11. Mearsheimer on Gaza: The Theory Vanishes

On Gaza, Mearsheimer's signature theory goes missing

Did you know that the Hamas terrorist attack of 7 October 2023, which Hamas calls the Al-Aqsa Flood after the mosque in Jerusalem—the worst anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust—was actually a prison break?

A desperate attempt to escape by Palestinians confined by Israel in horrible conditions in Gaza, in a veritable “open-air prison”?

This is the proposition that Professor Mearsheimer would have you believe, as he expressed in an interview for Turkish state TV posted to YouTube on 19 May 2024.

Here is what Mearsheimer said:

We’re talking about one state, which is Greater Israel, and we’re talking about the fact that inside of Greater Israel the Palestinians in Gaza are revolting against the Israelis. This is basically a prison break. What happened was that the Israelis in effect locked the Palestinians in Gaza in a giant open-air prison and they treated them horribly, and what happened on October 7^th is a prison break.

This interpretation of October 7 will strike most people as bizarre. It goes perilously close to mounting a defence of this murderous onslaught. After all, who would not sympathize with people imprisoned in horrible conditions trying to break out?

But then, Mearsheimer is a distinguished professor, supposedly a hard-headed proponent of the realist school of international relations, and many people are inclined to give credence to what such people say—undeservedly in some cases, with this being a particularly egregious example.

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that 7 October was, as Mearsheimer said, a prison break by desperate people. We have all over the years seen instances of prison breaks, including some mass breakouts, in news reports or fictional versions in movies.

Have you ever heard of a prison break, real or fictional, where the inmates, rather than making good their escape, stick around to viciously assault, torture, degrade, and kill as many people in the surrounding neighbourhoods as they can get their hands on?

To do so without discrimination, with victims ranging from the frail aged, including Holocaust survivors, to young children, including the mass murder of 364 people attending a peace-themed music festival? And who preserve for posterity the extremity of their brutality by videoing and live streaming it to their families and the world?

Even the Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their crimes against the Jews, not publicize and celebrate them (check out the translated transcript of the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 at which Nazi leaders endorsed the Final Solution, titled Secret Reich Matter).

Moreover they committed these atrocities in an area known to be popular with Israeli peace activists committed to reconciliation between Israel and Palestine, some of whom had gone out of their way to provide jobs and assistance to Gazans.

A prison break with escapees who, after kidnapping some of their victims, returned to the “prison”, dragging their terrified hostages along with them, where they are humiliated, abused, and assaulted by cheering crowds, before being incarcerated in appalling conditions?

Mearsheimer’s prison break characterization implies this attack was motivated by a desire to liberate the Gazan population from their horrible circumstances.

Seriously? What did the attackers imagine would eventuate after they carried out this attack on innocent Israeli civilians with such exuberantly sadistic brutality? Especially given the attack was directed against a nation with an overwhelming preponderance of conventional military power.

Could anyone in their wildest dreams imagine that anything good would befall the people of Gaza from this “prison break?”

Certainly not the planners and perpetrators who, notwithstanding their manifest evil, were clearly highly capable, rational and indeed innovative in the planning and execution of this attack. As described below, the design and construction of the subterranean infrastructure of war they constructed over seventeen years was massive and impressive, more akin to what a nation state could achieve than a terrorist organisation.

Hamas knew what they were doing, and what the consequences for the Palestinians they ruled would be. Yet Mearsheimer sheets the entire blame this humanitarian disaster to the Israelis. In his many commentaries on this conflict since 7 October 2023, you are hard put to find the slightest condemnation of Hamas’s conduct.

Indeed, his tone sometimes borders on the congratulatory as when he says, “what happens on October 7 is that Hamas attacks into Israel and I think it’s fair to say achieves a spectacular success.”

Spectacular success at kidnapping and mass murdering civilians!

And what about Mearsheimer’s description of Gaza before the Hamas attack as an “open-air prison”, which he thinks justifies calling the attack a prison break? Mearsheimer is not alone in using this phrase—it is a standard trope of the pro-Palestinian movement.

This refers to the imposition of a partial blockade on the territory by Israel, supported by Egypt, in September 2007. Mearsheimer does not even attempt to address why Israel took this action. It is as if it came out of thin air, motivated solely by malice.

Israel completely withdrew its military and civilian presence from Gaza in August-September 2005. This included the forcible removal of 9,000 Jewish residents living in 21 settlements by the government led by Ariel Sharon.

The Gazans were left to govern themselves. At the time, there was some cautious optimism about Gaza’s future. As a goodwill gesture, the Israelis facilitated the transfer to Palestinian ownership of an extensive infrastructure of high-tech greenhouses, that could have formed the basis of a flourishing horticultural industry. There was even speculation, given its favourable positioning on the Mediterranean coast, that Gaza could become another Dubai.

The earlier optimism died definitively with the complete takeover of the territory by Hamas following its success in the 2006 Palestinian elections and its violent expulsion of the rival Fatah organisation in June 2007. Some Fatah leaders were brutally executed, including a member of Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential guard hurled from the roof of a 15-story building.

Suddenly, Israel had on its border an entity controlled by a group that, from its inception until the present day, has been implacably committed to Israel’s destruction, and the systematic hunting down of its Jewish population, as stipulated in its genocidal founding Covenant of 1988.

In 2017 Hamas issued a “softer” version of the Covenant, for Western consumption, that nonetheless recommits to a sovereign, Islamic Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Moreover, Hamas spokesmen, whenever they are asked, vehemently insist that everything in the original Covenant remains applicable.

Hamas has never deviated from its genocidal goals, either in theory, or in practice. Since vacating Gaza in 2005, Israel has been subjected to continuous missile and mortar attacks from Gaza. They started within hours of the last Israeli soldier leaving the territory, and ramped up considerably after Hamas took over in June 2007.

In September 2007, after months of such attacks, the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert declared Gaza to be a “hostile territory” and implemented the partial blockade that Mearsheimer contends turned it into an open-air prison.

The ”blockade” consisted of restrictions designed to prevent the smuggling of weapons and materials, including dual-use items that could be used to manufacture rockets, explosives and other weapons and build tunnels, and to minimize the risk of terrorist activities within Israel. The limitations on movement did not prevent tens of thousands of Gazans crossing the border to work in Israel, subject to security checks.

At no stage was it a comprehensive blockade restricting the importation of food, medicines and other essential items. If you have any doubts about this check out these two “walking tour” videos of Gazan food markets and street scenes months before the 7 October attack.

Moreover, what was “open-air” about it, a term calling to mind photographs of the open pens holding POWs in the world wars and American civil war, with huge crowds of captives exposed to the elements? Gaza was a developed urban area, much like innumerable others around the world. What on earth are Mearsheimer, and the many others who mouth this claim, talking about?

Question for Professor Mearsheimer. As a realist who stresses the imperative for states to ensure their security and survival, what do you suggest Israel should have done faced with this problem, if not impose restrictions on the passage of goods and people across its border, to minimize security dangers?

Short answer: he has had nothing to say about this. He never even considers the matter. A little odd for a theorist who identifies state security and survival as rightfully the paramount concern of all nation states.

If not as a prison break, how should the October 7 attack be characterized?

It was a declaration of war. A war launched with explicit and openly declared genocidal intent, the first of many intended onslaughts against Israel with the ultimate goal of annihilating the Israeli state and systematically hunting down its Jewish population, as stipulated in article 7 of the Hamas Covenant. All the territory, “from the river to the sea”, would be made an Islamic waqf, a territory reserved for “future Muslim generations until Judgement Day.”

According to Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, the October 7 attack was “just a rehearsal.” Another leader declared the attack would be repeated “again and again” until Hamas’ ultimate goal of annihilating Israel is achieved. The tunnel system was designed to enable these attacks to be carried out on an ever-larger scale, with ever growing sophistication, with more and more powerful weapons provided by Hamas’s mentor Iran.

October 7 gives us a preview of what Hamas would do to the entire Jewish population of Israel, with aspirations of extending the slaughter to the wider world, were they ever to get the chance. Hamas wanted a war, and it got one, with all the terrible consequences that entails for the unfortunate people under its rule.

This is the entity that Professor Mearsheimer seems to think tried to carry out a prison break on October 7. To the contrary, Hamas are the jailers of the people of Gaza. After winning the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, it violently seized control of the strip in 2007 in a brutal civil war with its rival Fatah that ended with Fatah representatives being hurled from the top of tall buildings. There have been no elections since, and none are in prospect.

Hamas rules Gaza with an iron fist. Any glimmerings of dissent are dealt with ruthlessly. According to an Amnesty International report, Hamas has resorted to “strangling necks, abduction, torture and summary killings” of Palestinians it accuses of collaborating with Israel.

One such glimmering of dissent occurred in 2019, when a group of Gazan dissidents organized an event they called the We Want to Live demonstration. In an article for Newsweek magazine, one of the organisers Hamza Howidy (now safely out of Gaza) described the response from the Hamas rulers:

Our demonstration elicited an extreme reaction by Hamas. They violently cracked down on the protests and we were all arrested. I will never forget my first day in jail—walking up the steps listening to screams of my colleagues, most of them fellow students, who had been arrested before me. I was held under arrest for 21 days and subjected to various types of torture. I was beaten with batons and sprayed with cold water in the late winter night hours.

This is Hamas, the group that those in encampments on universities around the Western world who chant: “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” want to empower. A free Palestine? They must be kidding. A judenrein (Jew free) Palestine certainly, if Hamas were to succeed in its murderous project. This, rather than the delusional talk by Western leftists about a secular democracy in Palestine, is what would eventuate should Hamas and its allies prevail.

It is  multi-dimensional war, with the information domain of critical importance. By embedding its infrastructure within and beneath densely populated areas, Hamas turned the civilian population of Gaza into one vast human shield.

Unlike almost every state caught up in a war in recent history, Hamas has made absolutely no attempt to protect its civilian population. Its vast tunnel network is exclusively to protect its military forces and infrastructure. It makes no attempt to get civilians out of harm’s way. On the contrary, it urges their people to ignore warnings from the Israelis to evacuate certain areas, in some cases firing on those who choose to do so.

As far as Hamas is concerned, the more Palestinian civilian casualties the better, providing more graphic coverage of dead and mangled Palestinians to feed to Western media in its campaign to undermine global support for Israel.

John Spencer, one of the world’s leading experts on urban warfare, including the subterranean warfare employed by Hamas, contends talk of Hamas using human shields does not capture the enormity of what it does:

Hamas uses a human sacrifice strategy, not a human shield strategy. I can’t think of any other evil actor in military history who said and acted to get as many of their own population killed as possible to achieve their political goals.

A human sacrifice strategy!

Apparently, there is a saying in Iran, presumably from dissidents: “Israel needs its weapons to protect its people. And Hamas needs its people to protect its weapons.”

And yet despite this, support for Hamas’ genocidal and self-destructive war remains strong in Gaza, and even more so on the West Bank, if recent polls are to be believed. To account for this irrational and self-destructive attitude, it is worth bearing in mind that the median age in Gaza is eighteen, meaning that successive generations will have passed through the Gazan education system run by UNRWRA, many of whose staff have been implicated in social media groups supportive of the 7 October attack, with most of the remaining schools run directly by Hamas.

This education is imbued throughout with virulent, violent anti-Semitic indoctrination, even extending to courses like mathematics and physics. Mathematics exercises require pupils to count numbers of martyrs and suicide bombers; Newton’s Second Law is taught by asking pupils about the forces that influence an object fired from a slingshot at approaching soldiers.

Maps in geography lessons erase Israel and depict the Palestinian flag flying over all the territory from the river to the sea. The same goes for the West Bank schools run by the “moderate” Fatah, whose leaders also praised the Al-Aqsa Flood.

Just about all the terrorists who perpetrated October 7 are likely to have passed through this sinister system of indoctrination, in which martyrdom in the service of Jihad is hailed as the highest honour.

A system of “education”, in reality indoctrination, designed to produce successive generations of Jew-hating terrorists, funded and largely operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), a body that generally well-meaning Western progressives insist must continue to be funded.

So, if Israel was subjected to an act of war on October 7, how should it have reacted? Unlike Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that Mearsheimer defends, Israel is entitled under international law to respond militarily in virtue of the inherent right to self-defence expressed in Article 51 of the UN Charter.

For Israel, things look particularly threatening once you take in the larger picture. Hamas is one of three major non-state terrorist entities intent on its destruction. Hezbollah, with an estimated 150,000 missiles, has a much larger arsenal than Hamas, which it has begun to use. On 27 August 2024 the Israeli air force conducted a massive pre-emptive strike, involving around 100 aircraft to prevent an expected Hezbollah barrage in retaliation for the killing on 30 July of the Hezbollah military cheif Fuad Shukr. As of July 2024, up to 250,000 Israelis have had to evacuate their homes in northern and southern Israel.

Standing behind all these non-state entities is Iran, which has the same annihilatory intentions toward Israel as its proxies, and is likely to soon acquire nuclear weapons, perhaps with assistance from its allies in Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China. In 2015 Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei predicted “God willing, there will be nothing left of the Zionist regime in 25 years.”

Any major attempt to attack and destroy Hamas’s infrastructure of war is bound to result in substantial civilian deaths, and this is by design as far as Hamas is concerned.

The magnitude of this problem has been underscored by recent revelations of the scale, depth and sophistication of Hamas’s tunnel-based apparatus of war. In an article that appeared in the 6 June 2024 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, the political scientist Daphne Richemond-Barak, explores the implications of what Hamas has achieved in Gaza, with developments that:

… suggest that subterranean warfare might be best framed as a separate domain of war rather than a mere subset of land warfare … Hamas’s use of tunnels is so advanced that it more closely resembles how states use underground structures to protect command-and-control centers than what is typical for nonstate actors.

It is hard to imagine a more serious, and genuinely existential, threat to a nation state than what Israel is now facing. And the way Hamas has chosen to wage its campaign, with total disregard for the safety of the civilian population it rules, has presented Israel with the very definition of a wicked problem.

A wicked problem indeed. What does Mearsheimer, the prolific theorist and commentator on international relations, have to say about the situation the Israelis faced after the October 7 attack?

How might his theory, that he calls offensive realism, be applied to this case? Especially given that, in the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, it features centrally in just about everything he has to say about it.

Here is the strange thing. In his many commentaries on the Israel-Gaza conflict, there is an almost complete absence of references to offensive realism, or realism in general.

The theory vanishes!

The only time he mentions it is when specifically queried about it by his interlocutors in interviews or Q and A sessions. And when so prompted, he says his own theory, elaborated over four decades, has no relevance to the Israel Gaza war.

To see just how strange this is, it is worth briefly reviewing the main features of his theory—covered in more detail in earlier chapters—of how states behave, and should behave, in the international system, and how he applied it to the Ukraine war case.

The prime imperative for states, according to Mearsheimer, is to ensure their survival in a dangerous, uncertain and anarchic world. Such is the centrality of this strategic imperative that states should be prepared to subordinate moral considerations, if necessary to ensure their survival.

Drawing on this theoretical perspective, he defends Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine, thereby starting by far the largest and most destructive land war in Europe since 1945. He takes seriously Putin’s claim that NATO expansion, especially if extended to Ukraine, posed an “existential danger” to Russia comparable to weapons of mass destruction.

With respect to Ukraine, strategy—or at least Mearsheimer’s conception of it—is all. The morality of conduct, and certainly its compliance with international law and the norms of Just War Theory, count for very little. When it comes to Russia’s conduct, it is all about survival. What would you, or anyone else, not do to ensure survival?

However, when it comes to Israel, strategic imperatives vanish, despite the genuine existential threat faced by Israel. Morality—or rather false moralizing—is all he has to contribute. In all his many commentaries since 7 October, he never invokes any of the standard realist themes: balance of power, the paramount need for states to ensure their security and survival, the primacy of strategy over morality.

Instead, he supports just about every libel ever directed against Israel, including holding it alone responsible for the failure to achieve a two-state solution. He supports accusations of it being an apartheid state, an absurdity given that Israeli Arabs are able to vote, to stand for the Knesset, to sit on Israel’s Supreme Court—rights that do not exist in any other Middle Eastern nation.

Regarding Israel’s response to October 7, he endorses the most extreme and outrageous allegations, including the claim that Israel’s intention from the outset of its operations was to ethnically cleanse Gaza, He also backs the preposterous charge of genocide levelled by South Africa in the International Court of Justice.

It is all moral condemnation of Israel, without the slightest effort to address the all-to-real existential dangers it faces; nor does he offer any realist advice as to how Israel can or should handle the incredibly difficult problem it faces in ending the threat from Hamas while minimizing innocent civilian casualties. Mearsheimer’s theorizing vanishes into thin air.

On the rare occasion Mearsheimer is subjected to some forensic questioning about this inconsistency, he dissolves into complete incoherence and reality-denial. Check out the first ten minutes of this interview on the UnHerd magazine’s YouTube channel (hats off to Freddie Sayers, the interviewer).

More recently, Mearsheimer was given an opportunity to explain the applicability of realist theory during a very soft interview with Paul Salvatori on Turkish state television, the Erdogan regime in Turkey being a staunch supporter of Hamas. Unlike Freddie Sayers, Salvatori did not trouble Mearsheimer with any pernickety probing questions about inconsistencies in his position. He simply asked Mearsheimer to explain his theory, and its application to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Salvatori asked:

Perhaps we can start off with this view of offensive realism. Could you, for those who may not be familiar with it, explain what it is and how it might be manifested right now in Israel’s assault on Gaza.

To which Mearsheimer replied:

Well, I’m not sure that Israel’s assault on Gaza has much to do with realism … Now the reason it doesn’t apply to the Israeli-Palestinian case is we’re not talking about rival states; we’re talking about one state, which is Greater Israel, and we’re talking about the fact that inside of Greater Israel the Palestinians in Gaza are revolting against the Israelis.

Notice the framing, both of Salvatori’s question and Mearsheimer’s reply: “Israel’s assault on Gaza”, not “Israel’s response to Hamas’s murderous assault on it.” A very soft interview indeed.

It is very hard to follow Mearsheimer’s reasoning here. If, as the realists insist, survival is and ought to be the core concern of all states, why should it matter if the threatening entity is a state or a well-armed and highly motivated non-state actor, allied with other non-states, and backed by a soon-to-be nuclear armed state with the same intention?

Then things really float off to the Twilight Zone with his implication that Israel wants to hang on to Gaza and incorporate into “Greater Israel.” This is a recurring theme in Mearsheimer’s commentaries. During a talk for the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) in Brisbane in October 2023 he claims: “what the government in Israel wants is Greater Israel which includes the West Bank and Gaza.”

So, according to the professor, Israel really wanted to rule Gaza, to incorporate it into Greater Israel.” It is doubtful if that was ever the case. In the 1978 negotiations that led to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, Israel proposed transferring the territory back to Egypt, which Egypt rejected. In 1992, in the wake of the violent Second Intifada, which went from September 2000 to late 2005, resulting in the death of 1,400 Israelis and 5,000 Palestinians, an exasperated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin expressed the wish the place would just “sink into the Mediterranean Sea.”

Far from being intent on permanently occupying Gaza, Israel has tried to disengage from the territory. As noted above, the government of Ariel Sharon completely withdrew its civilian and military from the territory in August-September 2005. Israel’s only ongoing interest in Gaza was and is to prevent it becoming a base for attacks on itself. Hence its maintenance of perimeter controls over air and sea access, and the additional controls imposed in September 2007.

Having implicitly repudiated his own theory, at least as it concerns this issue, how does Mearsheimer respond when asked what he would recommend by way of a solution to the Israel-Palestine problem?

The only suggestion he offers is purely retrospective in nature: Israel should have agreed to a two-state solution. If it had only done that years ago, then maybe all these problems might not have arisen, Mearsheimer suggests.

One small problem with that: Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Jihad and like entities are not, and never have been, the slightest bit interested in any permanent two-state solution, or any other outcome in which Israel remains as a Jewish state. In the Hamas Covenant, the very idea of a negotiated outcome is dismissed.

Notwithstanding which, Mearsheimer blames Israel for the failure to achieve a two-state outcome. In the aforementioned talk to the CIS, Mearsheimer asserted that the failure to reach an agreed solution was due solely to Israeli intransigence and the failure of the United States to push Israel hard enough to accept one. This is what he said to the CIS audience:

As most of you I’m sure know what the United States has been interested in doing is creating a Palestinian state in the West bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem living next door to a Jewish state of Israel. We have failed, we’ve not been able to push the Israelis to accept that … Jimmy Carter understood this completely and put enormous pressure on Israel to accept a two-state solution, but we were incapable of doing that.

So according to Mearsheimer, the failure to achieve a two-state solution was basically down to Israel, and secondarily the US for not pushing Israel hard enough, and Arafat and the Palestinians were presumably blameless. This is just false. There have been at least four occasions when a two-state solution was on offer to the Palestinians, starting with the Peel Commission in the 1930s, the UN partition resolution in 1947, the Camp David negotiations in 2000, followed by the Clinton Parameters proposal in January 2001, and the Ehud Olmert proposal in 2008, all rejected by the Palestinian side.

Bill Clinton, who oversaw the 2000-1 negotiations, blamed Arafat for their failure. He described as “an aging leader who relishes his own sense of victimhood and seems incapable of making a final peace deal.” Nonetheless, thinks Mearsheimer, Arafat is blameless, and the “taproot” of Hamas’s behaviour is the failure to achieve a two-state solution, for which sole responsibility lies with the US and Israel.

To state the obvious: Hamas started this round of warfare, breaching a truce that had held since 7 August 2022. If Hamas had not started this war, there would have been no casualties, Israeli or Palestinian, civilian or military.

Every one of these unintended civilian deaths is a human tragedy, as are casualties among the actual combatants. That is why there is an overwhelming moral imperative to refrain from starting wars, except in the direst exigency, such as pre-emption, defined as “an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent.”

Such dire circumstances were not present when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October. Nor were they present when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Yet, in both cases, Mearsheimer has gone on the record defending the aggressor, the side that started the war. This is the only point of consistency in his assessments of the two conflicts.

Those who criticize the proportionality of Israel’s response need to bear in mind Hamas’ war aims when they pass judgement. Civilian deaths are an inevitable result of wars, even with the best will in the world by the protagonists. For any army governed by decent moral norms, they are an unintended consequence of military operations, often referred to by the anodyne term collateral damage.

This inevitability is accepted in international Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), also known as International Humanitarian Law, which permits attacks against military targets with the knowledge civilians are likely to be unintentionally killed, provided that the attack complies with the principle of proportionality, the requirement that the military goal sufficiently justifies the human cost.

The international legality of even genuinely pre-emptive wars is a matter of ongoing debate among legal scholars, with Article 51 of the UN Charter requiring, on its face, an actual rather than an imminent attack. Hamas and its allies launched an attack that unambiguously triggered Israel’s inherent right to self-defence recognized in the Charter.

Moreover, and this is the crucial point, it was an attack in which Israeli civilians were the intended target, rather than the inevitable unintended collateral casualties that are a feature of every war. In so doing, Hamas clearly violated the Genocide Convention that defines genocide as:

…any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

The Convention goes on to list five acts, the first being “killing members of the group.” A crucial requirement in the Convention is the existence of intent. By its actions on October 7, Hamas amply demonstrated intent, and a willingness to act on that intent.

Statements by Hamas leaders that this was just the first of many such attacks, indicated its intent to carry on its efforts with the ultimate goal of exterminating the Jews in Israel, and the Hamas Covenant makes clear an aspiration to extend this to the world. Hamas’s goal was no less than a second Holocaust. Yet it is Israel that is before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accused of genocide, notwithstanding the extensive measures it has taken to minimize collateral deaths in its Gaza campaign.

Moreover, Hamas not only meant to inflict maximal Israeli civilian casualties. In its war making it deliberately sets out to maximize the number of Palestinian civilian casualties when Israel inevitably responds to its aggression. This is the notorious “human shields” strategy pursued by Hamas in all its earlier military conflicts with Israel.

The cynical callousness of Hamas leaders, especially the Gazan leader Yahya Sinwar, towards Palestinian civilian casualties has been revealed in a Wall Street Journal article published in June 2024:

In dozens of messages—reviewed by The Wall Street Journal—that Sinwar has transmitted to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas compatriots outside Gaza and others, he’s shown a cold disregard for human life and made clear he believes Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas. The messages were shared by multiple people with differing views of Sinwar.

In one message to Hamas leaders in Doha, Sinwar cited civilian losses in national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France, saying, “these are necessary sacrifices.”

In an April 11 letter to Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh after three of Haniyeh’s adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike, Sinwar wrote that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”

Hamas spokesmen make little attempt to conceal or deny their use of civilians as human sacrifices, and their refusal to make the slightest attempt to protect them from the war they started. They readily concede that subterranean tunnel network it has built is solely to protect its terrorist troops and military assets, and to facilitate their movement around Gaza and across the border into Israel and Egypt.

Hamas has not built a single bomb shelter for civilian use. In an interview for Russian television, Hamas Political Bureau member Moussa Abu Marzouk stated that the tunnels are exclusively for protecting Hamas forces, insisting that the protection of civilians is a United Nations responsibility. In a recent editorial the Washington Post stated:

Hamas itself has consciously exposed noncombatants to danger by provoking Israel militarily — while protecting its own leaders and fighters in tunnels. (Hamas has apparently not thought to build shelters for civilians.) At least some of the dead in Gaza have likely been killed by the militants’ own errant rockets.

On multiple occasions, Hamas has ordered civilians to ignore IDF warnings of an impending attack and move out of the area. They did this when Israel began the ground offensive when Israel advised residents in northern Gaza to “evacuate south for your own safety” in advance of the ground invasion. Eyad al-Bozom, a spokesman for Hamas’ interior ministry, urged residents to “stay put in your homes and your places.”

During an earlier attempt to breach the Gaza border, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar stated that the group “decided to turn that which is most dear to us—the bodies of our women and children—into a dam blocking the collapse in Arab reality.” He reiterated this view in October 2023, saying:

the blood of the women, children and elderly … we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens us with resolve.

John Spencer is one of the world’s leading experts on urban warfare. He is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, and codirector of the MWI’s Urban Warfare Project. He sums up Israel’s dilemma this way:

Yet while the use of historical analogy may be tempting for armchair pundits, in the case of Israel's current war, the comparisons are often poorly cited, the data used inaccurate, and crucial context left out. Given the scale and context of an enemy purposely entrenched in densely populated urban areas, as well as the presence of tunnels, hostages, rockets, attackers that follow the laws of war while defenders purposely do not, and proximity between the frontlines and the home front, there is basically no historical comparison for this war.

For his part, Spencer credits Israel with having taken measures unprecedented in the history of warfare to minimize the civilian casualties that are the inevitable result of urban warfare in densely populated areas:

The truth is that Israel has painstakingly followed the laws of armed conflict and implemented many steps to prevent civilian casualties, despite enormous challenges. Israel's military faced over 30,000 Hamas militants in over 400 miles of defensive and offensive tunnels embedded in and under civilian areas, populations and protected sites such as hospitals, mosques, schools, and United Nations facilities across multiple cities.

According to UN estimates based on global data, in urban warfare the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties is typically nine to one. In the operations by the US and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, the civilian-to-combatant ratios were five and three to one respectively.

In Gaza, even accepting Hamas’s undoubtedly inflated figures of total casualties—recall how they blamed Israel for bombing the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital causing 500 deaths when in reality a misfired Hamas rocket hit the hospital carpark—the ratio is much lower, with the IDF and some Israeli analysts putting it as low as 1.1 to 1, and other sources putting at closer to 2.5 to 1. This is due to the extensive measures taken by the IDF to minimize collateral deaths, not least the systematic issuance of warnings before strikes and designation of safe escape routes. Spencer contends there is no precedent in the history of warfare for measures like being taken by one of the belligerents to protect the opposing side’s civilian population.

This is not to understate the tragedy of every single death of an innocent civilian. But the grim reality is that whenever a state or non-state party initiates a war, even with the best will in the world, there will be innocent casualties. Hamas knew this perfectly well. They intended it, as the basis for their information war in the world’s media. It is an integral part of their strategy. As Sinwar said to an Italian journalist: “We make the headlines only with blood. No blood, no news.”

Bear in mind that under international humanitarian law, specifically Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, civilian objects lose their protected status if used to make an effective contribution to military action.

Moreover, deliberately using civilians or civilian objects as human shields can constitute a war crime, with those responsible accountable under international law. Hamas has done just this on a historically unprecedented scale, making large numbers of civilian deaths inevitable notwithstanding Israel taking historically unprecedented precautions to minimize them.

Given which, the charge endorsed by Mearsheimer, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is false and grotesque. It is Hamas that committed genocide by indiscriminately and with maximal cruelty killing any Israeli they could get their hands on. Hamas has also committed a grave crime under international law with its human shield strategy displaying depraved indifference to the deaths and suffering of its own people.

With the above background in mind, let us return to the few observations Mearsheimer has made when questioned about the inconsistency of his approach to Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, on the one hand, and Israel’s response to Hamas’s aggression. Here is how he responded to questioning about this from Freddie Sayers of UnHerd magazine:

Sayers: I’m looking for a consistency of approach across these and…

Mearsheimer: I don’t have to provide a consistency of approach. I’m focussing on what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. I’m not comparing what happened in Gaza with what happened on October 7^th and what’s happened in Ukraine. Those are different issues.

Sayers: So, let’s get theoretical then because you’re so famous for this realist school and exactly what that means would be great to elucidate for our viewers. How does the realist principle apply to the Israel-Gaza conflict. I mean, could you say for example that Israel, if it’s going to act rationally in its own interests, needed to respond dramatically to the atrocities on October 7^th, and that could be seen as quite a realist response.

Mearsheimer: I’m not criticizing the Israelis for responding to what Hamas did on October 7^th. What I’m criticizing is how they responded. It made no sense militarily to launch a campaign where they’re basically massacring huge numbers of Palestinians and starving Palestinians.

As discussed above, the claims that the Israelis are going out arbitrarily massacring civilians and starving the population are libelous nonsense. Sayers presses him further:

Sayers: Had you been in charge, or had Israel been listening to your advice, what would you have recommended as a better response?

Mearsheimer: I think their response could have been much more selective … the emphasis should have been on going after Hamas not punishing the Palestinian population.

Sayers then gets to the crux of the matter.

Sayers: So, the reports of Hamas deliberately putting centres of operations in civilian centres, under hospitals etc, does that not complicate the idea that they could have done a surgical strike that they could have done a surgical strike that avoided any civilian casualties?

Mearsheimer: Well, there’s no question that Hamas is integrated in all sorts of ways into the civilian population. How could it be otherwise? I mean, Hamas is not going to build military bases far away from the civilian population so that they present the Israelis with a big fat target. What they have done is they have built tunnels underneath the ground all over Gaza which is a way of protecting themselves from Israeli bombing. It makes perfect sense from their point of view.

Precisely. It makes perfect sense from the point of view of an entity prepared to ruthlessly use its civilian population to shield its military forces and infrastructure.

Never mind that it is a gigantic breach of international law, including the Geneva conventions that prohibit this and rendering hospitals and the like unprotected by the prohibition on attacks on civilian sites.

With his reply, Mearsheimer has effectively endorsed Hamas’s human sacrifice strategy. Or, at the very least, he fails to condemn it. But then, at least in this he is consistent with his own theory, which deprecates international humanitarian law and the moral norms of just war theory if they conflict with strategy.

As should be apparent by this point, Mearsheimer applies entirely different criteria in his commentaries on the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas war. In the former case, he draws on his offensive realism theory to offer a justification for Putin’s blatant aggression, a war lacking a shred of legitimate justification, which has at the time of writing (June 2024), caused around ten times as many deaths as the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Mearsheimer never even mentions offensive realism in reference to Israel’s conduct, except when specifically asked about it by an interlocuter, as in the Turkish television interview cited above, when he dismisses his grand theory of international relations on grounds so thin as to be frankly preposterous.

He contends Russia’s aggression is justified, describing it as a defensive war prompted by a change in strategic circumstance that, according to Putin, posed an existential threat to Russia. Yet he ignores the terrible dilemma faced by Israel after it was attacked by an adversary openly committed to the annihilation of its state and the extermination of its population, and which wages war in a manner deliberately calculated to maximize suffering of its own civilians as Israel is compelled to respond.

Which brings us to another inconsistency in Mearsheimer’s treatment of the two wars. In response to a question following his lecture to the CIS in Sydney on 16 May 2024, Mearsheimer conceded that Israel’s nuclear arsenal, tiny compared to Russia’s, ensured it against existential threats:

I think there is no question that nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent, and I don’t think any country with nuclear weapons is going to disappear from the planet because another country attacks it. I think that no country would try to inflict a decisive defeat on Israel because it has nuclear weapons.

Has Mearsheimer heard of the 1973 Yom Kippur war?

If as Mearsheimer says, Israel is secure because it has a small nuclear stockpile, how come Russia, with its enormous nuclear arsenal, is existentially threatened, its survival put on the line, by NATO expansion? By acknowledging this, Mearsheimer has effectively demolished his defence of Russian aggression.

So, Israel should take comfort then? Not necessarily, and this issue highlights a key defect in Mearsheimer’s offensive realism theory: the idea that the way states behave is determined by structural features of the international system, with regime type having little bearing on what they decide to do.

Consider the following statement from Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former President of Iran, in a speech at Teheran University on 14 December 2001, concerning the potential consequences of a nuclear exchange between Israel and the Islamic world:

If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialist strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.

Not irrational? In his latest book How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer argues in favour of a presumption that state leaders will act rationally, responding to the imperatives of balance of power politics. What to make of a state led by people like Rafsanjani, who think it rational to embark on nuclear war? And bear in mind the US State Department considered Rafsanjani a moderate among Iran’s leaders.

Contrary to Mearsheimer’s theory, leaders of theocratic states do not behave just like any other national leader. With a focus on the next world, they can contemplate possibilities that strike others as insane.

Unlike Russia, Israel faces a coalition of enemies openly committed to its destruction. Unlike the ostensible NATO threat to Russia, Israel’s enemies have a track record of completely disregarding the lives and welfare of their own civilians as they pursue their destructive project against Israel, as with Hamas’s use of a human sacrifice strategy in the current conflict.

Unlike Russia, Israel is surrounded by a coalition of enemies willing and able to subject the state to co-ordinated attacks from multiple directions. Even short of nuclear weapons being used, this could potentially make Israel’s economy and national life unviable.

Given which, there are realistic scenarios, both non-nuclear and nuclear, that could threaten the survival of Israel. An analysis by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv university identifies five potentially existential threats that could emerge in the medium to long term.

On 30 January 2024 Mearsheimer gave a lecture titled War and International Politics (the general aspects of which are discussed in Chapter 3 of this article). Remarkably, the only reference to the Israel-Hamas war in this lecture, delivered four months into the conflict, is a single footnote that, echoing what Mearsheimer said to Turkish television, says:

The present conflict in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinians is not an interstate war, as the Palestinians do not have their own state. It is violent resistance to a belligerent occupation on the part of the Palestinians, coupled with a violent response by Israel. Nevertheless, that conflict threatens to escalate in ways that could lead to one or more inter-state wars in the region.

The disparities between Mearsheimer’s treatment of Russia and Israel as regards their respective conflicts is incoherent to the point of perversity. Russia launched a war against a neighbouring state that posed no threat to it and has pursued that war with total disregard to all decent norms. Israel was forced to respond to a monstrous act of war by an adversary intent on its destruction and that waged war with the aim of maximizing both Israeli and Palestinian civilian casualties.

Yet Mearsheimer defends Russia and condemns Israel. The only consistency is that Mearsheimer always manages to construct a reason to side with the aggressor, invoking “defensive war” in the one case and “prison break” in the other.

The tragedy of Gaza is that it did need not have been this way.

The decision to disengage from the territory in 2005 was highly contentious within the Israeli cabinet. Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s finance minister, was strongly opposed and resigned from the government over the issue.

In his letter of resignation, he stated:

I am not prepared to be a partner to a move which ignores reality and proceeds blindly toward turning the Gaza Strip into a base for Islamic terrorism which will threaten the state.

There were far more optimistic predictions, at the time. Omar Shaban, a lifelong resident of Gaza reflected in November 2023 on what Gaza was like before the turn of the century, and what it could have been:

For the past 20 years or more, the Gaza Strip has been seen by many around the world—particularly in the global north—as a place that exports hate and radicalism, its people mired in poverty, not a place where someone would want to live or even go.

I have lived in Gaza all those years, and I say that this image contradicts what Gaza has been, and especially what it could be. Prior to the turn of the century, Gaza was a tourist destination for international visitors, including hundreds of Israeli citizens who visited every weekend for its beautiful beaches and excellent restaurants. Gaza also used to export garments, textiles, furniture, strawberries, and flowers to Israel and Europe. During those years, the notion of making Gaza into “the Middle East’s Singapore” or “the Palestinian Dubai” felt very possible.

In the years since disengagement, Hamas has received huge amounts of aid from UN agencies, $4.5 billion between 2014-2020, as well as additional amounts from the Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Europe and the US. Most of the UN money was channelled through UNWRA, a specialized entity set up exclusively to aid Palestinian refugees. UNWRA has been discredited by support, in some cases active support, for Hamas terror attack on 7 October. Moreover, as the agency responsible for running many of Gaza’s schools, it has used this position to inculcate hatred for Israel and Jews.

Instead of realizing Gaza’s potential, and working to improve the living standards and economic opportunities of Gazans, Hamas has purloined a large proportion of aid money, supplemented by covert payments from Iran and others, to support its main purpose: making war against Israel, building its subterranean infrastructure of war.

What could Gaza be like if all these resources had instead been devoted to peaceful purposes? Ponder the lost opportunity to prove Netanyahu wrong and help build a level of trust that could have made a two-state solution tenable. Instead, Hamas has achieved the opposite, and a negotiated Palestinian state now seems more distant than ever.