Understanding Gaza — and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — through the analysis of John Mearsheimer

The realist scholar has been a rare voice of reason and moral clarity throughout the war.

John Mearsheimer is one of the world’s leading international relations scholars, and the most prominent representative of the realist school of international relations. He’s definitely one of the people who has most influenced my understanding of conflict and war. He has been a constant purveyor of invaluable insights into the Russia-Ukraine conflict, for example — since well before 2022.

A decade ago, he presciently foresaw that if the West insisted on bringing Ukraine into the Western sphere of influence, and especially into NATO, even if just de facto, the final outcome would be war. And since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he has been one of the fiercest challengers of the simplistic Western narrative about the war, systematically pointing out the shortfalls of the US-NATO strategy in Ukraine — and systematically being proven right.

But equally insightful, and inspirational, have been Mearsheimer’s reflections on the ongoing war in Gaza — and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more in general.

Mearsheimer has been a long-time critic of Israeli policy, and from the perspective of realist theory this is perfectly reasonable, as I explain in an upcoming article about realist theory and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 2007, Mearsheimer caused shockwaves with the publication of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, co-authored with Stephen Walt, in which the two scholars argued that America’s near-unconditional support for Israel over the years had caused lasting damage to the US national interest, and that this strategically self-defeating policy could be largely explained by the massive influence exercised in the US by the Israel lobby, which had “managed to divert US foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US and Israeli interests are essentially identical”.

However, Mearsheimer and Walt explained that US support for Israel was unjustified not only from a political-strategic perspective — but from a moral standpoint as well. Among the issues they cite (and here I’ll be quoting not from the book but from the original paper the book is based on):

Israel’s founding involved awful crimes against the Palestinians, which have never been redressed:

When political Zionism began in earnest in the late nineteenth century, there were only about 15,000 Jews in Palestine. In 1893, for example, the Arabs comprised roughly 95 percent of the population, and, though under Ottoman control, they had been in continuous possession of this territory for 1300 years. Even when Israel was founded, Jews were only about 35 percent of Palestine’s population and owned 7 percent of the land.

The mainstream Zionist leadership was not interested in establishing a bi-national state or accepting a permanent partition of Palestine. The Zionist leadership was sometimes willing to accept partition as a first step, but this was a tactical maneuver and not their real objective. As David Ben-Gurion put it in the summer of 1937, “After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine”.

This ambition did not change after 1937 or even after Israel was founded in 1947-48. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, “Zionist mainstream thought had always regarded a Jewish state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River as its ultimate goal. The vision of ‘Greater Israel’ as Zionism’s ultimate objective did not end with the 1948 war”.

To achieve this goal, the Zionists had to expel large numbers of Arabs from the territory that would eventually become Israel. There was simply no other way to accomplish their objective, as the Arabs were unlikely to give up their land voluntarily. Ben-Gurion saw the problem clearly, writing in 1941 that “it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion”. … This opportunity came in 1947-48, when Jewish forces drove up to 700,000 Palestinians into exile.

[T]he creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved explicit acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews. … [Before that, b]etween 1944 and 1947, several Zionist organizations used terrorist bombings to drive the British from Palestine and took the lives of many innocent civilians along the way. Israeli terrorists also murdered UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948, because they opposed his proposal to internationalize Jerusalem.

Nor were the perpetrators of these acts isolated extremists: the leaders of the murder plot were eventually granted amnesty by the Israeli government; one of them was elected to the Knesset.

Another terrorist leader, who approved Bernadotte’s murder but was not tried, was future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Indeed, Shamir openly argued that “neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat”. Rather, terrorism had “a great part to play… in our war against the occupier [Britain]”.

Israel has systematically denied the national aspirations of Palestinians:

Since [1967], Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. Prime Minister Golda Meir famously remarked that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, and even Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the 1993 Oslo accords, nonetheless opposed creating a full-fledged Palestinian state. Pressure from extremist violence and the growing Palestinian population has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from some of the Occupied Territories and to explore territorial compromise, but no Israeli government has been willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state of their own. Even Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David in July 2000 would only have given the Palestinians a disarmed and dismembered set of “Bantustans” under de facto Israeli control.

Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians:

Israeli personnel have tortured numerous Palestinian prisoners, systematically humiliated and inconvenienced Palestinian civilians, and used force indiscriminately against them on numerous occasions. During the first intifada (1987-91), for example, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protestors. The Swedish Save the Children organization estimated that “23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada”, with nearly one-third sustaining broken bones. It also estimated that “nearly one-third of the beaten children were aged ten and under”.

Israel’s response to the second intifada (2000-05) [was] even more violent, leading Haaretz to declare that “the IDF ... is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking”. …  A similar pattern can be seen in Israel’s response to … violence in Gaza and Lebanon.

Israel is not a liberal democracy:

The United States is a liberal democracy where people of any race, religion or ethnicity are supposed to enjoy equal rights. By contrast, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state, and whether a citizen is regarded as Jewish ordinarily depends on kinship (i.e., verifiable Jewish ancestry). Given the priority attached to Israel’s Jewish character (which explains its longstanding commitment to maintaining an unchallenged Jewish majority within its territory), it is not surprising that Israel’s 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a “neglectful and discriminatory” manner towards them.

Israel’s democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own. Israel controls the lives of about 3.8 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, while colonizing lands on which the Palestinians have long dwelt. Israel is formally democratic, but the millions of Palestinians that it controls are denied full political rights.

Mearsheimer reaffirmed many of these points in a 2009 article about the infamous Operation Cast Lead — a massive, 22-day military assault on the Gaza Strip, in which some 1,400 Gazans were killed:

The campaign in Gaza is said to have [two objectives: weakening Hamas and restoring Israel’s deterrent]. But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them. The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future.

This brutal policy is clearly reflected in Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War. Israel and its supporters claim that the IDF is going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, in some cases taking risks that put Israeli soldiers in jeopardy. Hardly. One reason to doubt these claims is that Israel refuses to allow reporters into the war zone: it does not want the world to see what its soldiers and bombs are doing inside Gaza. At the same time, Israel has launched a massive propaganda campaign to put a positive spin on the horror stories that do emerge.

The best evidence, however, that Israel is deliberately seeking to punish the broader population in Gaza is the death and destruction the IDF has wrought on that small piece of real estate.

In what Ehud Barak called “an all-out war against Hamas”, Israel has targeted a university, schools, mosques, homes, apartment buildings, government offices, and even ambulances. A senior Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, explained the logic behind Israel’s expansive target set: “There are many aspects of Hamas, and we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel”. In other words, everyone is a terrorist and everything is a legitimate target.

There is also little chance that people around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in Gaza. The destruction is just too obvious to miss, and too many people—especially in the Arab and Islamic world—care about the Palestinians’ fate. Moreover, discourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims. What is happening in Gaza will accelerate that changing picture of the conflict and long be seen as a dark stain on Israel’s reputation.

The bottom line is that no matter what happens on the battlefield, Israel cannot win its war in Gaza. In fact, it is pursuing a strategy—with lots of help from its so-called friends in the Diaspora—that is placing its long-term future at risk.

What I find so powerful about Mearsheimer’s viewpoint is his ability to combine hard-nosed strategic thinking with moral clarity. This has been especially true of his analysis of the unfolding tragedy in Gaza.

Speaking of the Hamas Oct. 7 attack, for example, Mearsheimer has insisted on the need to place the latter within the wider context of occupation. As he told Lex Friedman:

We have to understand what caused this, so that we can work to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s not like Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 because they’re a bunch of antisemites who hate Jews and want to kill Jews. This is not Nazi Germany. This is directly related to the occupation and to what was going on inside of Gaza.

“Most people understand that what provoked this was the way the Palestinians — especially the Palestinians in Gaza — have been treated for a long, long time”, he explained to Andrew Napolitano.

In this sense, it is clear for Mearsheimer that the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime isn’t just morally wrong, but is also the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

As long as the occupation persists, the Palestinians are going to resist. … This was a resistance move, they were resisting the Israeli occupation. … The notion that you can beat Palestinians into submissions is delusional. … Palestinians are not going to submit to Israeli domination of their life.

As for Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, it is telling that once again Mearsheimer, the hard-headed realist, has felt compelled to focus more on its moral dimension than on its political-strategic one. His first written intervention on the topic, on Dec. 12, was a simple denunciation of the “moral calamity” unfolding in Gaza — the unprecedented scale of the death and destruction wrought by Israel on the besieged enclave.

“I do not believe that anything I say about what is happening in Gaza will affect Israeli or American policy in that conflict”, Mearsheimer wrote. “But I want to be on record so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see that some Americans were on the right side of history”.

His more recent article — tellingly titled “Genocide in Gaza” — published on Jan. 4, is even more scathing in its moral assessment of Israel’s actions. The starting point for Mearsheimer’s reflection is the 84-page “application” that South Africa filed with the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza (which I have written about here).

Mearsheimer describes the document as “a superb description of what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is comprehensive, well-written, well-argued, and thoroughly documented”. Indeed, Mearsheimer goes on to explain that even though he initially had doubts, he now has come to the conclusion that Israel is in fact committing genocide in Gaza:

For the record, I believed Israel was guilty of serious war crimes—but not genocide—during the first two months of the war, even though there was growing evidence of what [Israeli historian Omar] Bartov has called “genocidal intent” on the part of Israeli leaders. But it became clear to me after the 24-30 November 2023 truce ended and Israel went back on the offensive, that Israeli leaders were in fact seeking to physically destroy a substantial portion of Gaza’s Palestinian population.

Here he discusses his change of mind with Glenn Greenwald:

While here he discusses South Africa’s genocide allegations with Andrew Napolitano:

In the same interview, Mearsheimer also reflects on the consequences of the US’s complicity in Israel’s criminal actions in Gaza:

In the Greenwald interview, Mearsheimer further makes a point that I have often made on these pages: that the physical destruction of Gaza, and the slaughter of a large number of Gazans, is ultimately aimed at driving all or most Palestinians out of Gaza — i.e., at ethnically cleansing the Strip. Here’s what he told Greenwald:

I think before Oct. 7, there was no question that most Israelis — certainly on the right and in the centre — understood that ethnically cleansing both the West Bank and Gaza would be good for Israel. Because Israel has a major problem — and that is that it is an apartheid state. … But it was hard to imagine doing that before Oct. 7. But once this war started out, [the Israelis] began to see an opportunity for ethnic cleansing. [They] saw this as an opportunity to do the ethnic cleansing and solve the apartheid problem. And I believe that is the principle reason they went after the civilian population at the start of the war. … And that was designed to drive out the Palestinians.

This is a tragedy for the Palestinians. But it’s a tragedy for Israel as well: not only are its actions tainting its international standing beyond repair, quickly reducing the country to the rank of pariah state, but they will also invite further retaliatory violence — from the Palestinians and from other regional actors as well, which is already happening.

Ultimately, Mearsheimer notes, a two-solution is the only way to secure Israel’s long-term security. The problem is that a two-state solution “has become almost impossible to conceive today” — not only because the current Israeli leadership openly rejects such a solution, but because there is no longer any territorial basis on which one could envision a viable Palestinian state: Gaza has been largely destroyed, while the West Bank has been colonised to such an extent that there is no contiguous territory left on which one could establish a state.

In the face of such an unspeakable tragedy, it’s not at all surprising that even an arch-realist like Mearsheimer has chosen, for now, to largely put aside strategic considerations and appeal, first and foremost, to basic human morality. What’s surprising is how many scholars and commentators in the West continue to remain silent about Gaza — or, even worse, to defend Israel’s actions. This only makes Mearsheimer’s brave stand all the more important.

Thank you for being a shining light in these dark times, Professor.

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Thomas Fazi

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