Israel’s ‘seeming victory’ could become a ‘decisive defeat’ as public opinion falls

Pentagon-funded think tank RAND says ‘seeming victory’ could become a ‘decisive defeat’ in Gaza when global ‘public opinion’ finally catches up to Israel.

Of course, the military think tank never actually calls what is happening in Gaza a genocide, or that Israel is committing war crime after war crime. The concern it has is with the bad PR Israel’s “kinetic operations” are generating and their “strategic” impact on Israel.

Kinetic warfare is defined as the deliberate use of — or credible threat to use — physical violence and/or physically disruptive actions to undermine security, damage confidence in democratic governance, and/or destabilise democratic society.

RAND, which works directly for the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Department of Homeland Security, in its commentary seemingly condemns Israel’s lack of engagement with counterinsurgency models that the US used in the Malayan Emergency, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It says:

Unlike their U.S. counterparts, the Israeli security establishment never embraced the population-centric counterinsurgency model. Indeed, some Israeli analysts were openly disdainful of it, partly because they believed that trying to win hearts and minds among the Palestinian population was impossible.

Oct. 7 only reinforced this long-standing belief. Polls taken a couple months after the terrorist attack showed that more than seven in 10 Palestinians surveyed supported the Hamas attack. And so Israel tried a different, far more kinetic, method in Gaza.

In RAND’s words, could the IDF have “stemmed some of the loss of international support” by embracing the “‘hearts and minds’ side of counterinsurgency”

Here is what RAND never says: maybe Palestinians don’t want their “hearts and minds” won by a settler colony. People will always oppose colonialism. Colonialism cannot be wished away with military jargon like “mow the lawn” or managed with counterinsurgency manuals. People want their freedom. Full stop.

Before October 2023, Israel Called It ‘Mowing the Lawn’

“Mowing the Lawn” or “Mowing the Grass” emerged in Israeli political culture around the turn of the century, according to a study, as the military-political strategy defined as regularly targeting Palestinian leadership, facilities, and infrastructure to control their growth like a lawnmower controls grass growth.

Even the New York Times (more aptly, the New York Crimes) pointed out in 2014 that “critics say the use of such terminology is dehumanizing to Palestinians and tends to minimize the toll on civilians as well as militants,” as Israeli officials were open about their aims with such tactics.

Yoav Galant said in a radio interview in 2014:

This sort of maintenance needs to be carried out from time to time, perhaps even more often

In RAND’s analysis, October 7 proved that “mowing the grass” never worked as Hamas couldn’t be “deterred, nor contained, nor appeased.” Hence, came Israel’s carpet bombing and bulldozers.

Not featured in RAND’s analysis: the barbarity, illegality, and utter lack of morality baked into the “mowing the grass” approach from the start. RAND is worried about whether the strategy worked or not.

Normalising Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency theory, or COIN in Pentagon-speak, is the military doctrine of fighting insurgency by winning over the population with ” a series of economic and political inducements.”

It assumes the problem is insurgency against the occupation, not the occupation. Further, it assumes that this problem can be solved by “economic and political inducements,” i.e., corruption, bribery, and propaganda.

Of course, the USA has a rich history of COIN. It has practiced this theory against Americans themselves, too.

J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI called it COINTELPRO. In 1967, the FBI quietly unleashed the covert surveillance operation targeting “subversive” civil rights groups and Black leaders. The objective, according to an FBI memo: to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralise” the Black freedom movement.

The UK has its own practitioners. Morgan McSweeney, until recently a key figure in Keir Starmer’s inner circle, learned the playbook well.

As Paul Holden’s The Fraud, serialised by the Canary, reveals, McSweeney used Labour Together funding to infiltrate Corbyn-supporting Facebook groups, trawling for posts to weaponise. He then fed the most damaging examples to friendly journalists at the Sunday Times.

Morgan McSweeney also told his fellow saboteurs, “kill the Canary before the Canary kills us“.

This is the awful truth about RAND’s commentary: it normalises colonialism in sterile military jargon, reducing questions of life, death, and freedom to matters of tactical efficiency. It treats Palestinians as “the population” to be managed, not a people demanding liberation.

Featured image via Aljazeera