Richard Haass claims Netanyahu's war aim of "eliminating or destroying Hamas" is unrealistic

But he makes some an odd reading from a recent public-opinion poll

Richard Haass raises some important concerns about current US policy toward Israel:

[W]hat is missing from the Biden team’s approach is any “or else,” such as introducing a resolution critical of Israel in the UN Security Council, conditioning some military exports, and/or speaking publicly (to the Israeli people) about the wisdom of, among other things, exercising greater care in how military force is employed.

Related to all this is Israel’s stated goal for this war and its working definition of success, which tends to come down to eliminating or destroying Hamas. This makes little sense as a military proposition; a far better metric would be to weaken Hamas (and strengthen Israeli defenses) so that nothing like October 7 can ever happen again. And as a political proposition, there needs to be a promising political track so that Palestinians and Arab governments have something other than Hamas to back.¹ [my emphasis]

He also warns that “the odds of this war widening are going up.”

He makes this important point about the shift in partisan politics in the US around Israel, i.e., unconditional support for Israel is becoming more and more mainly a position of rightwing Republicans and Christian Zionists, who are basically all Republicans anyway:

In Israel, there are now few, if any, doves. The decline of the left was long underway before October 7, but it has sharply accelerated in the wake of it. Trust for Palestinians is at an all-time low, in part because sympathy among Palestinians for Hamas remains high with some polls reporting that 57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching its October attack. As a result, the Biden administration needs to tread carefully in how it frames the public debate. I would put less emphasis on two-state solutions and final status negotiations and more on what confidence building measures both sides can undertake in the political and security domains to help transition out of the current morass and give more ambitious diplomacy a chance down the road. [my emphasis]

He then makes some dubious suggestions about the findings of a particular poll:

I also want to talk about attitudes here at home. For much of the past 75 years support for Israel was broad and deep in this country, an all too rare and welcome manifestation of bipartisanship. This began to change somewhat in recent years as support for Israel started to fade among Democrats and grow among Evangelicals tied to the Republican Party.

The war has accelerated this shift. It is impossible not to be taken aback by polls indicating that nearly three-quarters of voters between 18 and 29 years old disapprove of the way Biden is handling the conflict in Gaza, or that more than half of young people do not see a need for Israel and believe the conflict could be solved by ending Israel’s existence as a sovereign entity and giving its land to the Palestinians. [my emphasis]

That last claim seems to be an imaginative reading of these results²:

I would say that this shows that the older an American is, the more often they have heard “two-state solution” as the respectable and practical official position of the US. And if there was no no-opinion option, “For Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians” would be the only option for people who had no idea what the two-state solution is and who didn't want to endorse mass expulsion of the Palestinians. Or for respondents that do know what the two-state solution is and think that is no longer a practical solution.

The following item from the same poll results also features a question that many of those surveyed surely found to be a muddled one:

Israel’s “right to exist as the homeland of the Jewish people” is a phrase that could be interpreted various ways. If those were the only two options posed the response would turn on what the participants understand "as the homeland of the Jewish people" to mean. The homeland of the Jews who live there now? The homeland of only Jews and not current non-Jewish Israeli citizens? The homeland of all Jews in the world?

If a general survey of the public poses questions who interpretations require some kind of foreign-policy-wonk level of knowledge of the tangled politics of Zionism from the 19th century until today, the results will probably by garbage. So it’s surprising to see Haass take that as meaning that “more than half of young people do not see a need for Israel and believe the conflict could be solved by ending Israel’s existence as a sovereign entity and giving its land to the Palestinians.”

But reading it as Haass does plays to the current position taken by American supporters of Netanyahu’s war policies that its critics are just a bunch of over-privileged, anti-Semitic college kids.

1. Haass, Richard (2023): War Weary (December 21, 2023). Home & Away (Substack) 12/21/2023. (Accessed: 2023-26-12).

2. Harvard-CAPA-Harris Poll (Field Dates: December 13-14, 2023). <https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP_Dec23_KeyResults.pdf> (Accessed: 2023-26-12).