The introduction to Nachum Kaplan’s much-awaited first book is here! Become a paid subscriber of Guerre and Shalom to get an exclusive first viewing of each and every chapter. The print version will be released within next 6 months via The Mitzpe Press under the imprint of The Guerre and Shalom Publishing House. Enjoy —and don’t forget to subscribe. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor, Guerre and Shalom)
Introducing Nachum and his New Book!
The First World War was called the Great War because the world had never witnessed slaughter on such an industrial scale. Israel’s war against Hamas is vastly smaller in conventional military terms. Yet measured by its moral stakes, the diversity of the forces arrayed against it, and the struggle’s extraordinary complexity, Israel is fighting something far more consequential than just another Middle Eastern conflict.
Israel is fighting The Greatest War.
Never has a state, much less one as small as Israel, been forced to confront such a disparate collection of enemies, adversaries, and hostile institutions simultaneously. Some seek the destruction of the Jewish state by force. Others seek to dismantle its legitimacy through law, diplomacy, economics, culture, and public opinion. Still others, while professing to defend universal principles, seem curiously reluctant to extend those principles to the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination and self-defense.
These forces differ enormously in their motivations, methods, and objectives. They do not constitute a single coordinated conspiracy. But their efforts frequently converge, producing a formidable system of military, political, ideological, and institutional obstacles that Israel must overcome.
At stake is a question that extends far beyond the Jewish state’s future: Can a free society defend itself against enemies who reject the moral restraints upon which society is built without surrendering those restraints itself?
If the answer is no, the consequences will not be confined to Israel. A civilization that cannot defend its foundational principles against those determined to destroy them will eventually discover that its principles afford it little protection.
The military challenges alone are extraordinary. Hamas has embedded its fighting infrastructure within one of the world’s most densely populated urban environments, constructed a vast subterranean military network, and developed a strategy in which civilian suffering is not just a foreseeable consequence of war but an instrument of political and psychological warfare.
Yet military fortifications constitute only the innermost defenses of a much larger citadel. Beyond them stand powerful diplomatic networks, international institutions, legal campaigns, ideological movements, financial resources, and influential cultural organizations, many of which have made the Palestinian cause central to their political or moral identity.
Israel is winning The Greatest War militarily, but guns alone cannot dismantle this citadel.
To understand why, we must examine the extraordinary layers of defenses Israel is being forced to breach.
THE MILITARY FORTRESS
Hamas spent years transforming Gaza into an immense fortified military complex, much of it underground. Estimates have placed its tunnel network at approximately 580 kilometers (360 miles), an astonishing undertaking given it sits beneath a territory of just 365 square kilometers.
For perspective, that would make the network longer than the London Underground and substantially more extensive than Israeli intelligence had initially estimated. The tunnels served as transport corridors, command centers, weapons depots, escape routes, and fighting positions, linking vital elements of Hamas’ military infrastructure.
This was not simply an engineering achievement. It was the foundation of an entire method of warfare.
Hamas fighters could emerge from hidden entrances, attack Israeli soldiers, and disappear into a subterranean labyrinth riddled with booby traps. Destroying this system required the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) not only to seize territory but to locate, map, penetrate, and dismantle interconnected underground installations while continuing to fight above ground.
At the war’s outset, international commentators confidently predicted catastrophic Israeli casualties if the IDF attempted to clear these tunnels. Israeli forces demonstrated remarkable tactical ingenuity and operational adaptability. Nevertheless, the sheer complexity of the undertaking helps explain why a rapid military victory, however politically desirable, was never a realistic proposition.
There is an important lesson here. Hamas was not preparing only to fight the IDF. It was preparing to survive the IDF, prolong the conflict, and exploit the political consequences of a drawn-out war.
THE HUMAN FORTRESS
If the tunnels constituted Hamas’ inner defenses, Gaza’s civilian population became the outer wall.
Hamas’ systematic embedding of military operations within civilian areas created a battlefield on which legitimate military targets and protected civilian infrastructure were intertwined. This presented Israel with an agonizing dilemma: how to destroy an enemy’s military capabilities without inflicting immense harm on the population among whom that enemy operates.
