They make a desolation and call it peace. – Tacitus
Shortly after the October 7th invasion of Israel by Hamas terrorists, I posted this piece calling for a measured response from Israel. Alas, the opposite has happened. I say “alas,” because I’m pro-Israel and that country’s response to the bloody deeds of Hamas will, I strongly believe, make the future worse for Israel. I care deeply about the welfare of innocent Palestinians, but even if you give not a tinker’s “damn!” about them, Israel’s response is still the wrong one for Israel and Israelis.
Israeli leaders fantasize about the total destruction of Hamas while its leaders sip tea in Qatar and untold numbers of terrorist fighters have gone south toward Egypt and blended in with the crowds biding their time. Meanwhile, the devastation in Gaza has reached horrifying levels. According to independent sources (i.e., not Hamas), some 21,000 Gaza residents, including 8,000 children, have been killed in the Israeli bombing and invasion. U.S. intelligence says those figures probably undercount the dead. The city is all but flattened, with an unknowable number of dead beneath the rubble.
Israeli rage is understandable, but, as I said last time, rage makes for bad policy. Its response has already further hardened the resolve of doctrinaire pro-Palestinians throughout the world. But many countries, including Muslim and Arab ones, harbor countless people who don’t want Israel destroyed, prefer peace to war and were revolted by the Hamas atrocities. Now they’re revolted by Israel’s far greater ones.
For example, according to the New York Times of December 21st, Israel has used 2,000-pound U.S.-made bombs on areas of Gaza it had previously designated as safe for civilians. Gaza residents, said the Times, then moved to those areas thinking them safe, only to be obliterated by the most powerful explosives yet used in this war. When asked, a spokesperson for the Israeli government didn’t deny their use against civilians.
Likewise, the Israeli government has made no secret of its denial of the basics of survival to Palestinians in Gaza, a clear violation of international law. According to Human Rights Watch, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said, “We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and must act accordingly.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Energy Minister Israel Katz have said the same.
It won’t be short-lived. Israel’s deputy chief of Civil Administration in Gaza, Col. Yogev Bar-Shesht made this promise: “Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.”
The war goes on, the dead pile up, the buildings come down with no end in sight. The international community, including staunch Israeli ally Joe Biden, beg Israel to show restraint, but they’re just shouting in the wind. Israel goes its own way.
And that way leads to the further marginalization of Israel in the community of nations. It tallies its own dead at the hands of Hamas – about 1,200 – and those of Palestinians in Gaza – 21,000 and counting – and finds the scales unbalanced in favor of the Palestinians. It turns potential allies into fence-sitters and fence-sitters into enemies. Most who support Israel see the folly, the long-term consequences for Israel’s well-being, but the Netanyahu government sees only its own rage.
As if to make the insanity of that government’s policy still clearer, the Prime Minister himself penned this astonishing op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Its purpose is to outline his three “prerequisites for peace” in Gaza.
Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized. These are the three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza.
Does Netanyahu inhabit a fantasy world or is he simply cynical to a degree that’s unfathomable to the rest of us? Whatever the case, we must understand his prerequisites.
First, Hamas will not be destroyed. Israel has recently made to Hamas three offers of cease-fire, each of which has been rejected. Why would any organization facing destruction do such a thing? The simple fact is that, as I predicted in my linked-to piece, Israel will not destroy Hamas. It will not because it cannot. Israel’s response to the October 7th terrorism is a gift, the best recruiting tool Hamas has seen in ages. The beat will go on.
Second, Gaza will not be “demilitarized.” If nothing else, Israel will occupy the strip and the level of its military presence there will be unprecedented, at least for the foreseeable future. And Hamas will move elsewhere.
Third and most importantly, his idea that Palestinians will be “deradicalized” strongly suggests a Netanyahu entirely untethered from reality. What Israel has been doing in Gaza and will continue doing will only intensify Palestinians’ hatred of Israel. Face it, they’re still animated by Zionist ethnic cleansing of the British Mandate 76 years ago. The ongoing slaughter of tens of thousands of their friends and relatives will not soon – perhaps not ever – be forgotten, nor should it be.
Perhaps Netanyahu should cast his mind back to 1982 when Israel attacked Lebanon in order to destroy Hezbollah there. Then as now, it wracked up an impressive body count (19,000 killed), earned international outrage and condemnation, allowed the slaughter in the Sabra and Shatila camps, etc. That was all horrible, but surely all’s well that ends well. After all, just as Netanyahu now says will happen to Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah was destroyed, Lebanon is demilitarized and Palestinians there have been “deradicalized,” right?
Er, no. Actually, the opposite is true, a fact Netanyahu well knows. That means his pretense that Israel is in any way promoting his three “prerequisites for peace” is a nothing but a cynical sham.
Supporting that conclusion is the fact that, last summer, Israeli security had evidence from its own sources, corroborated by American satellite images, indicating that Hamas was planning an attack on Israeli kibbutzim. But the Netanyahu government did nothing either to alert kibbutz residents or to guard against the attack. Now some are asking whether the government saw the attacks as an excuse to do what it had long wanted – destroy Gaza, ethnically cleanse it of Palestinians and expand the Jewish state there.
We’ll never know the answer to that, but what we do know is that, if those are Israel’s “prerequisites for peace,” peace will never come.
And whatever takes its place we’ll simply call “a desolation.”
This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
