Israel has already lost the Gaza war. It just doesn't know it yet

Middle East Eye

16-05-2025

In the latest episode of the TV game show, "The White House on Uber: How to pre-purchase a US President", it appeared, fleetingly, as if the host was reading from the right script.
US President Donald Trump said in Saudi Arabia that liberal interventionism was a disaster. That's true. He said you can't break and remake nations. Post-Soviet Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen are each testimony to that.
He stopped bombing Yemen and reversed decades of sanctions on Syria, blocking in the process two of Israel's key routes to regional dominance: dividing Syria and starting a war with Iran.
I say fleetingly because - as Iran has been through this script many times before in negotiations over its nuclear programme - what a US president promises and what he delivers are two different things.
Not least of those to be blindsided by Trump's announcement halting Syria sanctions were his own officials in the US Treasury. It turns out that the cessation of the multi-layered sanctions piled on Syria since the US first put the country on its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1979 is not so easy, nor will it be rapid or comprehensive.
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There is the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which requires Congress to overturn it, although Trump could suspend parts of it for national security reasons. The sanctions themselves, a mix of executive orders and statutes, could take months to unwind. There is scope for more handbrake turns.
This particular episode of the show cost its sponsors, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, staggering sums of money, more than $3 trillion and counting, which is high even by the standards of the Gulf.
Deadly mission
There was $600bn from Saudi Arabia, $1.2 trillion worth of deals with Qatar, a personal 747 for use as president, a tower for Trump's son Eric in Dubai, and much more to come, including cryptocurrency deals with the Trump family firm World Liberty Financial.
The richest Arabs were competing with each other to lay tribute at the feet of Washington's latest emperor.
While this orgiastic display of wealth was taking place in Riyadh and Doha, Israel was marking the anniversary of the 1948 Nakba by killing as many Palestinians as it could in Gaza.
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Wednesday was one of the bloodiest days in Gaza since Israel's unilateral abandonment of the ceasefire. Nearly 100 people were killed. Bunker-busting bombs were dropped near the European hospital in Khan Younis, a strike aimed at Muhammad Sinwar, the de facto leader of Hamas in Gaza. His death has not been confirmed.
Like the assassination of the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Israel was targeting a key negotiator at a time when it was purporting to negotiate.
My sources tell me that just before Israel resumed its attacks on 18 March, the political leadership of Hamas abroad had accepted a deal with the Americans that would have led to more hostages being released in return for an extension of the ceasefire - but with no guarantee of an end to the war. But Sinwar rejected it, and accordingly, it did not go ahead.
The since-acknowledged futility of the US military campaign against the Viet Cong is mirrored and amplified by the Israeli military's attempts to wipe Hamas off the map
If indeed Sinwar is dead, it will take time to re-establish secure communications within Hamas with one of several men who could now step into his shoes.
His attempted or actual killing is proof, if any more is needed, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of bringing the remaining hostages home alive. A hostage deal needs Hamas forces to retain command and control. A guerrilla fight needs none.
Netanyahu's mission in Gaza, which is to starve and bomb as many of the 2.1 million Palestinians out of the enclave as he can, has become so clear, so obvious, that not even the misnamed international community can now ignore it.
Tom Fletcher, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told the Security Council: 'For those killed and those whose voices are silenced: what more evidence do you need now? Will you act, decisively, to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law?'
French President Emmanuel Macron called Israel's policy in Gaza 'shameful'. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called Israel a 'genocidal state' while speaking in parliament, noting that Madrid 'does not do business' with such a country.
Massive betrayal
But not one public word of condemnation about Israel's behaviour in Gaza was spoken to Trump from the lips of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, nor from UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed or Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani.
The charade in the Gulf was a massive betrayal for Palestinians, but as they know only too well, Arab rulers have a track record of abandoning them.
In the past, they waited a few decent months or years after a military defeat to do so. It took a while after the 1967 war for Arab leaders to talk about a peaceful solution for the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Today, they are abandoning the true heroes of the Arab world as they are being starved and bombed to death.
As Trump basks in Gulf Arab applause, Israel massacres children in Gaza Read More »
Hamas and Hezbollah have both been severely weakened, although I question whether the blows they have received are terminal. But Hamas is still fighting on the ground, as the underreported Israeli military death toll in Gaza continues to show. No single guard has given up their hostage to save their own life.
The spirit of resistance in Gaza has not been defeated. In fact, the parallels with another historic defeat of colonial forces, the French and the Americans, have only grown stronger.
In one sense, there is no comparison between Gaza and the Vietnam War. The force Israel uses today in Gaza dwarfs that used by John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson and Richard Nixon, the three US presidents whose terms were doomed by Vietnam.
In a span of eight years, the US dropped more than five million tonnes of bombs on Vietnam, making it the most bombed place on earth. By January of this year, Israel had dropped at least 100,000 tonnes of bombs on Gaza.
Put another way, the US dropped around 15 tonnes of explosives per square kilometre of Vietnam, while Israel has dropped 275 tonnes per square kilometre of Gaza - a figure that is higher by a factor of 18.
That being said, other points of comparison hit you between the eyes about a war that scars the US to this day and the current war in Gaza, which Netanyahu is set to deepen by attempting to reoccupy the territory permanently.
Crushing deja vu
The current generation of war watchers can only experience a crushing sense of deja vu when they watch the painstakingly complete account of the conflict in the new miniseries, Turning Point: The Vietnam War.
The since-acknowledged futility of the US military campaign against the Viet Cong is mirrored and amplified by the Israeli military's attempts to wipe Hamas off the map.
As US involvement in the Vietnam War expanded and Washington had to drop the pretence that more than 16,000 troops and pilots were 'advising' the South Vietnamese Army, it became clear to both Washington and Saigon that they were going to have to push the Viet Cong out of the countryside and regain government control of around 12,000 hamlets.
Probably nothing turned villagers in South Vietnam against the US and their own government in Saigon faster than the 'Strategic Hamlet Program' .
These were fortified settlements where villagers who had been turned out of their ancestral lands by US troops would be forced to resettle. In the jargon of the newsreel at the time, the villagers could start a new life purged of the communists.
As Thomas Bass, author of Vietnamerica: The War Comes Home, put it: 'You have these entire regions that would be declared a zone that was open for attack.'
Closely allied to this was another assumption of the US 'pacification' programme, the father of today's counterinsurgency. This was born out of the problems US soldiers had in distinguishing civilians from combatants. The solution lay in treating any Vietnamese encountered in a declared 'free-fire zone' as the enemy, and opening fire without referring up the chain of command.
One former US Marine said: 'We were taught that all the Vietnamese were free to leave and all the Vietnamese that stayed were part of the infrastructure of the Viet Cong. You just hunt for people and you kill them, and you can kill them however you want.'
Commanders were expected to come back with a high body count. All of those killed, women and children included, were treated as dead communists: 'I was told that if we killed 10 Vietnamese for every American, we would win,' another Vietnam vet said.
Villagers starved in their Viet-Cong-free encampments because they lost access to their paddy fields. The main aim, however, was not to feed them, but to clear the countryside. The result was that the villagers fled, and the Viet Cong came ever closer to the cities.
At one point, up to 70 percent of the villagers who volunteered to join the Viet Cong were women. Tran Thi Yen Ngoc from the National Liberation Front said: 'They called us the Viet Cong, but we were the liberation army. We were all comrades and considered ourselves one family. When one person fell, five to seven others stepped forward.'
'Terrible chaos'
There are two other similarities between today and 1968: the protests and vicious levels of repression on US campuses, and the extent to which the American and Israeli militaries felt they had to dehumanise their enemy before committing atrocities.
After the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which around 500 unarmed and innocent civilians were killed in the span of just a few hours, American commander General William Westmoreland said that life is cheap to the Vietnamese: 'The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a westerner.'
Israeli leaders go much further than Westmoreland did. They call Palestinians human animals.
Labelling legitimate criticism of the genocide as antisemitic won't work anymore. That bolt has already been fired
Indeed, all this history from decades ago sounds eerily pertinent to the present day in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
In an interview on 29 October 2023, only weeks into the war, Giora Eiland, a retired major general reserve, said Israel should not allow aid into the territory: 'The fact that we are breaking down in the face of humanitarian aid to Gaza is a serious mistake … Gaza must be completely destroyed: terrible chaos, severe humanitarian crisis, cries to heaven.'
He later reasoned: 'All of Gaza will starve, and when Gaza starves, then hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will be angry and annoyed. And hungry people, they are the ones who will bring about a coup against [Yahya] Sinwar, and that is the only thing that bothers him.'
Nothing of the sort happened, but Eiland's reasoning became known as the Generals' Plan, which was at first applied to northern Gaza, where 400,000 Palestinians remained.
The plan to empty northern Gaza failed, as hundreds of thousands of people streamed back to their homes during the recent ceasefire, even though there was nothing left of them.
One-way ticket
But the tactic of starving and clearing has found new life in Israel's current military operation, called 'Gideon's Chariots'. In what Netanyahu has repeatedly called the 'final stage' of the war, the plan is to force more than two million Palestinians into a new 'sterile area' around Rafah.
Palestinians will only be allowed entry after being checked by security forces. And it's a one-way ticket: they would never be able to return to their homes, which would be completely demolished.
'The [Israeli army], in cooperation with the Shin Bet [Israel's domestic security agency], will set up checkpoints on the main roads that will lead to the areas where the Gazan civilians will be housed in the Rafah area,' Ynet said.
Like Vietnam, Israel's war on Gaza is now a global war on resistance Read More »
Netanyahu said on Tuesday that he might accept a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, but would not commit to ending the war on the Palestinian enclave.
What Vietnam did for LBJ and Nixon, Gaza will do for Netanyahu and his successor as prime minister, probably Naftali Bennett. For Netanyahu is much more ill from cancer than he is publicly acknowledged to be, according to sources in Britain who see him regularly.
Two factors ended the Vietnam War, and with it more than a century of struggle to rid the country of a colonial master: the determination of the Vietnamese and public opinion in the US.
The same two factors will lead the Palestinian people to their own state: the determination of Palestinians to stay and die on their land, and public opinion in the West, which is already turning rapidly against Israel. Watch it carefully. It is seeping into the right and is firmly established on the left. Labelling legitimate criticism of the genocide as antisemitic won't work anymore. That bolt has already been fired.
It is both in Palestine and in the hearts and minds of the West - from which the Zionist project grew, and on which it is so dependent - that this war is being fought.
Israel may win each battle, as the Americans did in Vietnam, but it will lose the war.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.