missed, but literally military deployments different from normal status quo that were created, a vulnerability that Hamas by happenstance was able to exploit.
Jim: Now, I think it is important for people who don’t concentrate on the details of this situation to realize how horrific and huge this loss was to Israel. About 1,200 people killed. If you scale that up to a country the size of the United States, that would be 42,000 people killed and about 12,000 people kidnapped. And so, when people wonder why this amazingly seemingly disproportionate, I don’t believe it is disproportionate, but some people believe disproportionate response by Israel. Imagine if Mexico due to some grievance from the Mexican American war decided to come across, sent government special forces across the border into Texas, killed 42,000 people, which by the way is more than the population of Del Rio, Texas, one of the larger cities along the border, and kidnap 12,000 other Americans and hauled them back across the border. We would flip our shit. We would wage unrelenting war until the government in Mexico City had been overthrown. There’s no doubt about that in my mind.
To also give a equivalent, if you scaled up Pearl Harbor to the present day size of the United States, that would be the equivalent of about 7,500 Americans killed. So Pearl Harbor on a population equivalent basis was one sixth the size of October 7th. And that led us to four-year long war. We killed two and a half million Japanese civilians. Most of them went the nukes, but mostly by strategic bombing of their paper and stick cities. And so this was a six times bigger provocation than the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. And further underlined by the horrific brutality, sexual assaults, et cetera. And normally you think of sexual assaults in war as coming relatively late in war after people have been hit by ambushes and they’re tired and all this stuff. These guys were doing this from the first hour.
This was clearly their instructions by somebody to be as horrific as you can possibly be. And they documented it with helmet mounted cameras, et cetera. I think it’s really, really important for people thinking about this situation to understand the magnitude of this assault. But again, we were not diligent around Pearl Harbor. We had reason to know, and we could have done a better job defending that. And so that’s on the general, but once an attack and a horrific atrocity of this sort happens, it’s completely reasonable to imagine a very strong response.
Timothy: And if we’re going to be complete. So this is one of the things that we have to tread carefully on, because the atrocities and the planned nature of the atrocities, I think is right. A non-state actor like Hamas, they use atrocity. I have a big article, if you go on Infomill, its atrocity cultural scripts. And it talks about why they would want to capture atrocities, they want to use it. It’s a deep dive. But when we talk about scaling things up, there’s two parts to this, one of which we have to scale up both sides. If we’re going to scale up the impact of the assault on the Israelis, we have to also scale up the casualties on the Palestinian. And when I ran those numbers, it’s not that they’re responding lightly. If you scale up Palestine, that scenario you gave, U.S. v. Mexico, Israel has accumulated the level of casualties in Palestine and literally within Gaza for the most part, a little bit in West Bank, but mostly in Gaza, within eight months that it took us the entire Iraq war or the entire Afghanistan war, they’d be the equivalent of 500,000 casualties.
So, it’s certainly, like you said, both of these scale up, because they are small populations and they’re very, very close to each other. I think people need to understand, we’re talking about a 45-minute drive from Gaza to West Bank, maybe something like that. And the space in between. We’re not talking the distance of Pearl Harbor to Japan or things like that. We’re talking really close. But because both populations are small, the impact that Hamas has generated from this act both on the Israeli side and as the casual them. But the second point is, and this may be controversial, bloodlust is never a successful strategy. There may be every reason to pursue a strategy of, “You hit us hard and we’re going to come back.” And like you said, I don’t think the Americans would be immune to this, but it’s not always a successful strategy.
Go back to that strain. Who can start a war? Hamas can start a war. They clearly did. I don’t think Hamas can win a war, they certainly haven’t. Israel can definitely win a war. Now the question is, who can win the peace? And a strategy of bloodlust could win you a war, but it may not be able to win you the peace. And I want to separate out World War II a little bit. Because there are so much strategic geopolitical factors. Pearl Harbor was a lot more than the American casualties. The entire fleet ended up at the bottom minus an aircraft carrier or two. But I think the Mexico incursion is a good one for analogy. All analogies have limits. But we look at this a strategy of bloodlust, it may get you that feeling.
And this is why I say Netanyahu’s Barbarossa, he needs to show that he’s in charge and this will never happen again. I’m not going to say for a fact, because the reports are still coming out that he’s intentionally ordering things. But I think the level of violence is not by accident. This is payback for what happened to them. And like you said, it’s understandable. The pragmatic question is, is it going to be effective for what their outcome goals are? And maybe that’s something we can get into.
Jim: Yeah, if I look at it from the perspective of World War II, which all analogies are useful, but not perfect. Both the allies in both fronts decided that these two powers had done something so horrific that the only answer was unconditional surrender. And we fought those wars until both places were bomb flat, huge numbers of people killed. Hitler dying in his bunker. Berlin leveled, nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. We fucked their shit up and we were not going to stop until they unconditionally surrendered. And I believe Israel is in a position where that is a very reasonable response. And you mentioned Hamas is a non-state actress. It’s not quite true. Hamas is the legally elected government of the Gaza Strip. Now, the Gaza Strip is not a full nation state in the classic sense. But it was a sovereign region. And they had full authority there, including the ability to have military forces. So this is not bin Laden, this is much more like Hitler or Japan or the nation state use their military to perpetrate this.
Timothy: I would push back. So I use, if you go back and look at one of my articles, Theory of an Emerging-State Actor. We actually differentiate there’s Non-State Actor and Emerging-State Actor. And Emerging-State Actor is one who is using the methods of governance but maybe doesn’t have international recognition. And I think that’s a good way to describe Hamas. And I’m not sure I would say they have sovereign control. Of course, it’s complicated. They don’t have sovereign control over their airspace. They don’t have sovereign control over their borders. They are somewhat subject to Egypt and Israel, which we can get into those dynamics. Because it’s not obviously intuitive why Egypt hates Hamas so much, but that’s important to know that Egypt is not a natural friend of Hamas. That’s a key thing to know. I think these are sort of definitional things that we can argue about.
But I want to get to that point about unconditional surrender. As always, analogies have limits. But the key difference between a conventional fight where you can’t get a fo to unconditionally surrender, and then that surrender holds. An asymmetric conflict in populations with a more modern form of non-state actors. What is building in Gaza right now that worries me is grievance. And we talked about this briefly in the Ukraine thing. Forget that you had any allegiance to Hamas at all. Forget that you had any desire, because as you said, they were elected once in 2005, 2006, never another election hold. And if you look at who gets oppressed most by Hamas, it’s the people in Gaza. That’s the one who’s underneath their authoritarian rule. But when you go in with heavy sorts of violence, you are going to be generating grievance that may not express itself in Hamas 2.0, but it may express itself 10, 15 years down the road.
And that’s the cycle of violence that causes difficulty for long stability. And it goes on both sides of this. Where do you start with the provocations? It goes back and forth. If you want to win the peace, you got to figure out a way to do it that settles it, not just for ending Hamas, because I think Hamas can’t be in power at the end of this. They’ve got to … And in fact, I think I just saw breaking news today that the latest version of the peace deal does have a multi-state actor, which we can talk about what the future might look like. You can’t have Hamas in power after this. But you also have to have conditions that don’t give rise to something like Hamas again, even if it’s under a different name, or you’ll repeat the same cycle over and over again.
We actually call this, in radicalization studies we call this pulling weeds. If you’ve got weeds in your yard and they grow up and you just go and pull them out, but you don’t address that root grievance, that root grievance at all, which is the water and soil, the weeds are just going to grow back up. And in Israel versus Hamas you have two mutual grievances. The Israeli people, for very valid reasons, especially after October 7th, feel they’re living under an existential threat, not just from Hamas, not just from the Fatah and Palestinian authority, but from other regional actors like Iran. Palestinians, putting aside Hamas, they have a grievance as well. They perceive themselves as living under an apartheid state under Israel. So you have these two grievances. And they exist side by side.
And grievance, we can argue whether it’s right or wrong, but we’re not there. Those grievances can give rise to those growth of actors that then come. And Netanyahu’s strategy, for years he called it mowing the lawn. He would periodically get into a provocation with Hamas. They’d toss a few rockets back and forth. They’d keep it limited, and then he could point out that he was the secure of Israeli security he would get … And I said in my article, I’m not shy of this. Hamas needed Netanyahu and Netanyahu needed Hamas.
And then this mutual provocation gets into this Barbarossa scenario where Hamas catches Netanyahu unprepared, the IDF unready, and it blows up, probably more than anyone anticipated. Of course, Hamas was not going to lay off the wheel once they got on it. They were like you said, they were going to do as much damage as they thought they could get away with. But now you have this situation where this decades long mowing the lawn strategy is caused a huge configuration. And the question is, how does it resolve not just next week or next year, but 10 years from now? And that’s the wicked mess, to go back to the beginning.
Jim: There is no doubt that Netanyahu was using Hamas in a somewhat cynical fashion to keep the two wings of the Palestinian group separate. The PLO over in the West Bank had also controlled Gaza until, was it 2006 or thereabouts when Hamas won the election, the last typical dictator?
Timothy: There was actually a civil war between Fatah and Hamas. After the election there was a brief civil war, people forget this, Palestinians fighting Palestinians for control of Gaza, and Hamas won that civil war.
Jim: And that actually works in Netanyahu’s advantage of keeping the two wings of his enemy separate from each other. So there wasn’t a critical mass that had the compelling narrative. And further, and again, I’m putting myself in Netanyahu’s place, it’s useful to have somebody with as extreme a platform as Hamas as your antagonist. I mean, the PLO have some flexibility, and in fact, originally the PLO advocated a secular state, right? Now, PLO came close to a reasonable settlement with Israel in 2000. But for reasons that have never become entirely clear, Yasser Arafat rejected the potential settlement, which he later said was his worst decision.
Timothy: I can shed some light on that. I’ve done some reading on that and it’s an interesting diplomatic lesson. And you talked about missed opportunities. That to me was obviously what you mentioned 1967, but 2000 clear missed. And I think it’s actually currently controlling the West Bank is Palestinian authority, which is run by Fatah, which is the party that succeeded the PLO. I don’t think the PLO-
Jim: Fatah was the biggest component of the PLO.
Timothy: Exactly. Yeah, PLO is a coalition.
Jim: Yeah, Fatah existed before the PLO, but they were the largest in the leadership cadre-
Timothy: Exactly.
Jim: … for the PLO.
Timothy: So, the 2000 scenario, if you want, and this gets into why, and you talked about religion and intersection, right? This is why Jerusalem’s a little bit tricky. And this comes from of all people a treatment by Kissinger. That is one of the few things with Kissinger. I was like, this is a really brilliant insight. He’s describing the Camp David negotiations that Clinton’s hosting At the very end, they’ve gone through all these things, and what they’re doing is they negotiate. And this is, for anyone thinking about solving these issues, this is a roadmap for how you solve these issues. Initially, they’re negotiating what I call bread and butter local municipality government thing. How do we keep the water on? How do we get the potholes cleared Israel and the PLO working together, bread and butter local issues, keep the potholes filled, keep the lights on, keep things basic.
Clinton, and this is Kissinger’s assertion, so I’m just going off him. Nearing the end of his presidential term and he wants to get the big win, and he pushes who owns the Temple Mount? The Temple Mount obviously is that shared sacred spot where both the Jews and the Muslims have a huge religious stake in who owns that. Literally the joke is, when an issue becomes a temple mount, it becomes existential. Kissinger’s assertion was that Clinton, by pushing the Temple Mount issue, killed all the cooperation, because he put the existential risk on the table to which neither side could really meet. It’s easy to agree on who’s going to fix the potholes, but by doing that you learn how to work together. You figure out that we can do this stuff, you build some cooperation, but when you push for who owns a Temple Mount, somebody’s going to bulk. And that’s where you saw Arafat walked away.
And I think that’s one reason he has that regret of it, because right after that Ariel Sharon went into the Temple Mount, so this is all tied together. He did that visit into the Temple Mount, which he was legally able to do, but was very provocative. And that started the Second Intifada, which basically killed the Oslo. I mean, the Oslo Accords were already in trouble with the death of Yitzhak Rabin. But once the Second Intifada started, the Oslo Accords were very difficult. They were kind of limping along when you get to this election in 2005. But it was sort of like on a patient on terminal hospice support at that point. And then from 2006 until now you have this kind of almost frozen conflict state between Hamas and Israel trying to sideline the West Bank as much as they can.
Jim: Yeah, that was the thing that to my mind, again, talk about I’ve so been fixated on this missed opportunity. Was so close, but it didn’t happen. I think one of the issues was Arafat wasn’t thinking strategically enough or big picture. He had a partner with Barack who he could actually negotiate with. I mean, Barack was of the Labor Party, even though he was a former general he really wanted to get to peace. And yet it became obvious that Sharon was going to win the next election. And Sharon absolutely didn’t want peace. He was the big Israel guy, one of these big Israel guys, even though he’d never admitted it. And again, where tactics and strategy come together, Arafat should have seen that this is the window where he has the best chance to cut a deal, the best deal he’ll ever get. They’ll never get a deal as good as that deal was.
Timothy: Well, and this gets back to the Bed Shell Test, these names minus Yasser, who’s gone. But Barack is actually advocating very different strategies for dealing with Hamas than Netanyahu. He’s still around. We can talk about these players. Ben-Gvir, who is in Netanyahu’s cabinet, was actually involved in the protests in the extremist action against Yitzhak Rabin. So, these players on all sides, they’re still the same players. A lot of them are the same names. And there’s a history here, like you said, it’s not just big pieces, it’s very personal and it does have to do with this local dynamics of interactions between individuals. Missed opportunities and things like that. So maybe we’ll get into some of these connections, but there are people in Netanyahu’s cabinet now that were cheering when Yitzhak Rabin was killed. So I mean, the Hamas is a very vile organization, and like you said, it’s useful for Netanyahu to have someone like that as a foil.
There are elements in Netanyahu’s cabinet, and I’m looking at Ben-Gvir and Smotrich here, who are just as vile, but they don’t need to resort to tourism because they have the state. They’re working through the state. That’s useful for Hamas to say, “Look, oh, look at these guys.” And so, both sides take this segment of the other and use that on top of that existing grievance, right? They’re exploiting the local social currency to tap into that grievance for political gain. Maybe the last missed opportunity was not playing this game of tit and tat provocation and ending up in the situation where neither side has really won from what’s happened in the last 10 months.
Jim: Yeah, there’s a good point that this final cabinet that Netanyahu put together after his narrow victory included some really disreputable characters. It’s kind of just amazing that they would be part of a national government. So again, contingency the world is full of big forces and contingencies. The fact that Netanyahu won this relatively narrow victory, but only with the support of some really quite hateful people who actually do hate Arabs, and are not shy about saying it. And really quite despicable folks. But he needed those three or four members of the Knesset to get his majority. And that’s very unfortunate, because you say, it gives the other side a chance to point at Israel. “Look what these schmucks have been saying. No wonder we have to do something profound.” Let’s narrow this in a little bit further to the actual events that have unfolded since October 7th.
Timothy: This gets into, and again, I don’t want to get into Ukraine as a current state. But we talked, when we talked in Ukraine about ways you can invade a city. And that was an interesting primer. We didn’t intend it. We didn’t know it was happening. I think that was in 2022, so it was … But you talk about ways to invade a city, and we talked about, you can storm it, you can surround it and put it under siege. You can use a belts. Modern cities are incredibly difficult to enter. They’ve always been hard, right? World War II they would just bypass them, right? Let’s go around them and get back to them later. And we even talked about cities like Fallujah, Mosul and counter ISIS. We talked about Grozny in Russia. We talked about different ways countries.
Israel chose, perhaps because like you said, they need Hamas out of power. They chose the hardest way to do this one could, and that is a direct ground invasion to go in street by street, block by block and root out Hamas. And not just cities, think of, remember, Gaza’s three-dimensional. We think of the city from the ground up. The tunnel networks under Gaza is a whole nother city, so it’s really a three-dimensional. If we roll the clock forward from seven October, there’s a three-week pause where everyone knows there’s going to be a military response, but Israel’s collecting itself and then they invade in late October. And at that point it’s a systematic city by city or township by township. So, Gaza itself has several townships in them. And they invade initially in the main thrust, the heart of it. And the problem is, is there’s this limited area that’s a box around it. No one can get out.
So the refugees don’t really, they can’t go to the west, there’s a water. They can’t go to Egypt, because the border’s closed. Israel certainly not going to let them in. So you have a civilian population that can’t get out of the area as Israel and Hamas begin this conventional conflict in a very heavy destructive way, which is the nature of urban conflict. You can’t get away from it, but it’s going on now for eight months and it’s been moving. If you think about it from the north, it started working its way down to the south and now east to west. And we’re at a point now where there’s very few areas that Israel hasn’t gone into and done one of these sort of clear operations where they have tried to root out what the Hamas elements are. Meanwhile, the civilian population’s trying to maneuver around them, sort of moving from one area to other and an increasingly dire straits.
And they didn’t choose a belt strategy. They didn’t choose a containment strategy. They chose to go in, and there’s reasons for that naturally because like you said, the shock of that. But the consequence of doing that kind of urban fighting in a modern environment, we talked about how difficult that is, and that’s what’s happening is the Israel army has been struggling to, now they’ve decimated Hamas. I think there’s one brigade of Hamas left after five. The immediate powers out there, we need to remember, there’s not a consistent force. The Israeli size of the force has declined steadily over time. They were not able to maintain the levels of mobilization that they had earlier. They’ve been peeling back a little bit. Hezbollah is attacking from the north, so we can talk about some of those. But literally in the Gaza area there’s less troops now. And it looks like if you’re to draw a tread line of sort of violence and deaths and whatever measure you want, it seems to be coming to a conclusion, which is why I think these ceasefire talks are gaining.
You always start out with ceasefire talks, but it’s kind of not realistic to expect to happen October 28th or 29th, the day after the invasion of Gaza by Israel. I think they had a truce, a limited ceasefire in January for a couple of days. But we’re at a point now where the military operational tempo seems to be hitting a point where you would have some sort of ceasefire armistice. Again, not with Hamas necessarily, but some sort of post-Hamas scenario come up. But there’s political dynamics too. Can Netanyahu have this war end and hold onto power under his current scenario? That’s a political dimension, but it seems to be coming to a natural conclusion.
Jim: At this point we can say that Netanyahu is coming within grasping distance of effectively eliminating Hamas as a powerful actor.
Timothy: We put a time window on that. When I study non-state or Emerging-State Actors, they have this interesting thing where you can knock them out. You can knock the Taliban down to a handful dozen of people fleeing across Torah Bora Mountains in 2001, and then in 2005 and 2006 their back is a sort of insurgency, and by 2010 they’re about 40,000 strong. That’s that grievance. The difference between conventional and asymmetric is the ability to reconstitute yourself and these non-state actors to shift and move. I don’t think Hamas is going to have effective operational control. Certainly, no actor involved in the peace negotiations wants them to, other than perhaps Hamas. But whether they will cease to be an effective force two years from now, five years from now, that’s a big question of how this ends up. And what is done afterwards to make sure they don’t return or relocate somewhere else.
Jim: With respect to Netanyahu’s prospects, I mean, I’ve talked to a number of Israelis and we can see it in their press. It seems almost for sure that the instant the war ends and the war cabinet breaks up, there’ll have to be an election and Netanyahu will get voted out.
Timothy: Yeah, and Benny Gantz has already left, so one my … We talk about contingencies. I love that you use the word. Complex systems are full of contingencies in these contingencies matter. One of my contingencies was when Benny Gantz leaves the cabinet, that begins to countdown to the next election. Now, they’re not scheduled for a normal election, I think until 2025, but they may have a snap election if he loses support. And there’s pressures not just Gantz left with a few. This mobilization and drafting of the ultra Orthodox may cause some of those ultra Orthodox members. It’s not directly related to their stance on the fight, but it’s related to the war obviously. The court has ordered them to go forward with the conscription, that may cause … So you may see these contingencies come together where Netanyahu dips beneath that 61 in the Knesset, or 60, and you’ve got to have a snap election.
Jim: And everybody I talked to in Israel says that everybody other than his core supporters are done with him. And then he’ll lose and lose big. And so how much he’s going to continue the fighting for his own self-preservation’s hard to say, but fortunately, it is a coalition. And so to your point, if he continues the fighting longer than is tolerable, other people will pull away from his coalition and he’ll fall below 60 and then they will have to cause an election. That is a constraint on his behavior. We talk about complex systems. We all know that complex systems are significantly governed by the constraints that exist in them. And one of the constraints is Netanyahu wants to preserve his power, which probably means continuing the war. But the constraint is when his coalition gets enough defectors to fail, he can’t push any further than that. Very interesting set of incentives and constraints, which give rise to kind of the possible trajectories going forward.
Timothy: Another constraint is the armed supply from the U.S. to Israel.
Jim: What do you know about that? I have not really been tracking that carefully. At this point it doesn’t seem like they need that much in the way of supplies.
Timothy: I’m going to caveat this, and I don’t want to get into politics. But I always give credit to the administration. Because you never know who’s really calling the shots. I set up until this point, Biden’s administration had played a sophisticated game of staying engaged with Israel, supplying with arms and weapons and maintaining his influence as best he could as a constraint. Now, given what we’ve seen in the last two weeks, I’m not going to say that’s Biden specifically, but somewhere in his administration this is happening. So what you’ve seen with the arm supply is, they have been consistently delivering key crucial arm supplies into Israel. We’re talking about replacement for the Iron Dome missiles and rockets, replacement munitions, things they need to not just continue the war but protect themselves from rocket attacks. Now, Israel is a major arms manufacturer. It’s not the same as Ukraine where they might be in real straits.
But there are key things we provide that they need, and we’ve been supplying those and restoring them. Caused a lot of churn on the progressive front of the Democratic Party. That is now tapering off, and I think it’s being used as a leverage point. But of course, you talk about contingencies, now we’re getting the U.S. election where maybe Netanyahu’s looking, “Can I hold out until something changes and that equation changes?” Again, I don’t want to get into politics here, but that is another constraint that they’ve got to think of. Because right now, the only partner Israel really has left is the U.S. And Israel’s not afraid to go it alone. They were born from going it alone. This is not something that they haven’t dealt with before. But they’re running out of allies who might be willing to step up and support them, particularly for material supplies.
So, the U.S. does still have some leverage, and I think they’re using that leverage without necessarily, there’s some tit-for-tat about whether you’re supplying enough, no general gets enough weapons that he wants. That’s always a thing. I’m not going to get into that. But you definitely have this additional constraint. There’s a political constraint in Netanyahu, and then there’s what I’d call a diplomatic constraint, which is the influence of the U.S. may have on him, complicated by Netanyahu, can read 528 like the rest of us and look at the election polls and say, “Well, I can outlast you.” It’s really a wicked mess, and I don’t mean to make light of it. I may be laughing at the complexities. Obviously, it’s a horrific situation on the ground, but it is all these interesting constraints and complexities interacting together in that one very, very tiny spot.
Jim: Very good. And that’s absolutely the case. If I’m sitting there with Netanyahu, you’re thinking some game theory here. What’s going to happen in November and what does that mean? But I think this actually sets up a very good pivot point to something that I was taken by surprise, probably because I don’t hang out in those sectors very much. Which is how Israel has lost considerable ground in the InfoSphere relative to pride battle. America has historically been very pro-Israel, bipartisan across religious groups and everything else. I was frankly pretty shocked at the quantity of pro-Hamas agitation. In fact, quite shocked that people in the west could be aligning themselves with a premodern, barbarian theocratic cult in a way that was like, “What the fuck is wrong with these people?”
Timothy: Well, let’s unpack that. Because I think what they’re aligned with, if you dig underneath the surface, is the grievance. That perception that they perceive, and this is perception, right? The Palestinian as a perceiving themselves as living under apartheid. Hamas happens to be, and I don’t think many people are very familiar with what Hamas is actually doing. Because if you look deep into it, you would not want to be aligned with these guys at all. Just like if you looked in Israel’s cabinet with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. You don’t want to be aligned with these guys. But the grievance of the perception of an apartheid style governance is a motivating factor on the left, especially in the more progressive radical left. Which is of course the ones who are most skilled at going onto college campuses and causing a ruckus and things like that. They don’t have … The AARP doesn’t take college campuses because they just go get a bunch of money from folks.
So, they use the tools they have, but there’s a lot of global dynamics in this information space as well. And not just the normal actors like, “Oh, well, Russia’s trying to stir the pot,” which of course they are. But when I did those atrocity scripts in that long article in the info mullet, Pakistan and India and Bangladesh and India have an ironic role in this information space. And the reason why is if you look at Modi’s party, the political ideology of Hindutva, it’s sort of a Indian version of sort of area nationalism, this stuff like that. Very racist, very ethnocentric nationalists. They support Israel. So, the Modi information folks is very pro-Israeli, and they like to say, “Hey, there’s a Muslim group living within our borders that’s very dangerous. They should be eliminated.” Because of course, they’ve got a local cause. They look at their own Muslim populations in India as a threat.
You go back, you look at Pakistan, the Muslim populations, or India or Bangladesh. These are majority Muslim populations. They identify with the Palestinians. Now, the only reason this matters is some of the largest bot farms in the world are located in Bangladesh and India. So when this conflict comes out, I actually traced it back. A lot of the initial memes and things like that are not coming from Russia or coming from China. They’re being propagated by bot farms. They call it Bollysphere. It’s the InfoSphere for Bollywood. Coming out of India and Bangladesh, which is spreading pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli more because of how it reflects on a local conflict between Hindu and Muslim and dominant political force versus smaller political force, those tensions. They’re exploiting that Israel Palestinian tension to release propaganda that’s locally important. But as a result, flooding propaganda all over, which is picked up on the west, a lot of times this Hindutva Bollysphere stuff gets picked up by more right wing folks and stuff like that.
You’ll see it on Tucker Carlson, all that stuff. Whereas the pro-Palestinian stuff gets picked up on the progressive side, and this causes a churn on this info space. Now you and I can both say anyone who spent 30 minutes on a Wikipedia source that was even marginally written could probably pierce through a lot of this. Unfortunately, today a lot of people aren’t spending that time. You get people who have supporting a grievance, but maybe doing it through an actor that they should not be supporting. I would not go on a limb and say, “I think Hamas is doing a good job here.” They’re absolutely not. Like you said, they’re very vile. Nor would I be supporting, and I don’t know the name. There’s a terrorist group that got disbanded that’s now reformed as a political party that I think it’s the Conests, but I don’t want to be misquoted. That’s the Ben-Gvir Smotrich. I wouldn’t support either of those groups. I wouldn’t put my name behind them.
But the grievance they’re exploiting means that you get rallied into this thing where if you want to be Palestinian, you got to be Hamas, and that’s very dangerous. You want to be careful about who you support, so you don’t get roped into these bad actors.
Jim: When you were talking about that, it just made me think, wonder why Israel has done such a bad job in the InfoSphere? I mean, they have an extraordinarily deep intelligence service, and a long history of positioning themselves politically around the world. They have really lost a tremendous amount of ground, probably for the long term. Any theory on why they have been so ineffective?
Timothy: So actually, first of all, to give credit to Israel, taking a step back from the Palestinian conflict with Hamas. Israel is much more sophisticated than the U.S. at playing local differences. They are much more nimble and adroit in what I would call traditional diplomacy. Economic ties, political ties, making sure, but social media flattens the world, and you have some very large population countries. Israel is a tech center there. You’ve got very deep technologies, but you have large parts of the world that didn’t have access to technology 10, 15, 20 years ago. Like the bot farms now in India and Bangladesh, they can amplify messages enormously and flood the sphere, so to speak. And so you have a lot of countries don’t like Israel. I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone who’s looking at a UN vote lately.
So, you have a lot of countries that may not have a stake to play in that geopolitical game that Israel used to play very well. Economic treaties, will work with this country, will have an arms length distance with Russia, but an ally of the U.S. Israel is still very good at that game. These other participants, they’re just getting into social media and flooding the sphere. They’re only doing in the info space. And so you have basically a state actor in one small country trying to contest with dozens of countries worth of organic emergent local groups. They could be non-state actors, they could be state sponsored, or they could just be local activists who are using these social media tools that weren’t really as powerful 10, 15, 20 years ago, when you were talking about Israel being much more capable in this space.
Jim: Yeah, that’s interesting. And then of course, you also get interesting, where did that come from? For instance, Ireland is very anti-Israel on the theory that Israel is a creation of British imperialism, just like, “We were suppressed for 800 years by those dudes.”
Timothy: It doesn’t surprise me. You can look at this, and that’s the narrative that in many parts of the world, and again, we don’t need to talk about Ukraine as a current conflict. But we look at Ukraine and we look at Israel and we view them as military conflicts. Or we might look at them as complex systems of political dimensions. In many parts of the world it’s a narrative. And the narrative in Israel is colonial forces versus colonial occupied colonizing. We can talk, whether that’s valid or not historically doesn’t matter. The narrative is, Israel is the occupying force and the Palestinians are the suppressed. And that’s a deep-seated vein, probably because of the British, right? Of this pushback on this colonial narrative, that narrative sells. It may not be accurate, there may be nuance to it, there may be complexity to it, but that narrative sells.
And that narrative sells in a lot of areas, even like Ireland, where they’re like, “Hey, the British were suppressing us. We know what it’s like to live in an area where we feel like it’s apartheid. That is our experience.” So this is where I try and disentangle support for the narrative or the grievance versus support for the actor that is on top of that narrative or grievance currently.
Jim: Let’s dig into this idea of grievances and how long they should last. I presume with a last name like Clancy, you must have some Irishmen in the wood pile someplace. And I can say, have done my DNA testing and I’m more Irish than they are anything else. And there ain’t nothing like an Irishman for holding a grudge over hundreds of years. But at some point you got to let it go. I mean, as far as I … There’s hardly any adult still alive that was economically engaged in 1948, for instance. And yet, the events of 1948 still have this massive emotional valence, particularly with the Palestinians.
Timothy: I model this in the computer simulations I make. We create a, it’s called a dual-term structure. And I’ll try not to get too wonky here, but explains what’s going on. Because we have to simulate this in our models. There’s a long-term sentiment that takes years to form, and there’s a short-term sentiment that takes months to form. And they’re averaging against each other, that’s why they’re called anchors. If you have, let’s see, a long-term sentiment that is rooted in stability and calm, and you have an occasional flare up of violence, you’ll have that long-term sentiment move a little bit towards violence. But once that violence stops, the short-term sentiment’s going to go back to the average of stability and calm. So, that long-term anchor is anchoring that particular civilian segment in stability.
Now, let’s say the opposite. You have a long-term sentiment rooted in violence and flareups and things like that. Now, if you have a short period of calm, but you have a short burst of violence, the long-term anchor is already towards violence, so it’s much easier to tip over. And this is the difference between a stable state, a failing state, and a state in perpetual conflict is where those anchors are. So how does this apply to the context we’re talking about now? 1948, if that had been the last conflict, let’s say that’s the last thing that happened. You would then have many decades where that long-term anchor can adjust backup to stability and as deep. Then let’s say you have a flare up. A small flare up, not something like seven October. But maybe one of these rocket attacks over the past couple of years. You have a minor flareup, “Hey, we got seven decades of living together, stability. We might not always like each other. We have this narrative from our grandparents. It’s going to pull a little bit to violence, but it’s not going to keep it there.”
However, we look at 1948 was not the last incident of violence by any stretch of the imagination. And when we run these simulations, violence, there’s lots of things that we do in this, economic conditions, provision of government services. So do they perceive Israel is providing the services they need or does whatever? But the biggest thing that moves that needle is violence. And there’s two ways it does it. On the short-term anchor the general violence around you is always a concern. Even if you aren’t feeling it specifically, people fear violence and they can get agitated and lose that sense of stability if there are violence around you. If you are personally experienced violence, personal resonant, I don’t mean like you yourself get killed, or maybe you get injured, someone you know, someone in your family, someone you can point to, that then draws that long-term anchor down very quickly to violence and instability.
And we talk about this small area, very concentrated in the West Bank and Gaza. Kin-based networks, very tight living conditions. Everyone knows each other. So, when violence happens, there’s a lot of people who have that personal resonance. And it may not seem like much here, but the settler provocations, the things like that, it is tipping that long-term anchor to be not a stability, but to be, “Here we go.” And on the Israeli side, well, if 1948 was the last war they had to fight, we’d have a lot of different conversation. But you ask an Israeli, they’ll be like, “1948, 1968.” They’ll go through the whole list and they’ll go through the 15 ceasefires from 2005 to ’09. So, we haven’t had a period of … So how long does a grievance last? It has to do with the period of time. I would say you’re talking years up to 10 years, maybe 20 years at least minimum of common stability to get that long-term anchor moving back.
And at any point in that outbreak of violence can flip it and draw you right back to where you were. It’s why stabilizing Afghanistan is so hard. They had literally three generations. They were very stable before the Soviet invasion. They were very stable for decades. But beginning in 1979, you have the Soviet invasion, then you have the Civil War and the nineties, then you have the U.S. invasion. They have three generations of instability and violence. So, it doesn’t take much now for anyone who’s been raised over those three generations say, “Oh, it’s the summer. Who am I going to go grab my rifle and fight to?” And you look at it now, Taliban and the Pakistan is about ready to go to war, off-topic. But you’ve got that they’ve only been in power for two years, and they’re already to go to war with Pakistan. It’s that instability anchor. Those two anchors I think are what’s driving this grievance and what you need to get beyond this grievance.
Jim: That’s very interesting. Now let’s pivot to the last of the three things that you talked about. The ability to start a war, the ability to win a war, and the ability to have a post-war settlement of some sort. It sounds like, I think people who take the Hamas side on this thing and brand Israel as European imperialists who must be forced out of Palestine are fucking diluted if they think that’s going to happen. And I say, “Take a look at Israel’s nuclear arsenal asshole. You’re not going to drive Israel out there. They’ll nuke the whole place first, and they will.” So by any kind of pragmatics, this thing, absolutely. The grievance has to be settled by frankly the Palestinians accepting the fact that Israel is here for good and if they’re going to get some token of right of return, it’s going to be no more than token.
And that’s just the reality. God-damn, it ain’t going to happen. Ain’t going to be anywhere different. And then secondly, and this is a very unfortunate thing about our modern world, and very asymmetric warfare. Something Nassim Taleb talks about quite a bit is that the most extreme faction has the ability to destabilize things. Let’s suppose 80% of people on both sides want 20 years apiece so these grievances can subside to the point that long-term peace can be made. All it takes is the most extreme Islamic jihad, I think, that even more hotheaded than Hamas. Let’s say Hamas is gone, but there’s some residual amount of Islamic jihad who creates some atrocity in five years. Or on the Israeli side, some of the most extreme settlers do some atrocious slaughter over in the West Bank while we’re trying to get to equilibrium. That seems to be another force that works against achieving, which I think makes a lot of sense. This idea of a cooling and calming period. Within all that, what are your thoughts on, are there any trajectories to long-term?
Timothy: I have a trajectory, but it’s not one people would expect, and it may surprise. I think Israel has a very good chance for long-term stability after this conflict, but not in the way anyone’s going to expect. And let me walk through this.
Jim: All right, let’s hear this.
Timothy: The reason I started with this imperial settling post-empire countries nation settling out, is to explain that this is a dynamic scenario with the regional partners. And the reason why it matters is that we tend to think of this as a Palestine Israel only. But part of Israel’s concern is the existential threat from their neighbors, the other Arab countries that surround it. Which they’ve gone to war with several times. So up until this point, probably up until the last 15, 20 years, maybe even less than that. Up until we invaded Iraq and Soleimani took over Iraq and unleashed Iran, the primary concern of Arab countries was Israel v. Palestine. The Palestinian Street was something they cared about. Now it’s Iran.
You have an interesting scenario where there are Arab countries that are more concerned about Iran than they are the Palestinian Street. And they may not say this in public, but they’ll signal it. And I think what’s going to happen is that there will be a normalization. This is not, unfortunately, it’s not good news for the Palestinians. I think it’s very tragic news. But I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to see some sort of, we can talk about the mechanics of the ceasefire itself, which is going to be very … But long-term, Saudi Arabia, Jordan’s already normalized, I believe. Libya was about to normalize, that kind of got scattered. Morocco’s normalized. I think you’re going to see Saudi Arabia normalize. I think you’re going to see Egypt’s already pretty much normalized. You’re going to see the Arab countries want to normalize with Israel in order to counter Iran. They are more scared a rising Iran that they’re willing to trade the Palestinian interest, which had previously been the thing that they were most motivated by.
Now they’re more looking to back. And this is why this local settling, right. We’re used to it always being Arab states versus Israel states. But Iran rose up and now it’s Arab and Israel straits versus Iran. And that’s a sea chain shift. And what that means on the ground is that the support that the Palestinian cause had from Arab states, the sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudge, yeah, we’ll funnel some things in that, it’s going away. And it’s going to increasingly become reliant only on Iran. Iran is the main supplier of Hezbollah. Hamas, this is a little bit ironic. Iran, Shia, Hezbollah, Shia, Hamas is Sunni. You wouldn’t think it matched, but there’s a weird contingency story of how they got together. Hamas relies on Hezbollah and Iran too. So you now have basically Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are all one power block. And I see the normalization of relations with Israel allowing Israel to calm that grievance of existential threat from surrounding neighbors, without having to resolve the Palestinian issue.
Which means bad news for the Palestinians, because they’re going to get the thumb put on them perhaps. And there’s not going to be a settling of people may think where there’s some, like you said, the Oslo Accords, two-state solutions, something like that. That’s the big picture. I can pause there or then go into the local of what it means for Gaza. But I think Israel is going to have stability, not because of something coming from Palestine, but through normalization with the other Arab states.
Jim: So that Israel’s now in just an utterly dominant position over the Palestinians. Historically, one of their constraints, boundary conditions at least was, there’s 400 million Arabic countries in the world, plus they throw in Iran, you’re almost at 500 million, versus 10 million Israelis. And Israel’s done an amazing job of winning wars, outnumbered 40 to one. But at some point, all they have to do is lose once, as we know. But if they can immunize the depth of the Islamic side, then Palestine is utterly at their mercy. Not as you say, not a very pretty picture for the Palestinians.
Timothy: And not something I’d necessarily say the Israelis have earned in the sense that this wasn’t some grand stratum by them. I mean, they’re taking advantage of it, but it’s literally, I think a contingent factor of the rise of Iran, and the concern of an Iranian expansionist Iran. Now it’s tapered off a little bit since Soleimani death. I’ve talked about that elsewhere. But Iran rising as a power to confront the entire Middle East is a new factor and it’s changed the dynamics. These are always local contingencies and they’re more willing to side with Israel because they see Israel. What’s the proof of this, right? It’s a hypothesis. Look at the Iranian attack on Israel. Thousands of missiles sent up with the only thing preventing you from seeing was the curvature of the earth or the time it took to get your outlet. This was known in advance, but you had Jordan intercepting some of those rockets.
You had Arab countries allowing Israeli planes and U.S. planes and their own forces to take out these, so that none of the Iranian missiles really hit anything of consequence. Now granted, it was telegraphed, it was symbolic. But that’s a key difference. You would not have seen 20 years ago an Arab country intercepting missiles destined for Israel. This is proof point, and this was in the last, I think three or four months when Iran decided to make that after we killed their person in Syria. This is a proof point. What happens in Gaza, I think the most likely is going to be some sort of multi-nation force, whether chartered by the UN or some sort of league. The Arab leagues could play a role here, but I don’t think Israel’s going to want just the Arab League. You’re going to need a multinational force that does basic Greek constitution and policing.
I’m not saying this is a great solution. Everyone’s like, “Well, that won’t work, because of X, Y, Z.” Yeah, but I don’t see many other options. Israel doesn’t want to reoccupy Gaza. They’ve been there before. It’s a very cost expensive thing. They don’t want to do that. They don’t want Gaza to run itself, because they’re worried about Hamas 2.0, or like you said, Islamic jihad. So, they’re going to have to accept some sort of multinational force with some sort of chartered mandate that has authority to police and restore basic functions. And the question is, who are those partners? Now, I just saw some of the ceasefire negotiations. I have seen that there’s a potential for the Palestinian authority to play a role, and I don’t want to oversell that that’s the miracle solution. Because the Palestinian authority has its own history and problems. They’re considered very corrupt, and they’re not well-respected in Gaza. But I think you’re going to have some sort of multinational force perhaps with a PA at the head, backed by the main participants in the region with Israeli blessing in Gaza when this is all said and done.
Jim: Now, you’re hypothesizing that a reasonable chance of a trajectory where Palestinian authority perhaps supplemented with international forces takes over Gaza. Okay, that’s ending the war. But your third piece was really winning the peace. Where does that go in terms of a long-term period of let’s say to your 20 years of quiet, so that the grievances can subside? It’s like putting Preparation H on your hemorrhoids to get them to calm down. How do we get 20 years of peace with all the dynamics that we’re talking about around here?
Timothy: All analogies have limits. And that one you just used has, I don’t want to touch that analogy. But no, so this is one reason I don’t have a hopeful forecast for the nature of the conflict. Because this grievance, you talk about how easy it’s this anchor is tipped, and it’s so easy for provocation. Here’s what I would say. This is what you’d have to see. I’m not saying it’s likely. You’d have to see a backlash against Netanyahu that not only took him out of power, but really hammered down on the extremist settler movements that are behind a lot of provocations. And not just Gaza obviously, but really in the West Bank. You’d have to see that on the Israeli side. You’d have to see a return of some sort of economic normalization where you can do work fees. And I’m listing these things, not saying they’re easy, especially in a secure environment. You’d have to see some sort of economic, some sort of cross border opening with Egypt.
Things that can restore a normal status, that could enable everyday life to return to the Palestinians where they’re not perceiving themselves as living in an apartheid state. On the Palestinian side, boy, we mentioned before how much Israel’s lost, and I said, “Look, they’ve lost the equivalent of the Iraq War.” They have a grievance that they’ve got to deal with as well. And the only way you can address that in the short run is recover them quickly and have some sort of credible thing. If they spend another few decades in refugee camps, squalid conditions, dire situations, if that multi … And I think the Palestinian authority is going to be symbolic at first, it’s really going to be this multinational group. If that group goes in and it ends up with a Haiti scenario where it’s just another disaster after another recovery, you’re not going to solve any grievance.
You have to go in and fundamentally rebuild and reconstitute Gaza in a successful way to get people active employed. One of the best cures for grievance, it sounds capitalistic, but it’s employment, right? Gainful employment, meaningful employment, the belief that you can go to school, the belief that you can have a future, that you can believe that you can have a career and retire. Those things get people off the track by both giving them something to think for. And also physically taking them out of that unemployed and nothing to do, but look around for how I can get into trouble. That is the cause of so many conflicts when your unemployment rate goes over a certain level.
But I wanted to put a big caveat on this. I’m listing these out as this, I was the magic guy in the sky that could just make this happen. How is Israel going to open the borders for economic trade with seven October in its close rear-view mirror? How are the Palestinians going to put aside? “Well, yeah, they’re rebuilding the buildings, but the buildings were bombed and my mom was in that building.” These are the kinds of things that it’s very, very tough. I don’t think there’s going to be a whole lot of good news on that front until maybe five years in the future or something like that. If Israel has a sense that their existential threat is less, they may be willing to soften up and release some of those things or have some encouragement. But I don’t feel bad for Hamas. They earn this, right? They signed a check and they’re getting get cashed. The Palestinian people are going to continue to suffer for a long time after this, unfortunately.
Jim: Yeah, I think that’s unfortunately a fair chance that that’s an area could come and pass. And what’s so sad about this is the opportunity, particularly for Gaza to be an economic powerhouse is quite considerable. Look at their location. They could be a Dubai, an even easier Dubai. Better location on the Mediterranean, close to Europe, near the Suez Canal, right next to one of the great techno powers in the world, Israel. If they could only give up their irrational grievance that they’re going to drive Israel into the sea. Until they do that, the Israelis are not going to deal with their shit. And until they give that up, there’s no solution to be had.
Timothy: Here’s the three body problem I think that this happens. And when I mean three body, I’m kind of thinking A happens to B, happens to C. If the Arab states normalize with Israel, right? That cuts off the support that Palestinians have traditionally relied upon to be their leverage point to hammer Israel above their weight. Once Palestine realizes that, they realize the game’s up. And I want to be careful here that the Hamas actors, the militant actors from the river to the sea, that’s got to go. Because the Arab countries aren’t going to back, so how are they going to do it? There has to be a recognition that’s no longer, you’ve got a good point about nukes and all that stuff. But if that ever was achievable, I’m not saying it was, but if anyone, that has to be let go before you can get to this.
So the three thing is, Israel and Arabs normalize. Arabs cut out the Palestinians. Palestinians realize they don’t have Arab support, and now they look at, “What do we do now?” But that’s not a guaranteed thing. Remember, irrationality sometimes is a lot easier than rationality. You could make Gaza into Dubai. It’s a lot easier to make it into Somalia. And we talked about feral cities in Ukraine. And the concept of feral cities, I think it’s just as likely Gaza ends up as a feral city. It wasn’t necessarily purely feral under Hamas, because they had control. Like you said, they had a good control locally. But it could end up as a feral city, which is nobody’s land, nobody’s control. It’s almost like a containment issue as opposed to a resolution issue.
Jim: Unfortunately, that may be the number one attractor out there. Let’s hope that somehow more rational minds prevail. I think it’s been a very interesting, and as always with Timothy, multidimensional look at the situation, which I love. And the fact that you bring the complexity lens to it makes it even more interesting. I want to thank Timothy Clancy for a very interesting conversation about the Israel Hamas situation.
Timothy: Well, Jim, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Jim: All right.