The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The (Much Extended) Agony of Israel and Gaza || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

I've avoided talking about the Israel and Gaza conflict as much a possible (given that there's no favorable outcomes for anyone involved), but some recent changes have forced my hand. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-much-extended-agony-of-israel-and-gaza

Hey, buddy, Peter Zine here, coming to you from the Via della Costa, which is the old Roman road that was used to transport everything through the Lugarian coast of Italy back in the day. Today is the 27th of May. You'll probably get this tomorrow. Anyway, today we're going to talk about something that has a rule of been avoiding, and that's the Gaza conflict. This is one of those intractable conflicts where there's really no version of it that goes well for anyone. And when I first addressed this issue back in November, shortly after the October attacks by Hamas into Israel, for those of you don't remember the specifics, basically we had several hundred to a few thousand. Um, low hanging. Um, Hamas fighters cross into Israel, kill over a thousand people, uh, engage in a pillage of raping and destruction and ultimately kidnapped, um,

a fair number of hostages, took them back to Gaza. Israel shortly thereafter launched an invasion of the Gaza Strip, where Hamas is based, launching what has now been a six-month conflict that has generated no end of bad press and horrors for everyone involved. There's no version of this that ends with a settlement. Israel has been deeply wounded and isn't going to stop. And Hamas has absolutely no problem sheltering behind. the civilian populations in Gaza and Israel is no problem targeting the

civilian population as part of an effort to get to Hamas so there's no there's no friendly outcome here and so I've been avoiding talking about it because when you have an intractable conflict like this all you have is the horror and both sides based on your point of view are doing horrible things so I've been avoided it can't anymore because we've had an unfortunate development that makes a situation worse. Over the last two to three months, Israel has been pushing steadily south,

basically purging the territories of Hamas fighters as they go. And the last reasonable estimate that I have seen suggests that somewhere upwards of two-thirds of Hamas fighters have been killed. So from a certain point of view, you know, if you get that number up to 100%, then the war is over, and we can get out of the next stage of reconstruction and figuring out what a post-Hamas Gaza looks like,

and that is absolutely the Israeli goal. What has most people occupied at the moment is that the people in Gaza, the civilians who have, has a little to do with Hamas as they can pull off, have been compressed into an ever smaller territory as the Israelis have gone section by section through the Gaza Strip,

to cleanse it of the fighters. As of about two weeks ago, we were anticipating something called the Rafah offensive. Rafah is the southern most major city in the Gaza Strip. And the hope, hope, hope was that we would be approaching the end game of this conflict. The idea is that all of Hamas has now been boxed into that section, and all Israel has to do is good. in there and root them out. Now the humanitarian side of this of course is atrocious because as you're

basically taking the most densely populated chunk of territory in the world and bit by bit removing the areas that civilians can go to, a humanitarian crisis has erupted. About 60, 65% of the housing stock in Gaza has been destroyed already. So what's left of people who were already living in what was basically a prison camp are now living in a compressed, zone, comprising less than a quarter of the land area. So just, you know, a humanitarian tragedy. We are already seeing famine at least on the scale of what went down in Venezuela two years ago and probably approaching what happened in Ethiopia in the 1980s.

Keep in mind that Gaza has nothing. They don't generate their own power. They can't grow their own food. There's no value-added manufacturing whatsoever. they basically subsist on eight. So that's where we were. And then, about 10 days ago, Israel announced that they were renewing an offensive in the northern part of Gaza, an area that supposedly they cleared months ago. Jabala, the refugee camp.

I don't know why they called a refugee camp. The whole place is a refugee camp. Was the specific spot. It's a place that used to be Hamas stronghold before the war began. And the Israelis have since completely. completed that assault. Now, so here's the problem. If this is an area that has already been cleansed,

there shouldn't be any Hamas fighters there at all. But what we're learning is that Israeli intelligence is not nearly as good under the current government as it should be. I mean, if there is any issue that Israel should be obsessed with, it's what's going on in the Palestinian territories because they're hard up against them. And it was a failure of intelligence of the current government that allowed the attacks of last October to,

occur. And now there's been a follow-up failure in that even in areas that have been cleansed, Hamas is still operating, suggesting that for the last six months of reading out of Hamas, the Israeli effort hasn't been nearly as effective as they thought. And in the last couple of days, we've gotten the results of this new Jabala offensive, and they found the bodies of some of the hostages. So it's not just that the Israelis missed these people as they were going through the first time they missed what was one of the primary warings was just getting their people back, which means we're entering to a new phase of the conflict where there is no end game. Israel under the current government seems to be incapable of fighting this war to what the Israelis

would consider a reasonable conclusion. And instead, they're getting dragged into a Afghan-style semi-urban campaign of just guerrilla suppression in an area that's roughly 1 8th, 1 9th, the size of Rhode Island, and has a population of about 3 million. This doesn't end without something very seriously cracking and breaking, and it is not clear to me at the moment what that might be. On the Palestinian side, Hamas has now the perfect recruitment system. They are in a land war of occupation on their home turf. There are 3 million people living in poverty and starvation. That is the perfect recruiting tool. and Hamas has been using it very aggressively and very successfully.

It would take a degree of PR incompetence to not be able to recruit in that environment. And on the Israeli side, the only way that this goes well for them is if they can break through this intelligence log chain and actually destroy Hamas faster than it can recruit. I don't think that's possible anymore unless you just kill everyone. And so that's very unfortunately the situation of the moment. and I don't see it improving any time soon. I would love, love to end this one on a little bit of a positive note, but what little hope that I had that this conflict was about to wrap up is now gone,

and we're looking at something far more intractable. Sorry.