Israel can't occupy like it used to

The devolution of Israel's military happened gradually but it has lost abilities it once had

Mao Zedong presented a staged model where a guerrilla army began with organization in safe and remote areas, building the ability to hold territory, then hit-and-run actions and raids, and finally engagement in conventional warfare to destroy the enemy’s army on the battlefield. Israel has been doing this in reverse: in 1967 it defeated the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies. But it could not defeat Hizbollah in 2006 and cannot defeat Hamas today. It once possessed the ability to occupy and hold territory and control populations. But in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank, Israeli warfare has devolved into an endless series of hit-and-run attacks on civilian targets, with the heavily armed Israeli army running away before their comparatively lightly armed opponents can catch them.

The gruesomeness of the hit-and-run attacks themselves, the revolting trophy photos that the Israeli army takes (e.g. posing in women’s lingerie, playing with the toys of dead children, blowing up houses and apartment blocks, etc.), the torture of thousands of Palestinian captives, by Israel’s imposed mass starvation on Gaza - these have obscured this reality. But beneath this stomach-turning surface is a cold military fact: the methods of occupation that Israel used for decades are unraveling.

In the 2007 book Hollow Land, Israeli academic Eyal Weizman analyzed what he called the “architecture of occupation”: the way Israel used the built environment to impose its will on the Palestinians. Befitting a book by an architect, Hollow Land is filled with drawings and photos of how the occupation worked from the early Zionist days until the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.

The work would begin with small settler outposts, defended by the army and the settlers themselves.

The outposts would grow into full fledged fortress settlements that commanded the heights and looked down on the native villages below.

The Israeli army forced the occupied people to accept these new realities. Palestinian movement from place to place was controlled by checkpoints. The big terminal at Qalandiya, for example:

Hollow Land also has a photo from the major checkpoint controlling people entering and exiting Gaza from Israel, Erez.

But the Erez terminal was destroyed on October 7 — mostly, like so much on that day and since, by Israeli airstrikes. The giant Israeli army that went into Gaza to destroy Hamas withdrew from Gaza City, then attacked Khan Younis, withdrew from there, threatened an invasion of Rafah for many months, invaded, and is in the process of being driven from there. The Israelis enlisted American help in building occupation infrastructure - the famous pier which took so long coming, floated into the sea, and then was rebuilt in time to commit a joint US-Israeli war crime of immense proportions in the Nusseirat refugee camp. They are trying to build a base along a road in central Gaza. But their base construction has come under constant mortar fire and soon, so will the American pier.

The Americans themselves have been forced into this way of fighting: they sailed into the Red Sea to engage in a little bit of classical gunboat diplomacy, to warn Yemen’s Ansarallah (the so-called Houthis) not to try to stop Israel’s genocide. They were roundly ignored, Ansrallah has not hesitated to engage the US navy directly with missiles, and the US has responded with aerial bombardment of civilian targets - hit-and-run.

There is no occupation if you cannot stay in one place, and Israel cannot stay in any one place in Gaza. They even have to return to the same hospitals again and again after destroying them because they can’t stay until the resistance comes for them.

That is Gaza, and Gaza is unique: Israel withdrew from there in 2005 (because the resistance made it impossible to maintain the occupation) and the resistance in Gaza has built an extensive infrastructure from which to fight the Israelis. But the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is devolving too. Yes, there are still checkpoints and settlements controlling the lives of Palestinians there. The occupation isn’t over in the West Bank. But Israeli operations in West Bank towns like Tubas, Tulkarem, Qalqilya, Nablus, and Jenin are raids: they go in heavy, besiege a house, fight gun battles with the resistance, have their bulldozers blown up by IEDs… and inevitably withdraw. And the duration of the raids seems to get shorter. Jenin had a raid a few weeks ago that was 48 hours long; the next one was 3 hours. In Tubas, the Israelis try to let their Palestinian Authority collaborators seize weapons and arrest resistance fighters on their behalf, so they can attack from a place of greater safety.

What explains this devolution from region-dominating conventional army to genocidal raider? The adaptations of the resistance have played the main role: their ability to defeat the ground forces of Israel render most of the occupation’s other infrastructural goals unachievable. Another factor: Israel slowly transformed its army into one that mainly staffs checkpoints and monitors electronic murder machines while serving as the institution responsible for socializing Jewish migrants and indoctrinating youths into Zionism.

But the arrogance of Zionist ideology and belief in racial superiority also played a role. Why train day and night to fight your racial inferior? Why risk death when you can kill by pressing a button? The Zionism of yesterday was stealing the land. The Zionism of today is killing from a distance. But stealing somebody’s land can only be done from up close. Too close, maybe, for illusions of racial superiority to hold up.