(Dobbs) Blaming Israel Might Not Make Sense. There Is No Upside.
A Palestinian poet says, “They are treating us like stones.”
First, the hospital. The Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Palestinian patients were being treated there, Palestinian families were being sheltered there. Then yesterday, a missile or a bomb, an explosion, hundreds dead.
It’s not inaccurate to say, the world jumped to one conclusion: it must have come from Israel. I certainly can’t say it didn’t. I’m not there. But sometimes the question to ask is, what makes sense? So ask yourself, what could possibly be the upside for Israel to bomb a hospital? The catastrophe can’t help but turn public opinion against the Jewish state. It scuttled President Biden’s scheduled summit with Egypt’s president, Jordan’s king, and the head of the Palestinian Authority. They don’t even want to sit down and talk with Israel’s most steadfast ally.
But what if Israel’s explanation is the true story? What if Islamic Jihad fired rockets toward Tel Aviv, and one malfunctioned in the worst possible place? Israel’s military says it has forensic evidence that the rocket wasn’t theirs, and that it will release a recording of a conversation it intercepted, with one Islamic Jihadist telling another that the rocket came from his side and it misfired. With weaponry that’s sent from sometimes shaky sources, it wouldn’t be the first time.
It’s relevant to remember that Israel dropped leaflets to warn Gazans to flee before it starts its full-throated attack. By contrast, the first warning 11 days ago of the attack by Hamas was a barrage of rockets. Like I asked, why would Israel stab itself in the back? There is no upside to attack the hospital. None.
Maybe one way to reach a conclusion about Israel’s motives and Israel’s morals is to ask, how many Palestinian hostages have you heard about in Israel’s custody? How many Palestinian civilians did you hear about who Israeli forces pulled out of their cars and shot, how many did you hear about that Israel targeted at a music festival?
The answer to every question is zero. Those are the kinds of atrocities— targeting civilians, slaughtering bystanders, taking hostages— that we know Hamas did commit. Just as the United States invaded Afghanistan to kill the terrorists who waged the attacks against it on 9/11, Israel is invading Gaza to kill the terrorists who waged the attacks against it on October 7th. Just 11 days ago.
There is no denying, blameless Palestinian civilians— women and men, the young and the elderly, the infirm and the disabled— are victims, and what happened at the hospital produced far too many more. The global charity Save The Children reported yesterday, before the hospital tragedy, that more than a thousand Palestinian kids had been killed in this war. But for Israel, as unspeakably dreadful as that is, if it doesn’t want another October 7th, there is no other way out. There is no way to cut off the head of Hamas without costing innocent Palestinians dearly.
I am not oblivious to their suffering. A writer named Mosab Abu Toha penned an essay about his own trauma as a Palestinian under fire by an adamant enemy.
“Do they not know that we have the same number of eyes and ears, the same number of body parts? That we all came into this world after our mothers gave birth to us? That we laugh at the same jokes in different languages and curse when our favorite team loses? That we have fears and tears?” He bemoans that Palestinians are regarded as if their lives have no value. “They are treating us like stones.”
It can break your heart. It should. Scenes from the hospital should break it even more.
But from the Israeli side, it’s Hamas, the Palestinian terror group, that threw the first stones. The challenge of ending its rule is existential enough that the Israelis have undertaken an operation that they know will cost the Palestinians dearly but that they also know will cost Israel dearly too.
Every Israeli soldier on the ground in Gaza will know that he or she might not come out alive. As I have written before, they will be fighting in Hamas’s own neighborhood where the enemy knows the tunnels to get around and the safe places to hide. The Israelis don’t. Despite their tools and their reputation as a superior fighting force, that makes them an underdog. What’s worse, from what we’ve learned since October 7th, they aren’t immune to error. What we’ve also learned is, Hamas is more formidable than Israel ever knew.
It will be the worst kind of urban warfare. Hamas has had time to prepare, there is no element of surprise. Israeli troops will fight in house-to-house combat. They will face time bombs, trip wires, booby traps. As I have seen with my own eyes elsewhere, a well-placed grenade dropped from above can take out a tank and kill every human being inside. There might be snipers concealed in the rubble. There might be suicide bombers around every corner. Since Hamas fighters live where they’ll be fighting, they can hide among civilians still stuck in the war zone and Israeli soldiers can’t always tell who’s who.
And they go in knowing that there will be human shields. That’s how Hamas works. Israel now says the number of hostages is close to 200. Every one of those lives depends on how the Israelis execute their invasion. Too aggressive and it can leave every hostage dead. It won’t be surprising if Hamas executes one or more after the agony at the hospital. But too careful and Israel can fail in its mission.
And still, and still, even the most efficient operation by the Israeli Defense Forces will carry no guarantee of success for that mission. That’s because some of Hamas’s terrorists inevitably joined the hundreds of thousands of civilians who heeded Israel’s warnings and fled to the south.
What this means is, Hamas is no longer just concentrated in Gaza City. So Israeli aircraft have hit a convoy heading away from the war zone, they’ve bombed Gaza’s small southernmost city, Khan Younis, they’ve struck the town of Rafah, close to the crossing to Egypt. It increases the danger for the refugees, but it also increases the danger that decimating Hamas in Gaza City doesn’t finish the job.
And, there are growing signs that threats against Israel from outside the Gaza Strip will grow, especially in the aftermath of the horror at the hospital.
Already Israeli troops have exchanged gunshots and rocket fire with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, which straddles Israel’s northern border. There have been lethal clashes with Palestinians on the West Bank, which edges up against the heart of Jerusalem. And yesterday, Iran’s foreign minister warned, “If the war crimes against the Palestinians are not immediately stopped, other multiple fronts will open and this is inevitable.”
For Israel, the war has gone from bad to worse. The war for control of Gaza, the war for world opinion. I wrote four days ago that given what Israel’s trying to accomplish, more can go wrong than right. At this perilous point, that’s what’s happening.
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.
Hope lies in the prospect that the decent Palestinian people will somehow finger the Hamas amongst them and help get them out of their otherwise peaceful existence. This seems possible for we hear first hand reports from the front lines in the news coverage, from the refugees.
I am grateful you are focussed on this near daily, and you remind us of how difficult it is go know what’s true in events like this hospital bombing. I too have a simple hueristic---“why would Israel do this?”
But Iran has an endgame and will manufacture false conclusionz to serve their propaganda objectives.