Why Israel Is Not Allowed to Win Wars

There are four fundamental principles underlying much of the West's technocratic view of war and peace, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Israeli flag in Israel (photo: Taylor Brandon/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written by Daniel Saunders who writes the newsletter, “The Beginning of Wisdom.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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So much has already been written about the ceasefire-for-hostages deal between Israel and Hamas.

I won’t go into detail about my thoughts except to say that, while I am of course glad to get some hostages home, I am worried about a deal that lets Hamas survive, regroup, import fresh leaders and fighters and, by their own admission, start this all over again in the future.

In return for this, Israel will not even see all the hostages returned. This is aside from the fact that I strongly suspect that most of the hostages will be coming back in shrouds; even if more are alive, Hamas will want to retain them as bargaining chips.

Some commentators are still wondering, or hoping, that the ceasefire deal is a ruse or a pay-off for some future American-backed Israeli move against Hamas or Iran, but I am not feeling hopeful about this either.

However, something that interests me, which I haven’t seen other people speak about, is why the West has been so keen on a deal like this for so long, really since the early days of the conflict. The deal is similar to that proposed by former U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration in the past and is now seemingly pressed forward by the incoming Donald Trump administration.

When Joe Biden was in office (but not in power), it’s hard to say who actually drew up and approved the deal, but this is the sort of thing that has long been pushed for in the capitals of Britain, France, and Canada too, to judge from their public rhetoric.

While Donald Trump’s motivation to shut down wars involving U.S. allies ASAP to appease the isolationists in his party seems fairly obvious, I want to look at why what I’ve referred to in the past as the technocrat class: the centre-Right, centre-Left, and further Left parties still holding power in many Western countries that have been pushing for a deal like this for a year or more and constantly undermining Israel’s attempts to win the war militarily.

These parties of the Left and centre are broadly globalist in terms of support for both global free trade and for international organisations, including NATO and especially the European Union and the United Nations (and all its subsidiary bodies, including the by-now notorious UNRWA). They avoid war and, when pressed, prefer to fight remotely, either funding local fighters or engaging in air and drone strikes rather than sending in troops.

Domestically, they tend to favour big government and high levels of state spending, funded by extremely high levels of government borrowing rather than high levels of taxation, partly to try to create more economic growth and partly because their middle class core constituencies wouldn’t stand being taxed more.

As a result of economic decline, they have become reliant on high levels of immigration, particularly from the developing world, including Islamic countries. This is necessary both for economic growth and to help fund welfare spending. They attempt to maintain social cohesion in the resulting “diverse” communities through multiculturalism, the doctrine that all cultures are equal and no (Western) culture has the right to impose itself even on those voluntarily coming to the country.

This is being maintained even as the Pakistani grooming gang scandal in the United Kingdom threatens to force open the debate on imported Islamic ideas about sexuality and sexual violence across the West.

I think there are four fundamental principles underlying the technocratic view of war and peace, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (which should probably be called the Israel-Iranian Proxy War at this stage) and some of these apply to other areas of policy too, hence my quick overview of technocratic domestic and immigration policy. These principles can be summarised as:

1. People are essentially good.

2. All cultures are equal.

3. The party that suffers more casualties is proportionately less culpable. (We might paraphrase Voltaire and say, “God is on the side of the heavy casualties.”)

4. War never achieves anything; only diplomacy can end a conflict.

The first principle, that people are essentially good, is, as Thomas Sowell¹ pointed out, the fundamental belief underlying “progressive” ideologies and separating them from conservative ones. It can be traced back to the Enlightenment, particularly to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Much hinges on this.

“Progressives” will argue against rooting out benefit fraud on the grounds that people are good and won’t defraud the system. They argue in favour of mass immigration by arguing that people are extremely law-abiding and would not come to a country just to claim benefits or to agitate against its culture.

They argue against lengthy penal sentences on the grounds that people are good and won’t reoffend if rehabilitated correctly. They argue in favour of defunding the police on the grounds that the police are more violent than the general public.

And so on.

If this belief was to be seriously challenged, “progressivism” as a whole would be in crisis. Hence, the need to maintain the idea that Gazans are basically good people, that they do not support Hamas, but are their victims just as much as Israelis, if not more so. So, if the IDF has killed many Hamas fighters and leaders — that’s it, the war is over, Hamas will never recover, because there is no pool of willing talent for them to draw new fighters and leaders from.

photo: Egor Lyfar/Unsplash

According to this viewpoint, people worldwide want the same things: peace and sufficient resources to support their families. Suspiciously, this supposedly global worldview is one compatible with the contemporary secular, individualistic West, despite the West being an outlier globally in its secularism and individualism.

It says nothing about religious goals and motivations (e.g. to attain the afterlife) or even communal ones (e.g. to enlarge a nation through military conquest or even to live in a society with a high level of social capital resulting from enforced ethnic and religious conformity). Instead, people just want individualistic and family benefits and pleasures only.

This brings us to the second principle, that all cultures are equal. Culture is barely even recognised by the technocrats and is really seen as an extension of the supposed individual worldview mentioned in the last paragraph. Just as individuals are seen to want peace and prosperity above all else, so are cultures. No more, no less.

The idea that different cultures have different worldviews, different values, and a different sense of right and wrong is alien to the technocratic mindset, and understandably so, because when they go to international conferences or even when they holiday, they do so with the technocratic elite of other countries, most of whom are multilingual, almost of whom are secular, none of whom are strongly nationalist or even patriotic, and so on. It’s like looking in the mirror constantly and believing that everyone in the world looks like you.

The idea that people from other Western countries, outside of the ruling elite, might think differently, let alone those from the developing world, does not occur to the technocrats.

When the technocrats say they value a “diverse” society, they mean that they want to live in a society where, on any given evening, they have a choice to eat at a Greek restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, an Indian restaurant, a Thai restaurant, or a Lebanese restaurant. They don’t mean that they want to be constantly presented with the radically different ideologies of ancient Greek philosophy, Confucianism (or Maoism), Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam — let alone to have to mediate between all these ideas in the political and social sphere.

The fraudulent and racist DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) framework championed by so-called “progressives” (photo: Quinn Dombrowski/Wikipedia)

Inasmuch as they recognise anything outside of postmodern Western values, it is in the form of trite little sayings used to bolster their pre-existing worldview, as with the much-quoted “African” saying: “It takes a village to raise a child.”

The next principle is, by this stage, the most obvious: Israel has constantly been criticised for the alleged number of Gazan casualties, generally by people who quote discredited Hamas figures (the “Gazan Ministry of Health”) and who fail to take into account the IDF’s tally of killed Gazan fighters.

Western leaders, from now-former U.S. President Joe Biden to French President Emmanuel Macron, to British prime ministers Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, have accused Israel of killing too many Gazan civilians, even on occasion appearing to accuse the IDF of systematic war crimes.

They have sometimes withheld arms sales. They have ignored the realities of urban warfare and the way Hamas operatives embed themselves in the civilian infrastructure of Gaza, including schools, hospitals, and UN infrastructure — a strategy described by Douglas J. Feith² not so much as a “human shield strategy” but as a “human sacrifice strategy” that causes mass civilian deaths on their own side to provoke international outrage against Israel.

If Hamas had fought a conventional war, they would have been wiped out months ago (and, of course, the Israeli hostages would not have been taken in the first place). If Israel’s supposed allies do this, is it any wonder millions of naïve or mendacious protestors and social media users repeat the lies?

Yet, if it is so obviously wrong, why do Western leaders continually say these things?

For one thing, military service has become a rare thing in the West (aside from Israel). While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still has the scars from being shot in the arm freeing hostages as an Israeli commando (and, of course, his beloved older brother Yonatan was killed in the famous Entebbe hostage-rescue operation), Biden, Macron, Sunak, Starmer, Justin Trudeau, and the rest have no military experience. Some of them come across as barely knowing one end of a gun from the other (which may explain why they constantly shoot themselves in the foot).

It is noteworthy that urban warfare veterans and experts like retired British Army officer Colonel Richard Kemp and retired U.S. Army officer Major John Spencer see the IDF’s strategy and efforts to avoid civilian casualties as not just as within the bounds of international law, but as exemplary, the “gold standard” that other Western armies will have to match.

To the technocrats, however, with their narrow worldview, context is nothing and sheer numbers are everything. They are, after all, bean-counters at heart. Even so, this fallacious viewpoint is reinforced by the final principle, that war cannot achieve anything and that only diplomacy can settle a conflict for good.

While it is true that diplomacy has an important role, particularly in preventing war, there have indeed been conflicts settled permanently by war. Ironically, the two wars that technocrats are most likely to pick as “just wars” to prove that they are not pacifists, the American Civil War and World War II, did just that.

The American Civil War ended slavery in the United States and, for all that the Reconstruction era failed to do since former slaves were reduced to second-class citizens, actual chattel slavery was never reintroduced.

Similarly, World War II permanently ended Nazism as a threat in Europe. The idea that diplomacy is the only way to end wars simply aggrandises the diplomats and politicians who put this view forward at the expense of those who risk and give their lives fighting for freedom and democracy. As a result, the technocrats are unable to notice the harsh realities of the world in which we live.

We can see throughout this analysis that it is the “harsh realities” of a world where people are often bad actors, cultures can be dedicated to war against the values the West holds dear, casualty levels are no sign of morality, and war is sometimes very necessary to resolve conflict — that the technocrat class cannot face, not least because of the threat of the collapse of their multicultural, increasingly Muslim countries if they do so.

photo: Nikolas Gannon/Unsplash

Douglas Murray³ has stated that Israel is the only country not allowed to win wars, and while it is tempting to attribute this to antisemitism, a more accurate cause is the fact that Israel is the only remaining Western country that has both the ability and the desire to win wars.

The U.S. and the United Kingdom have not really won a war since the Gulf War in the early 1990s, more than 30 years ago. Since then, although the U.S. and Britain have invaded countries, they have failed to build sustainable regimes and ongoing casualties from insurgencies have led to withdrawals and the return of the deposed governments or their replacement with governments that are just as brutal and anti-Western.

Even more limited interventions, like those in Syria and Libya, have not really achieved much and former U.S. President Barack Obama failed to follow through with his declared “red line” over chemical weapon use in Syria’s civil war, a sign of U.S. national weakness and decline that was surely noted in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang as much as in Damascus.

The West has let itself grow weak and the existence of a vigorous and successful Israeli army — able to demolish Hamas, push Hezbollah northwards, all but wipe out the leadership of both groups, chasten the Houthis, and establish air supremacy over Iran — is not just an embarrassment to the West, but is believed by the technocrats to be a destabilising influence on stable, globalised, rules-based technocratic world order they think they have created and maintained.

Except that this rules-based order is collapsing in the Middle East, in Ukraine, perhaps soon in Taiwan, and who knows where after that. Attacking Israel is a tactic, not a strategy, a way of (a) remaining in a dream-world where it is still 1993⁴ and (b) avoiding the day of reckoning with Islamic extremists inside the multicultural West, as well as anti-Western regimes outside it.

What the technocrats want above all is the diasporisation of Israel: the return of the Jews to the pathetic, weak, powerless, and fundamentally ignorable figures they were for so much of Jewish history and which, to a great extent, they have been shown to be in the Diaspora since October 7th.

This powerlessness has been shown even in the U.S. (where they were reputed to be political kingmakers) as well as in Canada, Britain, and Europe, where Jews have been assaulted verbally and physically and prevented from attending class on campus, where synagogues have been vandalised and marchers carrying antisemitic signs and calling for genocide have marched in broad daylight, with police protection, while Jews have been threatened with arrest for “provocatively” being Jewish in public.

What the West’s technocratic elite wants is to make Israel the Jew among the nations — despised, weak and pitiable — so that it will stop its “warmongering” and adopt the West’s “self-evident” four principles of international diplomacy and “make peace” with the Palestinians, who are assumed to be just waiting for a call from Jerusalem so that they can agree to a two-state solution.

Of course, as most Israelis realise, that would be suicide in the most literal sense. No Israeli government could submit to such diasporisation. Hence, the growing rift between Israel and its so-called “allies” in the West.

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1. A renowned American economist, economic historian, social philosopher, and political commentator, as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution

2. U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005

3. British neoconservative political commentator, cultural critic, and journalist

4. An arbitrary date, obviously, but my point is to suggest the hoped-for emerging post-Cold War order in the wake of the Gulf War and the Oslo Accords.