(Dobbs) The Cost Of Restraint, Higher Than The Cost of Killing Hamas
As heartbreaking as it is, it is Israel’s will.
“Every Hamas member is a dead man.” Those words were spoken by Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu on Wednesday, the same day that he and his political rivals formed a coalition government, a “war cabinet,” so that Israel can fight its murderous enemy with a single voice.
What that voice is saying is, it will be a fight to the death. Netanyahu and his partners across the political spectrum have been crystal clear. The old approach in every previous conflict is dead: taking out key members of Hamas, soberly choking off their supplies until they agree to a new ceasefire. In all the retaliatory strikes Israel has staged in the past against Hamas, none has been a full-throated attack. Now that is history. The hundreds of thousands of Israeli troops dispatched to Gaza have different marching orders now than they ever had before. The terrorists of Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities. Kill Hamas.
But they cannot kill Hamas without killing a lot of innocent Palestinians in the process. Whether from air assaults or an invasion, the misery inevitably will mushroom, and it will spread far beyond the militants who started this war. With water and electricity and medical supplies cut off, life will become even more unbearable than it already is. Without electrical power, raw sewage has started seeping into the streets, life-sustaining hospital machines eventually will stop running. The Red Cross says hospitals in Gaza “risk turning into morgues.” An estimated 425,000 citizens have lost their homes. No matter how many Palestinians heed Israel’s warning and evacuate to the southern part of the Gaza Strip, more civilians will die, women and children among them. Especially since Gaza officials have told people it’s a trick and not to comply.
A Palestinian journalist, Fadi Abu Shammalah, writing for The New York Times from a refugee camp in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, penned a column yesterday with the title, “What More Must the Children of Gaza Suffer?”, and began with this first-person scenario: “The bomb exploded a few hundred feet from where I was sitting with my wife, Safa, and my three children, Ali, Karam and Adam. Ali, 13, screamed; Karam, 10, buried his face in my chest; and Adam, 5, burst into tears.” My heart has to bleed especially for Ali, Karan, and Adam.
This isn’t their fault. But it is their fate.
Because as heartbreaking as it is, it is Israel’s will.
An analyst for The Times of Israel, Haviv Rettig Gur, explained that kind of thinking: “A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot.”
A senior fellow at a think tank in Jerusalem, Yossi Klein Halevi, wrote in The Atlantic, “The devil we know is no longer preferable to uncertainty.” It was in the vacuum of uncertainty that the terrorists from Hamas could strike. “The immediate need to end its rule over Gaza has surpassed the question of what will follow.”
What will follow will come with unthinkable human costs. But Israel already this week has suffered unthinkable human costs of its own. The conundrum is captured here by syndicated political cartoonist Jeff Danziger.
What it comes down to for Israel, easily the superior force in this war, is choosing the lesser of two evils, the lesser of two horrible evils: accepting the collateral damage that comes with an unsparing blitz against Hamas, or leaving Hamas intact.
There is a parallel to the attacks against America on 9/11. If President Bush had not sent troops into Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda might still have safe haven there, plotting more monstrous massacres against us.
There is a parallel too to President Truman’s decision in 1945 to drop two atomic bombs on Japan. Although in retrospect it has been reported that some high military officials had concluded that Japan soon would surrender anyway, Truman believed that as high as the death toll from the bombs could be, it could be even higher if Japan’s brutal belligerence were allowed to persist.
A seasoned firsthand witness to war, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, wrote yesterday, “There will be no optimal solution in Gaza, any more than there was in Afghanistan or Iraq.” There never is. “Street fighting,” he predicted, “might well spill over into an uprising in the West Bank and a war on the Lebanon border as well.”
That would be a triumph for Hamas, no matter how high the toll, which takes things back to the lesser of two horrible evils.
American diplomat Elliott Abrams, who has deep experience in that part of the world, told a briefing this week that the evil of letting Hamas live is not an option, because they will never relent on their resolve to push the Jews into the sea, no matter the cost to their own people. “They’re perfectly happy to see the entire population sacrificed.”
The fighters from Hamas are like suicide bombers with the entire population of two million people strapped to their chests.
What complicates everything are the hostages— still reportedly about 150 of them, Israelis and foreigners, civilians and soldiers, held as human shields in Gaza. That’s why even Secretary of State Blinken, during his trip to Israel, yesterday sought some level of restraint, saying, “It’s important to take every possible precaution to prevent harming civilians.”
At the same time, President Biden was very clear in his own warning to others who might come to the aid of Hamas: “Let me say again, to any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t. Don’t.” In Israel today, he is cast as a hero.
Israel does now speak with one voice. In his Atlantic essay, Yossi Halevi said that “overnight, Hamas has transformed Israel from a society that was tearing itself apart to an unprecedented extent into a society united as it has rarely been. Now the old Israel is back.”
That’s why Netanyahu could say, “Every Hamas member is a dead man.” That today is the unified voice of Israel. It is now what Israelis want. They know the stakes. But they also know that although they are inflicting a humanitarian tragedy, the cost of restraint would be even higher than the cost of killing Hamas.
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.
Greg you clearly and concisely said it all. Thank you
Greg, you have become the voice of reason and authority I turn to in this terrible crisis, just as Heather Cox Richardson is for American politics.