Hamas & Israel

minutemenX said:

October 7 is a staged movie; Holocaust is a myth. We heard this before. I know what sort of people are saying this. Any rational discussion with such people is impossible. Thus, Israel has the ability and the will to defend itself.

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minutemenX said:

Inglorious Bastard said:

So no. Again, October 7 is not unprovoked.

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October 7 is a staged movie; Holocaust is a myth. We heard this before. I know what sort of people are saying this. Any rational discussion with such people is impossible. Thus, Israel has the ability and the will to defend itself.

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wiinston17 said:

I never understood this logic.

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Foolish notions about Israel are being repeated morning and night. Relayed by high international authorities. Validated by respectable organizations, among them Action Against Hunger, which I helped found. They are echoed by one of my friends, the Israeli author David Grossman, who 30 years ago helped me launch La Règle du Jeu, a journal that supports every struggle for freedom. Yet they remain foolish notions. Three examples:

• Israel is “reoccupying” Gaza. True, two ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have said, without shame, that they dream of doing so. But this isn’t the strategy of the Israel Defense Forces or the position of the government. Whether one likes Mr. Netanyahu or not, the least one can do is listen.

On Fox News, on Aug. 7, he said he wants the IDF to drive out Hamas and take control of Gaza—but “without administering it” and handing it over to a “civil government” as soon as possible. “We do not want to keep Gaza, we do not want to govern Gaza.”

How could he be clearer? How could he better say that his war aims don’t contradict those of Ariel Sharon, who left the Palestinian enclave in 2005?

One can be horrified by this war. One can find that it causes, on both sides, far too many victims. One can wonder if everything is being done to bring back the hostages. But one can’t say just anything. One can’t keep repeating, ad nauseam, in a perpetual “J’accuse!” tone that Israel is occupying Gaza.

• Israel is using famine as a “weapon of war” in Gaza. Look at the hundreds of trucks that have passed inspection, with Israelis ensuring they are not also carrying weapons. These trucks don’t wait at border crossings. They wait inside Gaza. And then what happens?

At one point, the United Nations agencies charged with aid distribution couldn’t prevent them from being looted by Hamas or gangs linked to it. Then Israel, with the U.S., set up the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, to which the U.N. agencies replied: No thanks, the starving can wait, we won’t touch that bread, we will not collaborate with those people. Then Israel agreed to work with the official agencies if they purged their ranks of Hamas activists. The agencies replied that Gaza was too dangerous.

Then Israel offered to open humanitarian corridors 10 hours a day in areas including Al-Mawasi, Deir al-Balah and Gaza City. The agencies demanded Israeli military convoys, even as they accused the Israeli military of engineering a famine.

Who, honestly, must be blamed for this tragic failure? And who will break this vicious circle of bad faith, in which, as usual, civilians pay the price?

• Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. True, there are pyramids of the dead. Children killed in the flower of their age. And not enough pressure on Hamas and its sponsors to stop this atrocious war. But words have meaning.

To say “genocide” means a plan—a deliberate, targeted initiative to destroy a people. That isn’t what the Israeli army is doing. Perhaps it is waging the war badly—though who would do better in an asymmetric conflict when the enemy’s goal isn’t to minimize casualties on its own side but to maximize them, so that every martyr is a trophy and a reason to continue a fight whose aim is not a state for the Palestinians, but no state at all for the Israelis?

A genocidal army doesn’t take two years to win a war in a territory the size of Las Vegas. A genocidal army doesn’t send SMS warnings before firing or facilitate the passage of those trying to escape the strikes. A genocidal army wouldn’t evacuate, every month, hundreds of Palestinian children suffering from rare diseases or cancer, sending them to hospitals in Abu Dhabi as part of a medical airlift set up right after Oct. 7.

To speak of genocide in Gaza is an offense to common sense, a maneuver to demonize Israel, and an insult to the victims of genocides past and present.

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For centuries, Jews have been the victims of pogroms and racist violence, culminating in but not ending with the Holocaust. The murderers rarely paid for their actions. Jewish blood was cheap. Even most perpetrators of the Holocaust were never brought to justice. For decades, the Palestinian Authority gave so-called welfare payments to terrorists who had killed Jews—the “pay for slay” policy. Those who died killing Jews were considered martyrs and their families compensated. The murderers and rapists who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre seemed to think they’d get away with it. They took videos of the atrocities they committed and bragged about killing Jews wherever they could find them.

But this time was different. Israel fought back and made the perpetrators and their supporters pay a heavy price. Many believe the price has been too heavy, especially for innocent civilians in Gaza. We don’t know the precise number of completely innocent victims. Gaza’s Health Ministry, run by Hamas, doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants when it claims that more than 60,000 Gazans have been killed since Oct. 7, 2023. There are good reasons to doubt the figure and even better reasons to doubt the claim that fewer than 10,000 of them were combatants. The criteria for categorizing someone as a combatant aren’t black and white, especially in a war waged by terrorist groups. There is a continuum from combatant to civilian.

On the clear end of the combatant side are the terrorists themselves: members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other designated terrorist groups. But there are also “civilians” who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre by hiding rocket launchers in their homes, holding Israeli hostages, digging and supplying the terror tunnels, and engaging in other activities that make them combatants in the moral sense if not in the strictly legal sense.

Although the Gaza Health Ministry doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians, it does distinguish men from women and children. By listing them separately, the organization seeks to imply that women and children can’t be terrorists. But they often are—and they kill Jews as other combatants do. Many combatants are women, and many are 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds who fire rockets and shoot guns.

The number of truly innocent civilians who have been killed is probably far lower than the figures featured in much of the media. Whatever the actual death toll among innocent children and other civilians, it is too high. But Hamas must bear responsibility for most of these deaths as well, because Hamas started the war and because it uses schools, hospitals, mosques and other civilian structures to hide combatants.

After Israel suffered the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, it sent a message of deterrence to those who perpetrated the mass killing. Although Israel didn’t target innocent civilians, it took extraordinary measures to kill every terrorist it could who had participated in the atrocities of Oct. 7, as well as their leaders. Israel inevitably caused considerable collateral damage, namely killing innocent civilians, despite its efforts to minimize such casualties. Hamas welcomed the deaths of Gazan civilians, knowing that these deaths would hurt Israel in the court of public opinion. The media played into Hamas’s hands by featuring casualties without context.

It’s unclear whether the Israeli policy will deter future massacres, because Hamas brags that it loves death as the Israelis love life. What is a democracy to do when its terrorist enemies threaten to repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7 over and over again?

Winston Churchill recognized that strategic bombing of German towns and cities was necessary in some cases to stop Nazi aggression. Harry S. Truman took a similar approach when he ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, recognizing that civilian casualties would be necessary to deter the Japanese from further aggression. An important effect of the bombings, even if not the sole purpose, was to demoralize the population and turn them against their leaders. History has generally not condemned the Allies for their successful strategy in ending the war, though the civilian deaths they caused were intended rather than collateral. Yet Israel is being condemned despite its extraordinary efforts to reduce civilian casualties.

Israel must treat Hamas and Islamic Jihad the way the Allies treated the Nazis and the imperial Japanese. These terrorists must be totally defeated, and only then should their cities be rebuilt, as German and Japanese cities were. Just as peace wouldn’t have been possible in 1945 if the Nazis and imperialists were allowed to survive and remain in control, so too Hamas and Islamic Jihad must not be allowed to survive.

European countries, the United Nations, the mainstream media, academics and the left will all condemn Israel if it continues its campaign against Hamas. But the message Israel has sent to the world—that Jewish blood is no longer cheap, and those who shed it will pay a heavy price—is a historical imperative. It is long overdue and made necessary by centuries of people around the world tolerating the shedding of Jewish blood without consequence.

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