How do wars end? Lots of different ways. One of the most common is also the simplest: the losing side surrenders and sues for terms. Needless to say, these terms are often harsh.
Wars can also end via negotiated settlements, usually mediated by a third party. In these cases the losing side often avoids the harsh terms of formal surrender but nonetheless is forced to accept a small fraction of what it wants.
Surrender and negotiation have one thing in common: both sides, but especially the losing side, have to stop fighting.
The Arab-Israeli War¹ has been ongoing for 80 years or so. The Arab side that started the war has lost. They've lost over and over and over, and they have no chance of changing that. They are outmatched in conventional terms, and even if, somehow, they were able to turn this around, Israel has nuclear weapons available in the last extremity. Put simply, the Arab side literally has zero chance of ever winning.
But they refuse to surrender. So the war continues, and Israel's defense becomes steadily more brutal in an effort to finally force surrender. None of this is necessarily fair. It is, however, the way the world works and always has.
The Arab-Israeli War will end when the Arab side surrenders. So far, only Egypt and Jordan have effectively done this, and they've had peaceful relations with Israel ever since.
The same thing will happen with any other organization or state that recognizes reality and surrenders. The terms of this surrender have gotten worse over the years as the fighting has continued, but that's to be expected. They'll get worse still as long as the fight goes on.
Like it or not, this is the only endgame. Short of Carthage-like annihilation, the Arab side has lost as thoroughly as any side has ever lost in history. They need to surrender and then rely on the US and Europe to help them avoid the harshest possible terms from Israel. It's the only way this ever ends.
¹This should be "Arab plus Iranian," but there's no good word for that. Just assume that Iran is included in all references.
I would agree with Kevin to a point. However, the superior power of Israel is entirely dependent on US support. So one thing the US might do is withdrawing that support.
It would change the strategic picture quite quickly. The US has the power to change this picture at any time but every President has felt it impossible to do; the last administration that has put any pressure on Israel (very modestly but it lead to the Oslo accords) was Bush 1.
What gets me: Netanyahu is one of the vilest humans on the planet. He routinely disregards US demands (officially we are against all expansions of settlements but they keep growing like mold, in fact all the growth is subsidized heavily by the government). Yet no President since Bush 1 has felt strong enough to put pressure on.
Right now the US should withhold any arms shipments until Israel agrees to acceptable rules of engagement AND sticks to them (or preferably a ceasefire but we are dealing with Hamas on the other side which is even worse).
A related point: We routinely and thoughtlessly consider Iran the enemy. But Iran's behavior, very bad as it is, is a direct consequence of US policy from the instatllation of the Shah to canceling the nuclear accord (tanks you, Trump!). Now we have zero influence on them and it's our fault not theirs.
And BTW: every nuclear expert agrees that nukes are useless in Israel's situation. Even Netanyahu would not use them and the Palestinians know that too presumably.
Obama tried abstaining from a Security Council vote. The blowback was fierce, he never tried again.
But... Netanyahu is so bad, and the US generational divide so deep, I expect Biden is the last Democratic president to unconditionally support Israel.
One reason why Biden hasn't put restrictions on aid to Israel is that Congress would override him in about 90 minutes.
Heh. Carthage is apt. And it's the only way. Brothers fighting in the same house that is their home - how else does this end? Annihilation or surrender* of both sides...
*the emotional, philosophical, material, and spiritual surrender of both sides – there's way too many dead kids to forget about and to seek revenge/justice for their little corpses.
I think there is what I would call a category error here. Egypt and Jordan are established states that could conclude peace treaties. The Palestinians have no such agency, and Israel is adamant on their not having one, whatever mouth music it has to play at the UN.
Israel is also adamant about colonization in the West Bank, and it allows settlers' land grabs and settler murders of Palestinians.
I think the more exact analogy here is to apartheid South Africa. The Israelis do have the capability of killing enough Palestinians to keep suppressing that population. The question is whether and how long the US is willing to tolerate this.
To a degree I feel like I am beating a dead horse, but this is such an embarrassingly bad column by Drum, which ignores most of what he would clearly know in any other contexts that there are so many important ways that he is wrong.
Even his fundamental lede is not just wrong, but the fact that it is wrong has been the defining feature of all successes in the 20th century. As I would think any American should know, we defeated Germany in World War I, but the French insisted on punitive end result that pretty much guaranteed there would be another war. (It did not guarantee that Germany would develop the most evil government in the history of the world on the way to that war. I don't mean to be defending Nazism by noting the short sighted nature of the French position after WW1). But the US learned from that mistake and after defeating Germany again in WWII we made a point of imposing peace. Germany still lost Alsace and Lorraine, but it was clearly given peace and we have seen 80 years of peace between the UK, France, and Germany (and the rest of Western Europe as well). That was something that seemed unthinkable. And the lesson I thought we had learned was that the way that wars end successfully is for the winning side to make sure that the end result is something that can reasonably be called peace. That is what differentiates successful peace from failed peace.
Israel took large pieces of territory in 1967, that can be justified. But as part of the lessons from the first WWI the world has established principles for making peace last. Israel ignored them to make peace impossible. And now peace seems impossible and people still say poor Israel, why can't they get peace?
Keeping millions of people stateless does not count as peace, even if a country is strong enough to limit the blowback it faces. Now to get to peace Israel would have to remove half a million settlers, every single one of them a violation of international law. And while many of those settlers are middle class and poor people who were given subsidies to move to settlements. A significant percentage of them are the kind of people who support the guy who murdered an Israeli prime minister because he was tentatively moving towards peace (while expanding settlements to make peace less likely).
The attempts to blame the Palestinians for this (or generically the Arabs) requires so much vacuousness in the description of the situation that it is depressing that somebody who is both smart and decent, like Drum, would engage in it to defend Israel, or perhaps just to distract from the fact that Israel is currently engaged in behavior in Gaza that could rise to the level of what Pol Pot did in Cambodia.
This terrible post is still up, eh?
The crusader states lasted 200 years. And the 1940s were but eighty years ago. A nation of 10 million surrounded by 370 million hostile people is unlikely to survive indefinitely.
I apologize for going off on a tangent here. Others have done so as well.
I think my main point is that, tragically, 80 years of war and loss, is not uncommon in human history.
The most geographically relevant example is, of course, the crusader states which lasted approximately 200 years. Others have mentioned Vietnam's history with China. Scotland and England, Wales and England, Ireland and England all have had centuries-long conflicts.
There are many other examples from around the world. Our gracious host's point is correct: as long as the losers in a long-running conflict don't give up, the conflict continues.
You could also say, more correctly, that as long as the winners do not allow dignity and basic human rights to the losers, the conflict continues.
I don’t see why the Palestinians have lost (according to this post). When US backing stops or is severely reduced, things could change fast. Israel would have to deal with its neighbors in a radically different way. All the suffering will make this awfully hard, but hopefully long lasting peace could be achieved. Both sides would have to acknowledge that the other side is not going anywhere.
Sure this is naive, I just think that the huge US backing of Israel has not helped the situation. It’s given the Israelis a sense of invulnerability - which is cracking.