The View from Gaza

Israel is fighting for its existence and the Biden administration is trying to undermine the duly elected Israeli prime minister. Thus, to sow dissension in the Israeli ranks, the better to save Hamas.

One does not like to put it this way, but the Biden administration is now so thoroughly suffused with empathy for the Palestinian people that it is even building a landing pier in the South of Gaza, the better to deliver supplies to the besieged Hamas supporters.

Building a pier is building infrastructure for Hamas. And rewarding Hamas for October 7.

Joe Biden promised that this operation would not put boots on the ground in Gaza. Unfortunately, you cannot build a pier without putting boots on the ground. 

As a sidelight, two New York Times columnists have gone to press with markedly different analyses of the situation in Gaza. Bret Stephens supports Israel while Tommy Friedman carries water for the Biden administration and blames the problems on the Israeli prime minister.

Given that the Biden administration funded Hamas and Iran, you understand why a shill like Tommy Friedman is arguing that the fault lies with the Israeli prime minister.

Thinking more clearly than most Stephens blames Hamas for the devastation in Gaza. 

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.

If Hamas does not want to surrender, Israel has few other options short of beating 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.

But, keep in mind the vapid musings about a two state solution. It does not solve anything. Stephens speaks clearly:

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.

As for the supposedly innocent victims, the fault lies with Hamas:

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.

Are the Israelis being especially brutal? Are they failing to avoid civilian casualties? Would any other force do things differently?

The reality of urban warfare is that it’s exceptionally costly and difficult. The United States under Barack Obama and Donald Trump spent nine months helping Iraqi forces flatten the city of Mosul to defeat ISIS, with results that looked even worse than Gaza does today. I don’t remember calls for “Cease-Fire Now” then. Hamas has made it even more difficult for Israel because, instead of sheltering civilians in its immense network of tunnels, it shelters itself.

As for the aberrant notion that Israel is committing genocide, Stephens responds:

Well, since you’re alluding to the Holocaust, it surely can’t be in Israel’s interests to be seen perpetrating a version of it in Gaza. Just look at the worldwide explosion of antisemitism since Oct. 7.

That analogy is false and offensive on many levels. Israel is fighting a war it didn’t seek, against an enemy sworn to its destruction and holding scores of its citizens hostage. If Israel had wanted to wipe out Gazans as Germans sought to wipe out Jews, it could have done so on the first day of the war. Israel is fighting a tough war against an evil enemy that puts its own civilians in harm’s way. Maybe there should be more public pressure on Hamas to surrender than on Israel to save Hamas from the consequences of its actions.

Some have argued that Hamas is an idea and that you cannot defeat an idea. Stephens responds:

By that logic, the Allies should have spared Germany because National Socialism was also an idea. You may not be able to kill an idea but you can defang it, just as you can persuade future generations that some ideas have terrible consequences for those who espouse them.

Stephens concludes that the Biden administration should help Israel win the war, “decisively so that Israelis and Palestinians can someday win the peace.”

And then we have the other side of these arguments, presented by Tommy Friedman, all-around Biden apologist. One understands, because one has said so often enough, that Tommy is working for the Biden administration. He is working to undermine Israeli resolve and to let Hamas survive. And, he wants to assure that no one hold Biden to account for the events in Israel and Gaza.

Tommy’s view is that Israel needed to have a plan for the after effects of its military. He also believes that the Palestinian Authority should be allowed to govern Gaza, a dubious proposal at a time when the PA has just joined with Hamas in the campaign to destroy the state of Israel.

Anyway, when someone attacks you and you decide to fight back, do you await the moment when you have figured out the aftermath of the war? Since when?

In my view, there is only one thing worse for Israel, not to mention Gazans, than a Gaza controlled by Hamas: That’s a Gaza where nobody is in charge, a Gaza where the world will expect Israel to provide order but Israel cannot or will not, so it becomes a permanent, grinding humanitarian crisis.

Tommy is happy to pay lip service to Israel’s just cause, but the thrust of his argument, such as it is, emphasizes how badly the Israelis are doing. In his largely warped mind the fault lies with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. With allies like that, why do you need enemies?

Anyway, according to Tommy, no one is in charge of the rubble that once was called Gaza:

…basically no one was providing day-to-day governance for the civilians left behind, save for a few hundred Hamas fighters and local gang leaders.

One should understand that the Palestinians have been militating for self-determination, as an adjunct to their wish to destroy the state of Israel and to kill as many Jews as possible:

I immediately understood how a chaotic scene unfolded over food distribution two days earlier. Israel is breaking Hamas’s control yet refusing to take responsibility with its own forces for civilian administration in Gaza — and refusing to enlist the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has thousands of employees in Gaza, to perform that task. It is behaving this way because Netanyahu does not want the P.A. to become the Palestinian government in the West Bank and Gaza, which might give it a chance at credibility to grow into an independent Palestinian state there one day.

Of course the PA is allied with Hamas, which makes Tommy’s reasoning even more lame than usual. It is not about whether the PA wants to become the Palestinian government. Now that it is associated directly with Hamas there is no chance that that will happen.

Then Tommy indulges some reveries about other situations in other countries. Analogies are dangerous because they cause people to ignore the specificity of the current problem. They allow leaders to indulge wish fulfillments, to the effect that the Palestinian Authority will become a responsible steward of the West Bank and Gaza.

And yet, this assumption forms the basis for Biden administration policy toward Israel and Gaza. 

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