The Price of Victory

Dr. Gary Kellner has spent considerable time in Israel, not as an occasional visitor collecting photographs of ancient monuments, but as a returning observer of a country whose survival remains inseparable from its politics. Through his work, he has met soldiers, spoken with families, and witnessed the daily realities of a nation living with the possibility of attack. His latest Fair Game episode raises a deceptively simple question: Who governs Gaza when the fighting ends? But beneath that question lies a more consequential one. What does military victory actually accomplish when the defeated enemy remains committed to the struggle? History offers an uncomfortable answer. Winning a war changes what an enemy can do. It does not  change what an enemy wants.

THE PROBLEM WITH WINNING

There is something almost charmingly optimistic and sometimes naive about the phrase, “winning the war.”

It suggests a conclusion.

The enemy is defeated. The generals exchange congratulations. The politicians announce that history has turned a corner. Someone produces a treaty, preferably accompanied by an impressive collection of fountain pens.

And everyone goes home.

Unfortunately, history has never been particularly cooperative with this arrangement.

Wars end. Hostilities resume. Victorious armies discover that destroying an opponent’s military capabilities is considerably easier than eliminating the political convictions that produced the conflict.

For Israel, this is not an obscure historical observation. It is a recurring national predicament.

Israel has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to defend itself against military threats. Yet the question of how to transform military success into lasting security has followed the country through successive generations.

An army can surrender without its political movement abandoning its objectives. A government can collapse while its ideology survives. A military organization or guerilla movement can lose territory and still retain the capacity to recruit, reorganize, and begin again.

The distinction matters enormously when considering Gaza.

Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023, were not an abstract expression of political dissatisfaction. They involved the murder and abduction of civilians. It was an assault that confronted Israel with an immediate and profound security crisis.

Israel is determined to prevent another such attack and has further strengthened its already formidable military.

But the question that follows a military response is complicated.

What constitutes a victory sufficient to ensure that Hamas cannot repeat its behavior?

The answer requires more than counting destroyed weapons, eliminated commanders, or miles of territory brought under military control. It requires examining the relationship between military power, political authority, and the stubborn persistence of national and ideological commitments.

To understand why military victory cannot always settle a nation’s struggle for survival, we need to look much further back in history.

THE EMPIRE THAT WON EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE ARGUMENT

The Bar Kokhba Revolt, 132–135 CE

In the second century of the Common Era, Rome possessed something approaching the ultimate military advantage.

It was an empire accustomed to imposing its will across vast territories, supported by disciplined legions, formidable administrative machinery, and an impressive talent for making resistance extremely expensive.

Rome did not negotiate with rebellious provinces as though they were equal partners.

It governed them.

Judea, however, had a persistent habit of frustrating Roman expectations.

The destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE had been a devastating blow to Jewish religious and political life. Roman forces had crushed the earlier Jewish revolt, destroyed Jerusalem’s central sanctuary, and demonstrated the consequences of challenging imperial authority.

From Rome’s perspective, the essential question should have been settled. It wasn’t.

Six decades later, another rebellion erupted.

Its leader was Simon bar Kokhba, a figure whose very name became associated with extraordinary expectations of national restoration.

The rebellion began in 132 CE during the reign of Emperor Hadrian.

Its precise causes remain debated. Roman plans to transform Jerusalem into a Roman colony, restrictions affecting Jewish religious practices, and resentment of imperial rule all figure in historical explanations.

What is beyond serious dispute is that the uprising represented a formidable challenge to Roman authority. The rebels organized military resistance, developed underground hiding systems, and briefly established an independent Jewish administration.

They even minted their own coins.

That detail is worth lingering over.

Currency is more than a convenient means of purchasing bread. It is a declaration of political authority. A government that mints coins announces that it possesses the right to define value, exercise sovereignty, and represent a community.

For Jewish rebels confronting the Roman Empire, those coins expressed something considerably larger than an economic transaction. They asserted that Roman power had not extinguished Jewish national aspirations.

Hadrian responded with overwhelming force.

Roman commanders conducted an extensive military campaign against the rebellion. Settlements were destroyed, resistance was systematically suppressed, and the Jewish population of Judea suffered catastrophic losses.

By approximately 135 CE, the rebellion had been crushed. Bar Kokhba was dead. The independent administration was gone.

Rome had won. And by the ordinary measurements of military victory, it had won decisively.

Yet something remarkable followed.

The destruction of Jewish political independence did not result in the disappearance of Jewish identity. Jewish religious scholarship, communal institutions, traditions, and historical memory continued to develop across the centuries.

The political state had been defeated. Jewish civilization endured.

This is not an argument that ancient sovereignty automatically determines modern territorial rights. Twenty centuries of history cannot be reduced to a property deed.

It is an argument about the limits of military power.

Rome could defeat a rebellion. It could dismantle institutions and impose imperial authority. What it could not accomplish was the permanent erasure of a people’s historical consciousness.

There is a considerable irony in that outcome.

The empire that commanded much of the known Mediterranean world eventually disappeared as a political system. The people whose rebellion it crushed retained a national and religious identity that survived the empire itself.

Rome won the war. It did not get the last word.

And that distinction carries us toward a larger question.

If overwhelming military superiority could not eliminate the national aspirations of a conquered population, what should modern governments expect military victory to accomplish?

The lesson is not that force is useless. Without force, states cannot defend their citizens against armed attack.

The lesson is that force has a particular function. It can prevent an adversary from achieving military objectives. It cannot, by itself, dictate what future generations will believe.

For Israel, whose modern national identity is inseparable from a long history of Jewish survival, this is a particularly resonant historical inheritance.

It is also a reminder that survival and security, although closely related, are not quite the same achievement.

THE EMPIRE THAT INHERITED AN IMPOSSIBLE PROMISE

The British Mandate, 1917–1948

In December 1917, British General Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot.

It was a carefully calculated gesture.

After centuries of Ottoman rule, Jerusalem had fallen to British forces during the First World War. Allenby understood the symbolic weight of entering a city sacred to three great religions, and he reportedly chose to walk rather than ride as a gesture of respect. But the humility of that entrance did not change the reality of what had happened.

The British had conquered the territory. What they had not conquered was its future, though they did create the conditions for the Jewish people to reurn to their ancestral homeland.

That distinction would occupy them for the next three decades.

Britain emerged from the First World War with considerable influence across the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire had collapsed, and the victorious powers were busily dividing its former territories into new political arrangements.

It was an undertaking of breathtaking ambition.

European diplomats examined maps, discussed populations, negotiated strategic interests, and produced documents intended to determine the political future of millions of people.

The map proved considerably easier to manage than the people. Palestine presented a particularly complicated problem.

In November 1917, Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, had issued a declaration supporting the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

The declaration also stated that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities.

Those two commitments would prove extraordinarily difficult to reconcile. The declaration promised a national home to one people in a land where another constituted the majority.

Yet while the declaration explicitly protected the civil and religious rights of the existing population, it made no corresponding commitment to their political rights or national aspirations.

For the Zionist movement, the declaration represented international recognition of Jewish aspirations for national restoration in the Land.

For Arabs, it raised concerns about political self-determination, immigration, and the future of a country in which they constituted the majority.

Britain had undertaken to administer a territory containing two increasingly mobilized national movements. Both possessed powerful historical narratives. Both feared political subordination. And neither was prepared to entrust its future to the other.

The League of Nations formally approved Britain’s Mandate for Palestine in 1922, incorporating the commitment to a Jewish national home. The British now possessed international authority to administer the territory. They had soldiers, police, civil servants, courts, and the administrative apparatus of an empire.

What they lacked was a political settlement acceptable to the competing communities. And no amount of administrative efficiency could manufacture one.

THE LIMITS OF IMPERIAL AUTHORITY

Throughout the Mandate period, tensions intensified.

Jewish immigration increased, particularly as antisemitism and persecution in Europe grew more dangerous. Jewish institutions expanded, including political organizations, agricultural settlements, educational systems, and defense organizations.

At the same time, Arab opposition to British policies and Jewish immigration became increasingly organized. Violence erupted periodically between communities and against British authorities.

The Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 presented Britain with a major challenge to its rule. British forces suppressed the uprising through extensive military operations, accompanied by severe coercive measures and substantial civilian suffering. The revolt was eventually defeated. But the political conflict remained.

Then came the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The murder of six million European Jews transformed the urgency of the Jewish national question. For survivors, the need for refuge and political security was no longer theoretical.

It was a matter of survival.

Britain, meanwhile, attempted to manage competing commitments while restricting Jewish immigration under policies introduced in 1939. The result was mounting opposition from Jewish underground organizations, including attacks against British personnel and installations.

By the mid-1940s, Britain found itself confronting resistance from different directions. The empire possessed legal authority. It retained substantial military power. Yet its ability to govern Palestine was deteriorating.

In 1947, Britain referred the question of Palestine to the newly established United Nations. The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to partition the Land into separate Jewish and Arab states, with a special international arrangement for Jerusalem. Six Arab states opposed the partition, joined by Afghanistan, Cuba, Greece and India.

Jewish leaders accepted the proposed partition in principle, despite reservations about its boundaries. Palestinian leaders rejected it. Britain withdrew in May 1948, the Jews declared independence and five Arab nations promptly invaded the new state of Israel.

The British had entered Jerusalem as conquerors. They departed without resolving the fundamental political question.

Who would govern, and by whose consent?

THE AUTHORITY TO RULE IS NOT THE ABILITY TO RESOLVE

The British experience offers an important historical distinction.

Military conquest can establish control over territory. International agreements can confer legitimacy and administrative authority. Neither necessarily produces political acceptance among populations with competing national aspirations.

Britain had possessed both military power and international authorization. It had also inherited incompatible expectations that could not be reconciled simply by issuing another proclamation.

And Britain issued quite a few.

The lesson is not that Jewish and Palestinian national claims were identical in their histories or political development.

Nor does the failure of British administration settle the issue of legitimacy.

What it demonstrates is that the power to govern and the ability to produce an enduring political settlement are separate achievements.

For Israel, the consequences of that failure became immediate and existential. The new state became independent amid war, attacked by neighboring armies and a struggle for survival. Its institutions would develop under conditions of continuing insecurity.

But the broader problem inherited from the Mandate did not disappear with the British departure. It became part of the unresolved political architecture of the region.

And that brings us to a particularly revealing episode from a later generation. One in which the government confronting an armed Palestinian movement was not Israeli.

It was Arab.

And the confrontation was not over the legitimacy of Israel.

It was over who possessed the authority to govern an existing state.

THE KING WHO REFUSED TO SHARE HIS KINGDOM

Black September 1970

King Hussein of Jordan understood something that governments occasionally discover too late.

A country cannot function indefinitely with two competing authorities claiming the right to command armed forces.

By 1970, Jordan had become the center of an increasingly dangerous confrontation between the monarchy and Palestinian guerrilla organizations. Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Palestinian armed groups had expanded their operations from Jordanian territory.

The Palestine Liberation Organization, established in 1964, had become an umbrella for several factions, including Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement. These organizations were committed to the Palestinian national struggle and the destruction of Israel.Their growing military presence also challenged Jordanian sovereignty.

Armed militants operated openly in parts of the country. Palestinian organizations established independent structures of authority. Their activities increasingly brought them into conflict with Jordanian security forces.

The situation presented Hussein with an extraordinary dilemma.

Jordan’s population included large numbers of Palestinians, and the monarchy publicly supported Palestinian national aspirations.

Yet armed organizations were exercising powers that belonged to the state. They could launch attacks across an international boundary, provoking Israeli retaliation. They could challenge Jordanian authorities. And they could make decisions affecting the kingdom’s security without answering to its government.

Hussein was discovering that sympathy for a political cause did not necessarily make its armed representatives agreeable neighbors.

The confrontation escalated dramatically in September 1970. Militants belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked several international airliners, diverting three of them to Jordan.

The aircraft became instruments of political theater.

Passengers were held hostage, international attention intensified, and the Jordanian monarchy faced a direct challenge to its authority.

Hussein responded by ordering military action against Palestinian armed organizations.

The resulting conflict became known as Black September.

Jordanian forces fought Palestinian guerrillas in Amman and elsewhere. Syrian armored forces also entered northern Jordan during the crisis, raising the possibility of a broader regional war.

Thousands were killed.

By 1971, Jordanian forces had defeated the principal Palestinian armed formations operating independently within the kingdom.

The PLO subsequently shifted its principal base of operations to Lebanon. King Hussein had preserved the authority and integrity of the Jordanian state.

But he had not eliminated the Palestinian national movement.

Nor had he resolved the political grievances that sustained it.

THE QUESTION OF WHO COMMANDS

Black September is an instructive episode precisely because it complicates the familiar presentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The confrontation was not between Israel and an Arab government. It was between an Arab government and Palestinian armed organizations whose independent military activities threatened that government’s sovereignty.

Hussein’s position was straightforward.

Whatever the legitimacy of Palestinian national aspirations, the Jordanian monarchy could not accept an armed political authority operating beyond the control of the state.

This was not merely a matter of political pride. It concerned the government’s fundamental responsibilities and is as applicable to Israel as it is to Jordan. A sovereign state cannot survive with divided authority. As Abraham Lincoln famously observed when debating Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, “A house divided against itself cannot endure.”

Who controls the armed forces? Who determines whether the country would enter a conflict? Who possesses the authority to make decisions that could expose civilians to retaliation? A state that cannot answer those questions is not sustainable.

Jordan responded decisively with overwhelming force and broke the back of the PLO in the nation. The civilian consequences remain part of the historical record.

But the underlying issue of competing armed authority did not disappear with the fighting.

The PLO’s relocation to Lebanon contributed to another complicated chapter in the region’s history. Palestinian armed organizations established an increasingly significant military presence there, conducting operations against Israel and destabilizing the state of Lebanon. The consequences would extend into the Lebanese Civil War and Israel’s military intervention in 1982.

An armed movement had been displaced from one country.

The conflict migrated. The PLO had been forced out of Jordan, but its armed struggle shifted to Lebanon where the PLO built a new base to carry out operations against Israel. And now, Lebanon was drawn into the conflict as well.

Black September demonstrates that the problem of independent armed organizations operating beyond established governmental control has not been confined to Israel. It has confronted other governments in the region, including governments sympathetic to Palestinian national aspirations.

And it raises a question directly relevant to Gaza.

What kind of government can provide security and exercise meaningful political authority if an independent armed organization retains the power to determine when war begins?

That question does not resolve every issue surrounding Palestinian self-government.

But it cannot be avoided.

THE ENEMY AFTER THE DEFEAT

We return, then, to Gaza.

Dr. Kellner’s argument begins with Israel’s right to protect its citizens against another October 7.

The attacks demonstrated the devastating consequences of Hamas’s ability to organize and execute a large-scale assault against Israeli communities.

For Israel, preventing a repetition is not an optional political preference. It is a fundamental responsibility of government.

Yet the historical examples we have examined suggest that the destruction of an enemy’s military capabilities is only one part of a much larger problem.

Rome defeated Bar Kokhba but could not extinguish Jewish national identity. Britain possessed the authority to administer Palestine but could not impose a settlement acceptable to its competing national movements. Jordan defeated Palestinian armed organizations operating within its borders, only to see the movement establish itself elsewhere.

These episodes are not identical to Gaza. Their legal circumstances, political actors, and historical settings differ.

But each illuminates the limitations of military victory.

Force can change the immediate balance of power. It can destroy military infrastructure, defeat armed formations, and prevent attacks. What it cannot automatically accomplish is the creation of a political order that survives without continuous coercion.

That requires institutions, leadership, public authority, and a population with some reason to believe that the new arrangement offers a viable future.

For Gaza, the challenge is particularly severe.

A governing authority must be capable of maintaining public order, administering civilian services, and preventing armed factions from independently initiating another conflict. It must also possess sufficient legitimacy among Palestinians to govern something more than the ruins of a defeated military organization.

And Israel must have credible assurances that the territory will not again become a base for attacks against its citizens.

Those objectives are difficult. They are not mutually exclusive.

A durable political arrangement would have to address both.

THE PRICE OF VICTORY

There is a peculiar contradiction in the way nations celebrate military success.

The moment of victory is usually defined by what has been destroyed. An enemy army defeated. A command structure dismantled. A strategic position captured.

But the enduring value of victory depends upon what can be built afterward.

Security arrangements that function. Institutions that command authority. Political leadership capable of making and enforcing commitments.

And some reasonable expectation that the next generation will not be required to fight the same war.

Dr. Kellner’s firsthand experiences in Israel give particular force to his insistence that national security is not an academic abstraction. For families living under the threat of rockets, infiltration, and terrorist attacks, the consequences of political failure are immediate and personal. Their concerns cannot responsibly be dismissed as obstacles to a settlement.

They are among the essential questions any settlement must answer.

But history also cautions against believing military superiority alone can produce the political conditions necessary for lasting security.

Destroying Hamas’s military capabilities is essential. But victory cannot end with the destruction of an enemy. Gaza must have a government capable of maintaining order, preventing the return of armed factions, and honoring its commitments to peace.

A government must do more than occupy an office. It must govern.

The political consequences of war begin developing long before the military campaign has ended. They are shaped by decisions about civilian administration, security, reconstruction, and the treatment of the population that will inherit whatever arrangements emerge.

A successful military campaign may create the opportunity for a more secure future.

It does not guarantee one.

That is the central challenge facing Israel and everyone involved in determining Gaza’s future.

The objective cannot simply be to defeat an enemy today. It must be to establish conditions that make another war less likely tomorrow.

Lebanon demonstrated that an armed movement can be displaced without eliminating the threat it poses. The danger can simply move across a border, reorganize, and return under another name.

The lesson is not that military victory is meaningless. It is that achieving victory must accomplish something beyond the immediate defeat of an enemy.

Victory is what an army achieves.

Security is what a nation must build.

And the true price of victory is the responsibility to make it last.