Essentially the Israelis lost in Gaza. They held a Kibbutz which basically split the strip in two, taking much of the good agricultural land. They withdrew from that. they’ve invaded what, 3 times, now? And in each case, withdrew and went back to the status quo. Blockading what is essentially a self-governing territory is not the same as winning.
There is basically no guerilla warfare in Israel, and minimal in the West Bank. There are random crazies who go on the attack, and there are occasional riots by frustrated large groups - but concerted, organized military resistance by guerilla groups? Basically none. Certainly not on the order of the attacks on the British Mandate authorities by the Jewish independence movements; and the 1948 war was just that, an all out war.
Cromwell’s Conquest of Ireland was one of the more brutal defeats for Irish insurgents over the centuries. Historians can’t even agree on just how high a percentage of the population died from war, famine or disease, other than “a lot”.
The sad truth is that guerrilla resistance can’t stop an invader willing to commit genocide, or something close to it. Guerrillas by definition can’t hold ground- if they could they’d be a conventional army. And if they can’t hold ground then they can’t protect two vitally important things: the non-combatant population and the food supply. Solving a rebel problem demographically is as old as civilization, if not older.
Yes, but the flip side of that, is that it’s impossible to defeat a determined locally supported guerrilla army without committing genocide, or at the very least destroying all the food sources, poisoning wells and water sources and interning non-combatants. At the very least I have not seen any examples here of a clear victory that didn’t use such tactics.
That’s an excellent point too. If the occupier wants to protect the civilian population and the guerillas are willing to commit genocide, the occupier loses. We think it’s about hearts and minds. It’s also about fear and terror.
But if the guerillas want to protect the civilian population and the occupier is willing to commit genocide, the occupier wins.
The lesson we should draw from that then is that we shouldn’t get involved in any guerilla wars unless we’re willing to go that far. If the Japanese or Germans had continued resistance in that fashion we would have been merciless in our response, and rightfully so. Which is probably why it didn’t happen. They knew that wiping them out(genocide) was something we were willing to contemplate.
The Israeli invasions of Gaza were not intended as “re-occupations”. Essentially, The Israelis (well, their PM anyway) decided that “disengagement” from Gaza was a good tactic for pre-empting a more comprehensive peace deal, and unilaterally abandoned it. They then had to deal with the fact that Gaza was being used as a base to stage harassing attacks on Israel proper. The Israeli attacks were designed solely to end that harassment.
The motivation for the Gaza withdrawal was not ‘Israel was driven from the place by guerilla warfare’. It was ‘Israel wanted to secure borders favourable to it, rather than wait on a bilateral comprehensive peace treaty, by unilaterally imposing borders as it liked’. Note the left-wing criticisms of the ‘disengagement’ plan, in the link above. Note that ‘Palestinian guerilla attacks’ are nowhere mentioned by either supporters or critics of the plan, on either the left or right, inside Israel or outside it, as a motivation for withdrawal. They simply weren’t the significant factor.
Also note that “disengagement” wasn’t a matter of moving a single Kibbutz. There were 21 Israeli settlements moved from Gaza as a result of this plan.
After the Israeli pullout, Hamas gained ascendency within Gaza, leading to a series of confrontations with Israel that all followed the same basic pattern: Hamas would launch cross-border attacks; Israel would respond with bombings and invasions. However, Israel had throughout this period, to the present, absolutely no intention of “re-occupying” Gaza.
Whether the Israeli strategy in dealing with Hamas can be considered a “success” or not is debatable. Point is that the unilateral withdrawal was not inspired by Hamas (which gained power only after the withdrawal), and was not inspired by pre-Hamas guerilla warfare. It was not a guerilla “success”.
Similarly, I’d classify the second Palestinian Intifada as basically an insurgency movement, and much larger in scale (if a whole lot less successful) than the situation in Mandatory Palestine.
The death toll was around 4,000 (3,000 Palestinians, 1,000 Israelis).
In contrast, the entire casualties for the whole period of the British Mandate’s battles with the proto-Israelis were … 338 British soldiers, police officers, and civilians killed and 50-100 militants and civilians killed - or around one-tenth the casualties of the Second Intifada alone.
Its importance has been magnified in the popular historical imagination by its eventual success (part of that success was the proto-Israeli’s skillful use of propaganda for their cause). Had it been a failure, it would be a mostly forgotten footnote to history.
The harassment from Hamas in Gaza also serves Israel politically and militarily. Politically it allows Israel to say “See? See what we get when we leave occupied territory? Peaceful co-existence? Yeah, right…”. Militarily, Gaza is too small to pose a true existential threat to Israel, but suppressing Hamas attacks keeps the IDF on its toes.
On the other side hatred and animosity of Israel, even with no chance of success, serves the Palestinian leadership well enough that it’s almost become institutionalized.
We may actually be seeing a war that both sides want in perpetuity.
Baltic republics after WWII. These actions would seem to meet the test in post 14 - Occupying force soundly defeating insurgencies.
The Lithuanian partisans were partisans who waged a guerrilla warfare in Lithuania against the Soviet Union in 1944–1953. Similar anti-Soviet resistance groups, also known as Forest Brothers and cursed soldiers, fought against Soviet rule in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Romania and Galicia. It is estimated that a total of 30,000 Lithuanian partisans and their supporters were killed.
Googling “Lithuanian partisans” and "forest brothers’.
Yep. It’s really just about how bad the occupying power wants it. That’s the irony of guerilla war: you can only win if your opponents aren’t bad guys.
Um, yes? Guerrilla war failed everywhere in Latin America other than in Cuba and Nicaragua (and arguably Mexico a half century earlier, though that was really an alliance between peasant guerrillas and some factions of the middle class). In Peru the military eventually adopted a number of the guerrillas’ ideas and in some other countries the left came to power via elections, but really the number of countries where the Cuban guerrilla warfare model failed was more than where it succeeded.
In Asia, guerrilla warfare succeeded in Indochina but failed most everywhere else- in Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India. Maybe you can count Nepal as a guerrilla war success story too.
Guerrilla warfare usually fails, which is why you want to think carefully about when yo engage in it.
There’s some issues with the way the question is asked that make it hard to really cite anything as succesful to those standards.
First the Geneva Conventions are crafted to apply to conflicts between nations with post WWII additions to cover partisans. The partisan pieces still exclude a lot of insurgencies because they are crafted from the point of view of a resistance movement in an area conquered. effectively the partisans are irregular forces of the conquered and internationally recognized nation not a domestic rebels. Applicability to strictly internal issues takes a lot of ramming a large square peg into a round hole. I can’t think of a single insurgency that has followed the requirements of the partisan accords anyway. International law simply hasn’t dealt with insurgencies well.
Second clarity is really hard to assess unless the insurgency wins. If the government falls and the insurgents win there’s clarity. Since the insurgency isn’t rigidly and hierarchically controlled it’s failure is harder to assess. The insurgency can splinter, be ineffective at presenting an existential threat and still exist for long periods. Without the benefit of a couple decades hinsight it can be hard to tell if that core of the most committed eventually comes back to be relevant. The Batlic republics’ resistance to the Soviet Union brought up above is a good example. Resistance went on for a couple decades after WWII ended (and would be a good example of a partisan movement as opposed to a strictly domestic insurgency anyway.) They weren’t really a major existential threat for most of that period but it was hard to assess their eventual defeat till they’d finished withering away. One of the standards I’ve seen in professional publications of research into force ratios tends to focus on COIN efforts that have arrested and pulled back from peak violence as “successful.” Based on the notion that violence tends to keep growing unless the insurgency is stopped it’s probably not a bad standard. It’s not very clear for the typical person on the street though.
The Troubles in Northern Ireland might serve as a decent case of answering the intent of the OP, even given the difficulties I noted. They exhibited better clarity than most because of an extended ceasefire process leading to a peace agreement. Not all groups accepted the agreements though. Remnants of militant groups still exist with some using variants of the IRA name. If you try to apply Geneva Convention like standards to methods used by police in strictly domestic insurgencies they violated them. The Royal Ulster Constabularly methods of interrogation early on could be more extreme than recent US “enahnced interrogation” techniques. Since they banned those methods well before the peace process. Since those methods were abandoned long before the peace process it’s not unreasonable to say they weren’t key to the eventual success.
I don’t entirely agree: one has to realize that neither Israel nor Palestinians are monolithic.
Having a powerful Hamas certainly does not suit the Palestinian Authority - Hamas is a rival, and happily murdered Fatah leaders when they had the chance, and Fatah returns the favour with arrests (though the two periodically paper over their differences with a ‘unity government’, it’s a pretty thin cover for an essential rivalry). Perma-war suits Hamas, but not the PA. Not to mention the average Palestinian, who would no doubt prefer not to be subject to permanently engaging in a one-sided conflict in which Palestinians suffer disproportionately to no tangible gain whatsoever.
Similarly, there are powerful currents within the Israeli democracy who would prefer some sort of negotiated solution, over perma-war. While Israelis suffer much less than the Palestinians, living with constant threat and alarms is wearing. Most Israelis have no interest in “settlers” and the like.
Really, the conflict serves extremists on both sides.
That’s not the only reason. Even when it is successful, it is typically horribly costly to the civilian population of the side that engaged in it.
Guerrillas live among civilians, which has three problematic aspects:
(1) They often have to take food and other material from the civilian population to survive. This can look an awful lot like armed banditry.
(2) The “occupier” almost invariably reacts with increased repression against civilians generally. The extreme example was the Nazi response to guerilla warfare (basically, massacre of local civilians); however, even more enlightened nations react with increasing harshness towards the civilian “enablers”. The guerillas may even count on repression, to swell their ranks and popularity.
(3) Another possible reaction of the “occupier” is to co-opt civilians - informers and the like. This usually leads to the guerillas imposing harsh ‘justice’ against suspected ‘traitors’.
So the civilian population gets it from both sides - the guerillas demand food and cash, and punish ‘traitors’ who are accused of informing (usually a pretty elastic concept - it can also mean ‘people who refuse to hand over food and cash’). The occupier responds with a mixture of repression and co-option, and often have their own demands for taxes (or labor).
Another factor is that guerilla wars are often miserably lengthy. There is usually no ‘decisive battle’, it is a war of attrition.
Its more complicated than that.
The Boers, and the Brits, were scared of being destroyed by the Zulu’s.
For that reason, the end of the war came about with a deal… Did someone win, or they just called the war off ?
Besides the end came with the Boer’s getting what they wanted,
basically Independence was a sure thing, the Boer’s just accepted to get it slowly, so as to reduce the risk of zulu’s taking advantage of the disappearance of the British military and police…
Yes, that was the Cuban strategy : convert a nonrevolutionary situation into a revolutioary one by provoking the goevernment into more and more brutality which further alienates them from the people.
Well, it’s a little more complex than that. The conservative governments in Cuba and Nicaragua- and in South Vietnam- were certainly bad guys, in the sense of being willing to use brutality to stay in power. They were also, however (at least the former two, I know less about Vietnam) extremely corrupt and decadent overnments without much ideological conviction or a mass base- they were held together in essence by the people in charge paying off their supporters. When it became obvious that they were in deep trouble, their support evaporated quite quickly (it helped that Castro and the Sandinistas were both posing as more moderate than they later became, that helped to get some middle class support).
When the far left tried to apply the Cuban guerilla model to a country like Argentina, with a ‘tougher’ right wing, with serious ideological conviction and a basis of support in some significant sections of society like the church, it failed miserably: the military just killed them and their supporters, and that was the end of that.
A “defeat” by guerillas may not end up with an all-out panic flight of occupiers (think helicopters on the roof in Saigon). It can also be a “disengagement” by the occupier recognizing the cost of maintaining the status quo is becoming too high.
It’s still a victory for the insurgents whether the generals were Hamas or Fatah.
From the Wikipedia link:
That sounds a lot like how guerilla wars go.
Yes, there probably were many settlements in Gaza; however, the main one split Gaza in two. The detail was visible on Google Earth until the USA forbade hi-rez satellite mapping of Israel and Palestine online. You can still see a bit of the scars today in Google Earth. Atlantic magazine (I think it was) had an article on how the Druze in the guard towers would use loudspeakers to yell Arabic insults at nearby Gaza residents all night. When the Israelis were ticked off, they ploughed up the one crossing by the sea or the one at the checkpoint that crossed the kibbutz access road, effectively making it impossible for Gazans to drive from the north to south part or vice versa.
Another model for the OP to consider would be Rhodesia or South Africa. In both cases, the cost of maintaining the status quo was simply becoming far to expensive; in their cases, the recognition that suppressing a sympathetic population that greatly outnumbered the incumbents was doomed in the long run.
Find a source that claims a primary motivation for leaving Gaza was casualties/costs from guerilla action. Then, we can debate.
Right now, every credible source I have so far seen claims that the primary motivation was to impose a unilateral border solution.
Where the accounts differ, is whether the observer thinks it was to undermine the peace process (the usual left-wing critique) or out of understandable frustration with Palestinian paralysis and inability to articulate credible demands (the usual right-wing support).
The only people claiming it was a ‘cowardly defeat’ are the true extremists on both sides - particularly, the settler faction. The main argument for the (more numerous) non-settler Israelis opposed to disengagement was two-fold: (1) that it would encourage guerillas into thinking it was a victory, on the mistaken belief that they had been violent, the Israelis had left, and so the two must be causally connected (the error you are, I submit, making right now); and (2) that it would make hunting them down more difficult.
The notion that Fatah military might in Gaza drove out the Israelis strikes me as simply not factually based. Citing small-scale attacks that occurred well after the proposal to leave was made (in 2003) as motivation strikes me as less than convincing. Israel was, and remains, relatively used to such attacks; and those made after the decision could hardly have motivated the decision.