On kingdoms of uncertainty – Mark Landler and Adam Rasgon in NYT:

‘Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman, the former Israeli military intelligence chief, characterized a special operation like that in Damascus as “the kingdom of certainty.” By contrast, he said, “a war is the kingdom of uncertainty.” The targeted strike in Syria, General Hayman said, was like a hunter “pursuing a single animal in the desert.” Fighting in Gaza was like stalking an adversary in a “jungle.” “In one place,” he said, “the chance of making a mistake is low, and in the other, it’s high.” Uzi Arad, a former national security adviser to Mr. Netanyahu who is now a critic, also rejected the comparison, saying the “sheer intensity” of the fighting in Gaza had even led Israeli soldiers to open fire on each other. “Mistakes happen,” he said. “The situation is changing all the time; it’s not static. It’s very dynamic.” Mr. Arad, who is also a former official in Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, said everything should be done to prevent such errors, but he suggested that they were inescapable on a battlefield like Gaza.
Amos Harel, a military affairs columnist for the Israeli paper Haaretz, acknowledged the challenges of fighting a war in Gaza, but he said the deadly strikes on the convoy were also simply a result of attrition.
“After fighting for such a long time, you get more of these mistakes and problems,” Mr. Harel said. “It’s not justified in any way, but it’s the price of ongoing war under these extreme circumstances.”’

Read the article here.

Attrition is too easy an explanation.

Lack of discipline, a certain amount of anarchy makes these mistakes possible. And the war in Gaza has been a punitive expedition from day 1, with all kinds of consequences that are part of these kinds of military operations.

But above all, the war in Gaza has become and probably has been for a long time a forever-war with no political direction whatsoever.

The death of Western aid workers appears a bigger tragedy than the death of countless Palestinians, and this should not be a surprise.

Nation state privilege counts.

In the meantime, the question remains what the outrage of Biden in reality will mean. I’m afraid not that much.

Geopolitical realities (Iran, Putin, China) weigh heavily on Biden, heavier than the outrage.