Today you can look at photographs of devastation and never quite know which war they’re from. Israel? Ukraine? You can’t really tell whose cities have been reduced to ruin and who’s been buried in the wreckage. The sorrowful scenes from both wars are almost identical. Israel is raining hellfire on Gaza and Russia is raining hellfire on Ukraine.
But Hamas, a terrorist organization, attacked Israel. Israel is fighting back. Russia, a terrorist state, attacked Ukraine. Ukraine is fighting back. As President Biden said in his Oval Office speech last week, both American allies are democracies whose aggressors are out to “completely annihilate” them. Both are the victims of terrorists. To each, fighting back is a matter of survival.
So they’re the same, and yet they’re not.
Over the past 20 months, I have condemned Russia for indiscriminately firing mortar and missiles, bombs and artillery, at non-combatants and non-military targets. It has killed and maimed. It has displaced hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. It has left an immeasurable mass of rubble. Yet not a word of remorse from the Kremlin. Only more aggression, more bogus rationalizations, more lies.
Israel’s in a different place. It justifies every strike as a military target when it finds terrorist leaders from Hamas hiding among their people. It says nothing is indiscriminate. To me, it is a plausible explanation. In the years I covered the region, Israel had informers all over the Palestinian map. This week CNN even did an interview with the son of a founder of Hamas, who later became a key inside source for Israel.
So if the strikes are based on accurate inside information, and if Prime Minister Netanyahu is to be believed, Israel “already eliminated thousands of terrorists.” Yesterday its forces stepped it up even more.
But the strikes also kill non-combatants, and that is beyond tragic. Hamas says there are close to 7,000 dead so far, another 15,000-plus injured. And conditions on the ground are unthinkable. Despite impossibly high demand for medical care, most Gaza hospitals are out of electricity, out of fuel, and out of service. Where doctors can still treat people, reportedly some are working without morphine or painkillers.
In much of the world’s eyes, Israel, as if it hadn’t been provoked, is doing the same thing to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that Russia does in Ukraine. But it was provoked. As the longtime Middle East envoy to several U.S. presidents, Dennis Ross, wrote in a commentary yesterday in The New York Times, “After Oct. 7, there are many Israelis who believe their survival as a state is at stake. That may sound like an exaggeration, but to them, it’s not.”
I am not missing the inconsistencies here but I don’t come down hard on the Jewish state. I am as heartbroken about the pounding that innocent Palestinians are taking, particularly the children, as I am about the pounding the Israelis took three weeks ago and, despite the release of a handful of hostages, the dread that the estimated 220 hostages still trapped somewhere in Gaza must feel every day that they are in the hands of their enemy.
That’s what makes me mourn. Here’s what makes me worry: every time you see a photograph of a Palestinian child in Gaza lined up for food or sorting through rubble or weeping at the death of a parent, that child is a potential future terrorist. That’s how terrorist organizations work: when people feel powerless and their fates are taken from their hands— when they are disenfranchised, when they are attacked, when they feel oppressed— they are ripe for recruitment. The terrorists give them purpose. The terrorists give them power.
There have been frightful casualties in the Gaza Strip and it’s conceivable that some of them were Israeli mistakes. Bad things happen in the heat of war. That is no excuse but I say from experience as a war correspondent, it is an accurate if doleful explanation. What we can’t forget is, what Hamas did was no mistake. It was organized and it was deliberate. Its fighters went from house to house, they pulled people from their beds, they kidnapped and killed, they even posted pictures of their victims’ corpses online. It was terrorism.
Israel’s the one that was ambushed. Israel’s the one that lost more than 1,400 people, non-combatants who were targeted, in a single day. Israel is doing what it has to do. It is going after Hamas not to scare it— that has never worked in the past and the price of that failed policy was the terrorist attacks on October 7th— but to erase it from the face of the earth. Pulling that off might not be possible and inescapably will be bloody for both sides, but they have to try. Otherwise, Hamas is patient. If Israel doesn’t cut it off at the head, the terrorists will come back again. And again. And again.
For some world leaders, that still doesn’t give Israel a pass. At an emergency summit last weekend in Cairo, Jordan’s western-leaning King Abdullah, who has an almost 30-year-old peace treaty with his neighbor, said, “Anywhere else, attacking civilian infrastructure and deliberately starving an entire population of food, water, basic necessities would be condemned, accountability would be enforced.” Leaders from Saudi Arabia and Egypt also denounced Israel. They claim there’s a double standard in the West, but until they concede that Israel has a right to protect itself— which is a cornerstone of international law— and until they denounce Russia for systematically and unsympathetically laying waste to Ukraine, they are guilty of double standards themselves.
For some citizens of the world though, there is only one standard: anti-semitism. This appalling photo from Poland, where more Jews died in Hitler’s camps than anywhere else, hammers that home.
The bottom line is, people are going to blame who they’re going to blame.
The pitiful devastation last week at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City is a good example. Israel and the United States have offered photographs, audio intercepts, and forensic evidence that show, in spite of initial conclusions that an Israeli missile was to blame, apparently it actually was a rocket fired by Hamas-allied Islamic Jihad that went bad. Hamas has offered nothing to pin it on Israel. But despite that, and despite the rational conclusion that Israel would have nothing to gain by firing on a hospital, it is still the one catching flak.
Commentator Dennis Prager wrote a piece about this conflict that boils it down to something sad but simple. It is, he said, “probably the easiest conflict in the world to explain. It may be the hardest to solve, but it is the easiest to explain. In a nutshell, it's this: One side wants the other side dead.” And he asked a pair of rhetorical questions: “If, tomorrow, Israel laid down its arms and announced, 'We will fight no more,' what would happen? And if the Arab countries around Israel laid down their arms and announced, 'We will fight no more,' what would happen? In the first case, there would be an immediate destruction of the state of Israel and the mass murder of its Jewish population. In the second case, there would be peace the next day.”
In his Times column, Ambassador Ross put it even more bluntly: “Ending the war now would mean Hamas would win.”
Neither is going to happen. Until one side is eliminated, both will fight on. Some stories don’t have a happy ending. This one won’t. This one can’t.
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.
Excellent piece. Thank you Greg
I have passed this on. Excellent. Hope you get more subscribers 😉