He was Christian Zionist and bibliophile, who by all accounts knew the land of Israel better than many of the Jews who lived there and was described as “sadistic” by Israeli historian and author Tom Segev.

Wingate had been dead for four years by the time of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, but his nimble approach to warfare was central to the newborn state’s defeat of the combined armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen in the war of Independence in 1948.  Most military analysts would agree that Wingate’s approach still dominated Israeli strategy and tactics in the Sinai campaign of 1956 and the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel once again conclusively defeated the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. After that, however, came a fateful change: Wingate’s lessons were forgotten, and the IDF became “Vietnamized.”

That ambiguous term has several interpretations. It was initially used to describe the strategy of reducing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War by delegating most military responsibilities to South Vietnam. That was also a failure, but I use “Vietnamization” in a different sense, to describe the use of overwhelming and often unnecessary brute force, leading to unintended and frequently disastrous consequences.

Consider that during World War II, roughly 3 million tons of explosives were used against the Axis powers, which comprised three large and heavily militarized nations. During the Vietnam War, however, 4 million tons were used against a much smaller enemy force, much of it a guerrilla army spread out across densely forested.    

Another aspect of Vietnamization was the repugnant use of terminology such as “body count” to describe enemy casualties, not to mention the U.S. military’s infamous use of euphemisms, outright lies and doublespeak: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” All of that fueled increasingly large protests against the war at home in America and turned the entire world’s public opinion against the war, leading to the humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973.

Why did America go to war in Vietnam in the first place? George Friedman, an author on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, says in one of his YouTube videos that European leaders, especially French President Charles de Gaulle, were skeptical of America’s Cold War promises to provide a “nuclear umbrella” in the event of a Soviet attack on Western Europe. To convince de Gaulle that America was serious, Friedman suggests, that the U.S. wanted to show that it was willing to wage war halfway around the world to address the Cold War Domino Theory that suggested that a communist government in one nation would quickly lead to communist takeovers in neighboring states, each falling like a row of dominoes.

It’s clear that America fell into the trap of using Vietnamization tactics employing extensive ordnance and war materials; Israel has been and is about to fall into this trap in the war against Hamas in October 2023. When initial Vietnamization warfare failed, the Americans felt compelled to use even more lethal force that again failed, leading to even more severe use of atrocious overwhelming force, and to vast civilian casualties, estimated at more than 1.3 total deaths in North and South Vietnam in 1965–1974.

Israel has already fallen into the same trap in its military ventures since 1973 and is about to fall even deeper in the war against Hamas, where a ground invasion of Gaza in October 2023— with no clear or achievable objectives, and a high probability of disaster is underway.

Charles de Gaulle died in 1969, five years before the end of the war in Vietnam. There was effectively no one left to convince of the supposed U.S. commitment to stop the spread of communism. Nevertheless, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, even after he received the Nobel Peace Prize (a grotesque travesty in itself), was determined to continue the war, although the Pentagon Papers released by Daniel Ellsberg made clear that the U.S. defense establishment had known for years that the war was unwinnable.

We can also look to the example of Afghanistan, which has been called the “graveyard of empires.” Overwhelming use of force by the British failed there in the 19th century, and the Soviet Union was similarly defeated in the 1980s, surely a factor in its subsequent collapse. America’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan occurred just two years ago, as an early black mark in Joe Biden’s presidency. In Vietnam, as de Gaulle could have testified, the French had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a seemingly inconsequential enemy in the early 1950s, and in their atrocious conduct in the Algiers War, a historical lesson the Americans studiously avoided.

So why did the IDF “Vietnamize” itself prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War — a near-catastrophe that in some ways prefigured the devastating Hamas attack of early October 2023? There are several possible explanations. The first is that Israel’s leading enemies, Egypt and Syria, had supplied by huge of arms from the Soviets, and the Americans felt that they needed to respond in kind. Noam Chomsky provides a second plausible explanation, arguing that the military aid to Israel has ulterior motives since providing state-of-the-art weaponry brings invaluable experience for arms that are used live in Israel for the first time.

But massive rearmament and “Vietnamization” of the IDF were not adequate to meet the challenges of the Yom Kippur War, in which Egyptian and Syrian forces at first overran the IDF, rapidly depleting Israel’s stock of arms. Richard Nixon, despite the antisemitic views he expressed in private, felt the need to respond to the massive Soviet arms shipments to the Arab nations, and the U.S. bailed out Israel with 23,000 tons of arms delivered by aerial shipment in the middle of the conflict.

In the subsequent decades, Israel developed tech fetish and has repeatedly used these kinds of heavy-handed, overkill tactics against the Palestinians. That has done little or nothing to resolve the conflict or to suppress militant groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, as the October 2023 events have made clear. Worse yet, it has led to many civilian casualties that inevitably fuel ever-deeper hatred among every new generation of Palestinians, leading to recurring acts of terror and increasingly dangerous war.

Revenge is a strong theme in Middle Eastern culture, certainly for Jews and perhaps even more so for Arabs. Virtually every Palestinian, no matter their class background, religion, or political affiliation, has a father, a son, a brother, an uncle, or a classmate who was killed, wounded, or imprisoned by Israel.

The Palestinian people are much fewer than the Israelis, and their casualties exceed Israeli casualties; at this writing, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza is at least four times higher than the number of Israelis killed by Hamas. Israel was severely traumatized by the attacks of Oct. 7, but that doesn’t change the fact that the relative impact of war on the Palestinians is much greater than the impact on Israelis.

What math can justify such a deepening cycle of violence? I do not advocate war and militarism, but if war against Hamas is inevitable, IDF top brass should go back and study Orde Wingate’s wars in Burma and Palestine. In his recent visit to Israel in October 2023, Joe Biden cautioned against repeating America’s mistakes after 9/11, when the desire for vengeance led to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and to two decades of pointless, wasteful bloodshed. If Israel is overcome by rage in response to the crimes of Hamas, the consequences for its future could be even worse. The lessons of the past should be clear enough; the stakes are far too high.