I want to believe this is the case, but it's increasingly clear that the Israel government is trying for a genocide rather than any kind of military victory.
Like, haha, yes very cool that the IDF is constantly covering up its Ls on the front lines. But you've still got over 25k Palestinians dead combined with a hepatitis epidemic and rampant starvation in a population that's been forced into what amounts to an open air concentration camp. Small wonder they're resisting so fiercely. Small wonder we're seeing conflict break out all along the Israeli border, as sympathetic Arabs and insurgent Christians and Jews struggle to aid them.
But to say the Palestinians are "winning", you need to ignore the rapidly growing pile of bodies in Gaza. This continues to be a bloodbath, a nightmarish incineration of a primarily child-aged population, with the recognized end-game of fully eliminating the population in its entirety. Some mid-level anonymous official whining about how they can't dismantle an organization that's become a smear-label for any Palestinian alive and still resisting their extermination is just part and parcel with the genocidal rhetoric. When every living Gazan is counted as Hamas, these articles only exist to justify the role of Israeli storm troopers in butchering Palestinians wholesale.
Yes, the Palestinians, or more broadly the Axis of Resistance, are absolutely winning. Normalization between the comprador Arab countries and the Zionist entity has ceased. The Zionist entity is irreversibly divided and internally falling apart. Netanyahu has already been threatened with a military coup if he doesn't step down, and he has more or less been reduced to a paranoid wreck. The northern parts of occupied Palestine have practically been decolonized since the settlers there don't want to get owned by Hezbollah rockets. And this is not getting into Ansarallah destroying their economy by shooting at cargo ships headed for Zionist ports or Iraqi militia launching drones at Zionist bases. And with the recent strikes including strikes against a nuclear power, Iran is tying up loose ends and preparing for a direct confrontation.
National liberation struggles are costly for the colonized. Go look up the number of dead people the French murdered in Algeria and Vietnam before losing them for good. 25k dead is a small price to pay, and the Palestinians will almost certainly pay a much higher price before Israel is gone for good. But as it has been shown time and time again, all the bombs in the world can't do shit if you don't have boots on the ground to actually do the occupying.
You forgot to reference all the genocides that have succeeded though
Gaza and West Bank can easily be completely sieged compared to Algeria and Vietnam
No, the Palestinians have too many regional allies and means of getting military aid through tunnels. Those regional allies aren't just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts because they know that once Palestine falls, they'll be next on the chopping block.
An actual successful ethnic cleansing is something like Artsakh. Artsakh was completely isolated politically. They weren't even officially recognized or supported by Armenia, a country that has maneuvered itself into a geopolitical quagmire where the West doesn't really support them despite much pathetic West simping on their end and Russia/Iran don't really support them either. Armenia has no friends and despite this, Artsakh couldn't even rely on Armenia. That's how isolated Artsakh was. And once you factor in Azerbaijan being supported by Turkey, a NATO country, the ethnic cleansing was inevitable.
Colonizers' ideological belief in their own racial superiority leads to them underestimating their enemy and getting wrecked. Tale as old as time.
"dang it's crazy these people with nothing to lost are fighting so hard, who coulda thunk it?"
Love to see it.
The Israeli military leaders admit, according to the Times, that their advances have “been stymied by a Hamas infrastructure that was more sophisticated than Israeli intelligence officers previously assessed.”
Ah, yes, Hamas' many aircraft, tanks, satellites, and sophisticated eletronic surveillance systems have tipped the war in their favor.
Oh, wait. No, they just mean tunnels.
I really used to buy the propaganda that IDF was one of the strongest militaries in the world, especially with so much US aid, but these motherfuckers can't even handle some tunnels.
The thing is, no military in the world could win this war. Destroying a terrorist organization fighting on their home turf with military might simply doesn't work.
The US spent 20 years in Afghanistan. As soon as they gave up, the Taliban returned to power (not that they were ever fully out of power).
As early as October 8, people were saying that there was no way a full blown military offensive would end well for Israel.
Now, after 100 days, tens of thousands of deaths, loss of international standing, and a generational trauma that will harden anti-Israel sentiment among Palestinians for generations; Israel is realizing that their military aims are unachievable.
Even if Israel were to reverse course today, they cannot undo the damage they had done. Hamas was desperate in early October. Israel was normalizing relations with its neighboors. Palistinian rights were starting to enter the political mainstream. The corruption at the heart of Israel's right wing government was in the public consious. These were all existential threats to Hamas.
With a single attack, Hamas managed to remove these all. Israel is on the verge of a regional war. Its regional friendly-ish countries have been distanced. Palestinian rights are once again anti-semetic. The Israeli body politic has been pushed further to the right (although they are miraculously still blaming the particular right wing government that got them into this specific mess)
And suppose Israel does manage to defeat Hamas. What happens then? Is a friendly state supposed to rise out of the ashes? Or we will just see another anti-Israel terrorist group thrive in the exact same environment that fostered Hamas?
A lot of this makes sense, but I'm confused by this:
Palistinian rights were starting to enter the political mainstream
What leads you to say so?
If you think Palestinian rights was mainstream or in the public consciousness, particularly in Israel, you were severely misinformed about the situation. If anything, Palestinian rights had never been more ignored on the world stage. Israel had them in a slow chokehold, literally counting their calories, and there were absolutely no signs that that was ever going to stop. This is not even to mention the literally thousands of illegally detained and imprisoned Palestinians that Israel had.
The same goes for the corruption of the Israeli government. Their right-wing coalition had literally not been politically stronger, they were literally at the point of normalizing their relationship with Saudi Arabia, which regardless of whatever leadership crisis occured would have cemented right wing rule for the next decade at least.
Hamas had the choice between submitting to a slow death or doing what they had been elected all those years ago to do, fight for the rights of Palestinians and try to free the illegally detained Palestinians. Now everything is up in the air. Will they win? Idk. But they certainly aren't going to submit to a quiet forgotten death.
This strikes me as the IOF asking for more resources. They want to do more genocide so they're acting like they don't have enough white phosphorous to do the job.
