For Americans like me, who’ve known their country at war only in the Middle East, one of the most interesting things about World War II is the lack of a postwar insurgency. After the Nazis and imperial Japanese surrendered, groups of disaffected soldiers did not lead violent campaigns to restore the defeated regimes (an end-of-war coup attempt in Japan failed rather quickly). The occupations of Germany and Japan were peaceful. Both countries became reliable American allies in short order. Hundreds of thousands of the defeated regimes’ erstwhile supporters––including senior officials, including war criminals––escaped serious punishment, rejoined society, and sometimes gained political influence. And still the peace was kept.
How did the populations that had supported and fought for the Axis regimes get moderated? It would be good to know, because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he wants to do in Gaza what the Allies did in Germany and Japan. Netanyahu wants to destroy Hamas and then to purge Gaza of whatever allowed Hamas to rule Palestinians and murder Israelis. Netanyahu wants deradicalization.
Netanyahu’s critics say what he proposes is impossible, because Hamas cannot be destroyed, because Hamas is an idea. This objection to Netanyahu––as the essayist James Wood wrote about much formalist criticism––is both obviously right and obviously wrong. Of course ideas cannot be destroyed. Ideas are abstract. One might as well try to destroy the number 3.
But politically speaking, ideas can certainly be destroyed, just as they can be weakened, or die peacefully, or be resurrected. Imperialism was destroyed in Japan. Baathism was destroyed in Iraq. Communism died (without war) in Russia. Nazism was destroyed in Germany.
Hamas’s bellicose Islamism might––might––be destroyed in Gaza. Not necessarily because Gazans stop believing, deep down, that Hamas has noble ideals. Rather, because Hamas’s ideals are deprived of the instruments of political power––armed militants, and popular support for armed militants. Such things have happened before; they could happen again.
World War II cases are good laboratories in which to see how it’s done.
First, for ideological reasons: Paul Berman argued persuasively in his 2003 classic Terror and Liberalism that both 20th century totalitarianism and Hamas-style Islamism are death cults dedicated to the glory of peoples long repressed by outside forces (Berman was mainly interested in communism and fascism, though it seems his analysis applies to late imperial Japan as well).
Second, for domestic political reasons: the Japanese imperialists, the Nazis, and Hamas all benefited from popular legitimacy when their wars began. The latter two had even won elections, and Hamas was more popular in Gaza two months into the current war than it was beforehand.
Lastly, for military reasons: the imperial ambitions of Germany and Japan were defeated on the battlefield and discredited on the home front. Millions of German and Japanese civilians, especially in cities, were put out of their homes by Allied airpower. Today, Hamas’s command structure is largely disabled and half of its fighters are dead. Gaza, which is very urban, has been devastated by eleven months of bombing, artillery, and demolition, and most Gazans are displaced.
What the Allies did physically to Germany and Japan was astounding. So is what Israel has done to Gaza since October 7th of last year. Many analyses of the Gaza war focus on the civilian death count. As far as it goes, this is not objectionable. Wartime civilian deaths should always be lamented, whether or not the civilians are subjects of the regimes that started the war. And I will say something later about the morality of military methods that kill large numbers of people.
But the effect of such methods on those who survive also deserves our attention. Military losses and urban destruction can improve political cultures. Populations can abandon the aims that motivated them very recently to support aggressive wars and the regimes that start them. Deradicalization need not wait until the proverbial ‘day after.’ It begins earlier, as civilians are persuaded of the futility and costliness of the aims of those who rule them.
Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich and the Japanese-led Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere died in military defeats. By war’s end, Germany had lost the four million kilometers of territory it controlled at its wartime zenith. Over three million German soldiers had been killed. Tens of thousands of airplanes and tanks had been put out of commission. When Germany surrendered, the Wehrmacht still had thousands of men officially under arms, but they were no longer coordinated, and were often too young, too old, too poorly-equipped, or too poorly-trained to fight a conventional war well.
Japanese losses in World War II were not as bad as Nazi ones. Japan’s home islands were free of Allied troops when the imperial government surrendered, and hundreds of thousands of troops remained in Japan proper and in Japan’s Asian colonies. But more than two million Japanese soldiers had been killed by war’s end, the Japanese navy had been disabled, Japan’s merchant marine could no longer supply Japan’s import-dependent economy, and Japan’s key island possessions had been conquered.
The German and Japanese surrenders officially ended the imperial programs of the wartime regimes. But these programs not only died; they have stayed dead since. The wars changed the Axis countries politically. Violent crime was bad in Germany and Japan right after the war––people were hungry and it took time to reimpose civil order. But neither Allied occupation had to contend with serious political violence or even serious peaceful campaigns to restore the Axis regimes.
A post-Hitler Nazi party or insurgency likely wouldn’t have found the needed popular support (and the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for Japan). For the German and Japanese peoples hadn’t suffered military defeat only in terms of body bags from the front and low rations. They had lost their homes, their streets, their comfort, and their civilian relatives to urban destruction brought on by their regimes’ failed wars. Military defeats showed the Axis projects to be futile. Bombing made the projects costly for Axis civilians. At war’s end, they complied peacefully with Allied occupations and then formed governments friendly to Allied governments. In great measure, the German and Japanese peoples were deradicalized by the war itself.
The mechanics of wartime deradicalization seem to be as follows. Civilians who are promised safety and glory see that the regime they once supported, whether from hope or from fear, cannot provide either. Official propaganda about eventual victory is belied by the lived experience of bombing: deprivation and homelessness and horrendous noise. Civilians may continue to go to work––thus supporting their regime’s industrial base––but their attention increasingly turns to immediate material needs. They care less about political matters. They just want the war to stop. As it becomes clear that the demise of the regime ruling them is a condition of peace, they comply with an alternative.
An early, albeit partial, instance of wartime deradicalization was the British Royal Air Force’s destruction of Hamburg. During the last week of July 1943, the RAF killed over forty thousand people, destroying a third of the homes and much of the industry. The material destruction had political results. The Nazi writ within Hamburg was, for a time, weakened. The survivors’ desire to avoid death and get food and shelter repressed all other instincts, including the instinctive deference to authorities in a police state. “The powerful and their officials had partly vanished from the face of the earth,” wrote the German writer Hans Erich Nossack in The End, his short memoir of the bombing. “But wherever they still led a spurious and, as it were, tolerated existence, they would yield as soon as someone bristled in protest.”
Hamburg was an early proof of a concept that British officials had formulated a few years earlier: that German morale might be severely impaired from the sky. This view was adopted by Allied civilian and military leaders throughout the war. It was vindicated not only in Germany but in Japan. To be sure, neither Axis regime was defeated by aerial bombing of cities. German industrial production actually increased during much of 1944, even as Allied military advances were putting German victory out of reach. Military historian Robert Pape argues persuasively in Bombing to Win that Japan’s maritime losses were far more important to the Japanese surrender than aerial destruction. Nor did bombed-out German or Japanese civilians rebel and demand surrender.
What bombing did was persuade civilians that their regime’s aims could not be pursued at a price acceptable to them. Axis military losses were accompanied by weakened standing at home, easing the way for peaceful occupations, and making a postwar Axis recrudescence a political loser among the very civilians it would’ve relied upon for political success.
It’s important to note that an adversary’s political culture can be altered in wartime even after the chances for the adversary’s military success are negligible. The worst period of air raids against Germany was the early months of 1945, when it was fairly clear the Allies would win. But it was only on March 2, 1945, two months before surrender, that Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels notes in his diary that criticism directed “at the Fuhrer personally” had begun to appear in letters to Berlin. Goebbels, who benefited from a Reich-wide intelligence network, sensed the airborne reason for the criticism. The German-Jewish writer Victor Klemperer quotes Goebbels’ broadcast to the Reich that same day: “We are strained to the utmost, the terror attacks have become almost unbearable––but we must stay the course.” Privately, Goebbels was not sanguine about the Reich’s chances. Two days after the broadcast, his diary extenuated the welcome German civilians were giving to allied soldiers on the western front: “these people have been totally worn down by the air war.”
Similar entries appear throughout Goebbels’ diary in the war’s final months, and the Allied Strategic Bombing Survey provided more general postwar evidence for Goebbels’ wartime diagnosis. The Allies were curious about the effects of their air campaigns on the German war effort. While the material effects of urban destruction to the Allied war effort were not what the Allies hoped, the political gains were substantial. The theme of hundreds of interviews was the elimination of Germans’ “faith in the prospect of victory, in their leaders and in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected … If they had been at liberty to vote themselves out of the war, they would have done so well before the final surrender.”
Like German cities, the Japanese home islands were subjected to near-constant bombing during the last months of the war. As in Germany, the worst bombing occurred after Japan’s military position was fairly hopeless. Japanese air defenses failed to stop American bombers from making 30% of the urban population homeless and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. In his surrender speech to his subjects, Emperor Hirohito deplored the American use of “cruel bombs” against civilians, a reference to the nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. But the postwar American Strategic Bombing Survey found that conventional bombing––experienced by more Japanese, more cumulatively destructive––had done enormous work to reduce morale even before Hiroshima. Two-thirds of Japanese thought by late summer that their country could not win the war––over half of those attributed their hopelessness to the destruction of Japanese cities, and 43% said the cessation of air raids was the best part of their postwar circumstances. In his comprehensive history of postwar Japan, Embracing Defeat, historian John Dower describes the political effects of the destruction observed by American occupation authorities: they “encountered a populace sick of war, contemptuous of the militarists who had led them to disaster, and all but overwhelmed by the difficulties of their present circumstances in a ruined land.” Early American visitors to Japan noted the peaceability of a population previously led very recently, by myths of racial supremacy and imperial dreams, into a brutal war in east Asia. The foreign service officer detailed as the political advisor to the American occupation authorities observes the following about his first five months in Japan: “these sentiments were confirmed over and over … ‘no deploring the surrender; no castigating the American enemy.’” The enemy was simply “too strong to resist” (emphasis mine).
Skeptics about the political utility of bombing note that bombed-out populations pretty much never rebel against their regimes. In Bombing to Win, Robert Pape writes (quoting the Strategic Bombing Survey) that “far from generating collective action against the government, bombing made people ‘more and more obsessed with finding individual solutions to their own severe and urgent personal problems.’” Dr. Fred Iklé, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy during the Reagan Administration (among other distinctions), writes in a related vein in his excellent monograph The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction. Iklé notes that civilians in wartime are poorly organized for the kinds of collective political action that the Allies hoped to induce; wartime governments are often secluded and occupied by other matters, and so less susceptible to popular influence than they are in peacetime.
But depriving civilians of their collective, political consciousness has political uses all its own. Any regime (or terror group) will have a core of fighters and supporters that will loyally carry on the struggle no matter what. But for many others, the desire to feed one’s family, find shelter, and sleep can overwhelm erstwhile support for the regime and its cause. These others may well be the majority of the population, and detachment from collective political concerns is precisely what will moderate them. The population’s compliance can then be won by a new regime that satisfies their immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies, even if compliance amounted, in the famous words of Hirohito’s surrender speech, to “enduring the unendurable and suffering the insufferable.”
Applying these lessons to the Gaza war can be difficult, because popular empirical pictures of Israeli operations are always muddied by sympathy for (contradictory) Palestinian interpretations of the conflict. Every Israeli military operation is now described both as a new form of brutality and as just the latest episode in a century of brutality. But while the standard moral analyses of Israeli actions are mistaken, the current war in Gaza is indeed new in the history of Israel’s conflict with Palestinians.
From after its victory in the Six Day War of June 1967 until October 6th, 2023, Israel conducted a frequently interrupted though never abandoned counterinsurgency against Palestinian militants in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel’s aims were always limited to reducing terrorism. Palestinian politics generally was neglected, to say nothing of Palestinian culture and other “root causes” of Palestinian terrorism.
Since October 7th of last year, Israel has undertaken something it has never tried before: a war of Palestinian regime change. Israel is doing a remarkable job given its political constraints. As of this writing, Hamas’s Gaza leadership is hiding or dead. The majority of Hamas battalions, including in the southernmost city of Rafah, have disintegrated into gangs loosely coordinated by higher-ups. More than 17,000 militants fighters have been killed––an absolute number and a proportion of Hamas’s fighting force never matched in previous Israeli operations.
No Palestinian enclave has ever been in worse physical shape. More than 20,000 Gazan civilians have been reported killed (the oft-cited statistics about Gaza’s war dead, about 40,000 as of this writing, include militants). During the brief 1967 war, in which Israel captured the West Bank from the occupying Jordanians, few buildings suffered damage. In 2014, during the most extensive of previous Israeli operations in Gaza, fewer than 7,000 buildings were destroyed.
The United Nations Satellite Center has tracked the destruction of Gaza’s buildings during the current war. No part of the strip has been untouched by Israel’s campaign of aerial and ground-based demolition proceeding, during eleven months, from north Gaza, down through Gaza city and Khan Yunis, and most recently into Rafah, on the Egyptian border. As of early July, more than 100,000 buildings have sustained at least moderate damage, including nearly 46,000 that have been fully destroyed. Things have no doubt gotten noticeably worse in the intervening two months.
Hamas’s military defeats and the ongoing destruction of the strip’s buildings have been been accompanied by a decline in political standing. This did not happen immediately. Two months into the war, only northern Gaza had sustained heavy damage, political pressure had begun to build on Israel to stop, and it looked like Hamas might survive as the strip’s predominant power. According to the much-cited Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), a larger percentage of Gazans supported Hamas, in December 2023, than did so just before the war, in September 2023.
But Hamas’s standing in Gaza had declined quite a bit by March, after the bombing campaign had substantially damaged all parts of the strip north of Rafah, to which Hamas’s few remaining organized battalions had retreated. This change was originally not registered in the March PCPSR poll; according to documents recently released by the Israeli Defense Forces, Hamas defrauded the PCPSR into inflating its standing in Gaza. The un-doctored PCPSR results show that from December 2023 to March 2024, Gazans’ support of the October 7th attack declined from 57% to 31%; support for Hamas declined from 42% to 25%; and satisfaction with Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar declined from 52% to 22%. Perhaps most encouragingly of all, support for armed resistance declined from an absolute majority of 56% to 28%. By March, more than two-thirds of Gazans favored either political negotiations or non-violent resistance to Israel to achieve Palestinian aims.
Hamas’s tampering with the March PCPSR poll suggests that the group’s June poll––which was pretty bullish on Hamas––is not to be trusted. But two other polling services (whose results do not appear to have been tampered with by Hamas), Arab World for Research and Development and the Palestinian Institute for Social and Economic Progress, put Gazan support for Hamas’s postwar governance in the single digits as of early summer, when Israel had commenced with the main part of its bombing and ground invasion of Rafah.
It is instructive to compare the sentiments of Gaza Palestinians with those of West Bank Palestinians, whom Hamas has never ruled. Across all three Palestinian polling services, Hamas and its leaders and policies––for instance, the October 7th massacre––are routinely between ten to thirty percentage points more popular among West Bank Palestinians than they are among Gazans. What accounts for this intriguing difference? It cannot be Hamas’s military position, for that is the same no matter where you live. The likeliest factor is the effects of Hamas’s policies on Palestinians. West Bank support for Hamas should be understood as a luxury belief, far more popular among those Palestinians who live free from the costs of Hamas’s decisions.
Of course, there is more to measuring morale than polls. Anyone who reads the coverage of daily life in Gaza is familiar with the desperate lassitude pervading the strip. Gazans have moved around for months, with only what they can carry, from home, to cousins, to tent camps, to the streets. They are exhausted from the carnage and the noise. While Israel has permitted an enormous amount of aid to enter the strip, Hamas steals much of it. Retreating Nazi soldiers likewise competed, sometimes violently, for food with German civilians. Like the Nazis and like the Japanese imperial government, Hamas ran a police state, in which dissent was highly risky and severely punished. But for months, it’s been common for major Western outlets to print harsh criticisms of Hamas from Palestinians still in Gaza. Palestinians know that it is Israeli airstrikes that have killed their family members. But perhaps because they are sick of Hamas’s attempts to profit politically from their deaths, many Palestinians are now declaring that Hamas is to blame for the desolation of Gaza. Such declarations are the beginning of political wisdom, a sign that Palestinians may abandon the militants who’ve ruined their lives.
In the hopes of keeping the discussion empirical, I have bracketed the normative questions raised by destroying an adversary’s cities, preferring to focus on the political effects of such destruction. Some of these normative questions are difficult, but some of them are not. Indiscriminate killing of civilians is always morally wrong. The evidence suggests the Allies were sometimes guilty of such killing, including in the nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But the Israelis have not only refrained from killing civilians on purpose––they have tried to reduce civilian deaths. The political results that the Allies intended to achieve in Germany and Japan have been approximated in Gaza as an effect of a morally just Israeli policy. Millions of leaflets, text-messages, and advanced warnings––including evacuation orders––have preceded Israeli airstrikes throughout Gaza. Such measures are the longstanding practice of the Israeli Air Force, and they are no doubt responsible for the extremely low ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties. Israel’s airpower is uncontested––it could have killed five as many civilians and destroyed five times as many buildings had it wanted. But Israel has no desire to duplicate the RAF’s firestorm in Hamburg, which killed twice more German civilians in a week than have been killed in Gaza in eleven months.
The toll on Gaza’s civilians and buildings is explained, not by Israel intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure, but by Israel’s ambitious war aims, by Gaza’s highly urban environment, and by Hamas’s strategy of increasing Palestinian deaths. It is impossible, with current technology, to fight a war of regime change in densely-populated cities without large numbers of civilians dying. Of course, Gazans might’ve been evacuated for the duration of military operations, but Israel’s Western allies were opposed (too many Palestinians leaving Gaza for safety might’ve made Palestinian statehood in Gaza less likely after the war). Hamas made things far worse for civilians and infrastructure with its longstanding practice of hiding fighters and supplies near large numbers of Palestinians civilians, hoping that images of destruction and death would pressure on Israel to stop its campaign.
The battle for Palestinian public opinion gets less attention in the postwar planning debate than military matters, institutional arrangements, economic benefits, and the like. Unfortunately, this attention deficit afflicts many people who claim to have high regard for what ordinary Palestinians think. My theory about the omission is this: Hamas was reasonably popular with Gazans not only on October 6th but on October 7th. The kidnappings were celebrated across the strip (and in the West Bank), just as militancy against Israel has long been celebrated by Palestinians everywhere. Palestinian extremism is not only an elite project but a popular one. This is an uncomfortable thought for any liberal who hopes for Palestinian self-rule.
But the consequences of the thought are straightforward. Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule––it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.
Alas, even destroying Hamas––and much of Gaza in the process––will probably not completely deradicalize Gazans. These problems never have purely military solutions. After World War II, Allied occupations managed the transition to moderate governance (and school systems, media environments, etc.) that decisive, devastating defeats had made possible. Certainly, a Gaza in which support for violent Islamism is as verboten as support for Nazism was in postwar Germany remains far in the future.
A noteworthy obstacle to moderate Palestinian governance is the lack of much precedent for it, and so let me now acknowledge one limit of comparisons between Gaza and the Axis countries. The constitution of the post-World War I Weimer Republic was quite liberal, and Weimer-era politicians like the Christian Democratic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer helped rehabilitate Germany after the war. Japan, too, had some prewar experience with peacefully competitive politics, and Emperor Hirohito’s imprimatur helped Americans and Japanese build a better, postwar Japan.
But for a hundred years, Palestinians have been led either by out-and-out Islamists like Hajj Amin al-Husseini––a wartime guest of the Third Reich––and like Hamas, or by better-marketed militants like Palestinian Authority chiefs Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Whatever their many and intriguing differences in background, in style, in rhetoric, in dress, and in political method, Palestinian leaders have shared certain broad commitments: to brutalizing their domestic opponents and to terrorizing Jews. One supposed exception was Salaam Fayyad, whose prime ministership of the Palestinian Authority was moderate enough to end his career in Palestinian politics prematurely. Fayyad moved to America, where he has made it as a lecturer at Princeton. Perhaps under the influence of his new employer, Fayyad recently called for incorporating Hamas into the PA.
Israel and whatever Palestinian partners it can find will have their work cut out for them. The military campaign against Palestinian militants in Gaza is by no means over. It may go on for many more months, as Israel weeds out the remnants of Hamas (and smaller groups) block by block, tent by tent, tunnel by tunnel. A long-term Israeli military presence will be needed to protect non-Hamas Palestinian leaders after main hostilities calm down. In line with regional custom, those leaders will probably not be elected. The good news is that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are all, to varying degrees, competently ruled by leaders who aren’t selected––let alone by popular vote––from their subjects’ wish lists. Pessimists will note that the governance of largely-Palestinian Jordan can be called “competent” only very charitably. I concede the point. But postwar Gaza, unlike the Hashemite monarchy, will have the benefit of the regular involvement of the Israeli Defense Forces, which will have just given ordinary Gazans very strong reasons to prefer the new regime to the return of extremists.
The postwar work will be hard, but not impossible. The Palestinians are now suffering as never before for their leaders’ viciousness. The leaders themselves are in dire condition, with more killed every week. The Hamas movement looks like a losing, destructive, and pathetic cause. Palestinians know it, more or more each day.
The prospects for decent Palestinian governance look better than ever.
