Israel Has No Choice but to Fight On, by Bret Stephens
13 March 2024
In this article, New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens argues that Israel has no choice but to destroy Hamas as an effective fighting force. His essay imagines a conversation with an intelligent critic of that view, whose voice is in bold/italics.
Some excerpts:
Look, Hamas is a terrorist group whose leaders should face justice for the massacres of Oct. 7. But it isn’t Hamas’s bombs, missiles or artillery that have leveled Gaza. It’s Israel’s.
Right. And Hamas, which started the war, could put a halt to that rain of fire tomorrow. It rejected a six-week cease-fire that would have paused the fighting and allowed much more aid in exchange for the release of roughly 40 of the remaining 100 Israeli hostages. It could stop the fighting for good by simply surrendering.
Note: I have written to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, (Michigan, 12th District), a prominent Palestinian-American, to ask her to go to Gaza to mediate a cease-fire or end to the war which, after all, was started by and is maintained by a Palestinian government and its constituents. She may be able to convince her fellow Palestinians to release the hostages and cease their rocket attacks.
Hamas may not want to stop the fighting, but there’s little we can do about that. Israel can stop its assault, and thus spare Palestinian lives. And because Biden has leverage on Israel, he should use it.
The best way to get Hamas to stop fighting is to beat it. If Israel were to end the war now, with several Hamas battalions intact, at least four things would happen.
First, it would be impossible to set up a political authority in Gaza that isn’t Hamas: If the Palestinian Authority or local Gazans tried to do so, they wouldn’t live for long.
Second, Hamas would reconstitute its military force as Hezbollah did in Lebanon after the 2006 war with Israel — and Hamas has promised to repeat the attacks of Oct. 7 “a second, a third, a fourth” time.
Third, the Israeli hostages would be stuck in their awful captivity indefinitely.
Fourth, there would never be a Palestinian state. No Israeli government is going to agree to a Palestinian state in the West Bank if it risks resembling Gaza.
All that is speculative. The reality is that children are hungry, the sick aren’t getting medicine, innocent Palestinians are being killed, now. It’s wrong to avert theoretical harms by causing actual ones.
It might be more speculative if this weren’t the fifth major war that Hamas has provoked since it seized power in Gaza in 2007. After each war, Hamas’s capabilities have grown stronger and its ambitions bolder. At some point this had to end; for Israelis, Oct. 7 was that point.
Maybe, but why can’t Israel be much more judicious in its use of force?
Do you have any specific suggestions for how Israel can defeat Hamas while being more sparing of civilians?
I’m not a military expert.
I’ve noticed that whenever Israel’s critics lecture the country on better calibrating its use of force, they don’t have any concrete suggestions. Are Israelis smart enough to fight better, but too stupid to appreciate the diplomatic consequences of not doing so?
Comment on this article from Portland (in the Comments section):
What exactly do Israel's critics propose other than surrender to Hamas? It was the Palestinian government of Gaza that started this war, and if they want it to end, they should surrender and accept Israel's right to exist. A cease-fire is meaningless, for Hamas will only violate it again. Only a peace treaty, one that plainly accepts the legitimacy of Israel's existence, should be the goal of those who want an end to this war.
The entire article, and accompanying comments, are here.
Follow me on Substack, LinkedIn, Threads: npernickmich and Tribel: @nat385440b
I have another blog on Cancer and Medicine.
The index to these articles is here.
Email me at Nat@PathologyOutlines.com.
I also publish Notes at https://substack.com/note. Subscribers will automatically see my notes.