(Dobbs) They Will Not Board That Train Again
“Our moral test… is to continue to distinguish between enemies and innocents.”
A man stood at the railroad station in Berlin, on the platform from which a train packed with 1,251 Jews headed east 80 years ago to the concentration camps. It had been October 18th, 1941, and it was the first such train of far too many. He asked, if he had been a Jew in Nazi Germany that day, would he passively have gotten on the train? All who did were destined for death.
The man is Yair Lapid, a centrist politician who for six months last year was the prime minister of Israel. “Would I have protested?’, he wondered in a commemorative speech, “Would I have been one of the few Berliners to join the anti-Nazi underground, or one of the many Berliners who carried on with life and pretended that nothing was happening? Would I have boarded the train?”
Israelis are through pretending. After last week’s massacres, on a scale unseen since the Holocaust, they are saying, no more. Hamas is no longer a nasty bug to swat. It is a murderous serpent to extinguish. Lapid ended his talk next to those tragic tracks reminding the world, “We will not board the train again. We will protect ourselves from total evil.”
But that protection will be costly. To Palestinians and Israelis both. The imminent ground invasion, supported by more bombs from the air, will come with a grim price to both sides.
For Israel’s soldiers, it will be urban warfare. I have seen urban warfare, in Tehran and in Beirut. This will be the worst kind, because Hamas has had time to prepare. There will be snipers concealed in the rubble. There will be time bombs and booby traps, trip wires and grenades.
And there will be human shields. The hostages of course, who Hamas said it has spread around so they cannot be found in a single place. But also the civilians of the Gaza Strip, the ones who didn’t evacuate from Gaza City. Some had no means to go south, some were too sick to get out, some said that if they fled they’d consider it a surrender, others that they expect to die in this war anyway, so they’d rather die at home.
Western intelligence says Hamas hides behind people like them. It makes Israel’s challenge almost unimaginably forbidding. Israel’s government says it doesn’t deliberately target civilians and having covered that dangerous part of the world, I believe it. But mistakes are made in the heat of war. Agonizing mistakes that no one can take back. The difference between Israel and Hamas is, Hamas does target civilians. It rapes them. It burns them. It shoots them at a bus stop, at a music festival, in their cars, in their homes. Attacking non-combatants to achieve a political purpose is the very definition of terrorism.
For the Palestinians of Gaza, this war has changed life for a generation. Children and grownups alike are shell-shocked. The bombs, the destruction, the bodies all around them. Those who fled south have escaped the horror of air strikes and tank fire, although Israeli aircraft, for reasons that have not been explained, evidently fired on a caravan of people trying to get out of harm’s way.
But they have traded one kind of horror for another. Communication services are all but destroyed and families are separated with no easy way to connect. With a million refugees taking shelter in the desert towns of southern Gaza that can’t begin to accommodate them, there is a shortage of everything. They are struggling to find places to sleep. They are straining to find medicine, food, water. Water trucks are circulating to serve them but soon, it is said, they will run out of fuel and then water deliveries will stop. Whatever ground water there is is unsanitary. When they resort to that, sickness will spread and more will die.
The Israeli Defense Forces have said that their ultimate goal is to exterminate the hierarchy of Hamas. But in a guest essay in yesterday’s New York Times, the secretary general of the United Nations argued, “The horrific acts by Hamas do not justify responding with collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
But the sad fact is, the two go hand in hand. And Israelis will not turn back.
Yesterday, an American from Walnut Creek in Northern California, Ilan Benjamin, who emigrated years ago to Israel and served in the army, wrote on Substack about his own personal transformation. When he was 12, his older cousin, Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped by Islamic jihadists in Pakistan and beheaded. The killers released the ghastly video. And yet, “After terrorists killed my cousin,” he wrote, “my family called for peace.”
But this week, he has seen celebrations of Hamas’s massacres and condemnations of Israel’s retaliations not only in Islamic nations but even on American college campuses. He says his hope for peace is dead. He told the terrorists, “When you killed my family, I forgave you. When you killed my people, I forgave you. But when you killed my idealism, I had no forgiveness left.”
What’s left for Israel is to achieve its aim while not showing the savagery of its prey. On that platform in Berlin, Yair Lapid said, “Our moral test… is to continue to distinguish between enemies and innocents.”
But they will not settle for anything less than victory over the terrorists. They will not board that train again.
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.
Powerful, sad, and spot on. Thank you Greg
So very tragic. Your words bring tears to my eyes.