Thursday, December 07, 2023

GREG DOBBS

  

(Dobbs) I wish Israel could have found a way to kill its enemies but no one else.

Everyone comes together when faced by a common threat.

GREG DOBBS

DEC 7

 

 

I’m afraid Israel could win the battle but lose the war.

To use the lingo of the Israel Defense Forces, they are “eliminating” Hamas leaders and eviscerating their capacity to wage war again. I support that goal. On October 7th, an estimated 1,200 Israelis were murdered. Women were raped, people’s limbs were amputated, eyes were gouged out, sometimes before these pour souls were slaughtered.

That’s what we knew before this week. Then, at a conference Monday at the U.N. in New York, it got even worse. 


Witnesses testified to what they found when they got to the scenes of Hamas’s crimes. A man who helped collect victims’ corpses spoke of “horrific things I saw with my own eyes.” Horrific things like a woman’s body with “nails and different objects in her female organs,” another victim’s genitals so dismembered that “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.” He spoke of one woman he found “half-naked, from the waist down. She was shot in the back of her head. When we turned her around she had an open grenade in her hand.,” presumably planted to kill others who entered the room. A military reservist who had to prepare bodies for burial described several women “who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” She told of others whose faces were butchered, or who had several gunshots to their heads.


Hundreds more, as we know, were kidnapped. Most are still in the wretched captivity of Hamas. Israel’s army says that at least seven of those in captivity have died. According to unverified reports, the number is even higher than that.

Israel cannot afford to leave Hamas alive to do this again. Ever.

As dreadfully costly as it has been to Palestinians and to Israel itself, it has made some progress toward that goal. The Israel Defense Forces have killed several top commanders from Hamas. Hamas itself has confirmed it. But as they die, other military leaders are waiting in the wings. Israel estimates that Hamas has had at least 30,000 fighters in its forces, maybe closer to 40,000. Many have been eliminated, but far from most. Now, as upwards of two million of Gaza’s civilians keep looking for safe refuge south of Gaza City, Hamas terrorists are concealing themselves in the cover of those non-combatants.


The odds are, some will be identified, pursued, and killed, but some won’t.

Fresh ground fighters are waiting in the wings too. In the West Bank, the other Palestinian territory, where people for years have felt abused by Israeli soldiers and police and persecuted by fundamentalist Israeli settlers who claim that God gave them their land, now they are being radicalized by what they see in Gaza. A New York Times reporter covering protests there described one chant that echoed across the crowds: “The people want Hamas! The people want Hamas!”


This bodes badly for Israel.

What’s more, when we see photos of children in Gaza who are going through hell, it’s not hard to imagine them being recruited into next generation of terrorists. Or in some cases, into today’s.


This is what U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin meant last weekend when he warned Israel, “If you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.” Regrettably, it might be too late to stop that. It is my experience covering conflicts where once there were deep divisions in a nation’s population that everyone comes together when faced by a common threat. Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank see that common threat as Israel.

This also bodes badly for the Jewish state.

There’s another way too that the Israelis might win the battle but lose the war: public opinion. In the first days of Israel’s response to the massacre, public sentiment seemed to be on its side. People understood Israel’s motive: to punish the perpetrators. But ten days in, when a missile struck near a hospital in Gaza City, news reports went viral with a claim by Hamas that the missile was Israel’s and that hundreds were dead. Before long, evidence pointed toward a Palestinian rocket that misfired, not an Israeli missile, but it was too late to erase the impression. Public opinion turned against Israel and hasn’t turned back.

To the contrary, it is getting worse. Now, the Israel Defense Forces are trying to get non-combatants who’ve already evacuated south from Gaza City, some with little more than the clothes on their backs, to get on the move again. Israel is chasing the terrorists and wherever it finds them, it will strike. But civilians are running out of places to flee. A U.N. official in Gaza said this week that he can’t even tell people anymore where to go to be safe. 

To Israel’s credit, it is dropping leaflets from the air, making robocalls in Arabic, and putting notices on Arab social media, telling Palestinians to get out of the areas about to be targeted. It doesn’t save every life but it saves some.

By contrast, Hamas never made robocalls on October 7th to the attendees at the music festival, where more than 250 victims died, or to the kibbutzes it attacked, or anywhere else, to warn people to get out. Its goal was not to save civilians. It was to kidnap and kill them.

And evidently, from that testimony Monday at the U.N., to mutilate them. The suffering in Israel on October 7th was epic. But with the scale of the suffering in Gaza, points like those are lost. 

If any of us watches what’s happening and doesn’t feel deep pity for the blameless Palestinians who have lost everything, we’re missing something. I wish Israel could have been more “surgical” in its attacks. I wish Israel could have found a way to kill its enemies but no one else. It’s easier though to be an armchair general than a general in the field, charged with eliminating adversaries who, as evidence now shows, operate among the innocents. Maybe what I wish for just wasn’t possible.

The dilemma is that both sides see this as an existential battle. For Hamas, the challenge is to stay alive. For Israel, there are two. One is, their long-sought alliances with western-oriented Arab states are in trouble, if not already in tatters, and might not be reparable. The other is, the more Palestinians they kill, the more enemies they make. Not just in Gaza, but in much of the world.

That’s what it means to win the battle but lose the war.

 

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Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.