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(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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!”
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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.
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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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