(Dobbs) "They're even losing me."
Israel has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
It already might be too late for Israel. Not too late to kill the terrorist leaders of Hamas, which raped and mutilated and kidnapped and killed innocent Israelis on October 7th. And not too late to dismantle and destroy some, although not all, of the military capacity of Hamas. Israel already has made headway toward those goals.
But too late to win the war for global goodwill. In fact it’s probably accurate to say, it already has lost it. I figured that out last week when a good friend of mine, who describes himself as liberal Jewish American and lifetime supporter of Israel, said, “They’re even losing me.”
Israel can’t afford to hear that.
For all the deaths and all the devastation that Israel has unleashed on the Palestinian population in Gaza, it does offer some rationalizations, but they are falling on deaf ears. If people don’t understand why Israel is doing what it’s doing and why it’s doing it the way it’s doing it, it needs to explain things a whole lot better than it has. Prime Minister Netanyahu repeats his mantra that Israel has one goal and won’t stop its military campaign until it achieves it: to destroy Hamas. But in the arena of public opinion, that’s not helping. Because of how Israel is going about that goal, it is sinking deeper in the esteem of much of the world every day.
If it doesn’t want to keep sinking, Israel has to explain why, since the outbreak of the war, it hasn’t been more surgical about striking Gaza. Did it have to carpet-bomb Gaza City to kill terrorists, knowing full well that civilians inevitably also would die? Justifying it by saying that the ratio of civilian dead to enemy dead is lower in this war than most armies experience in urban warfare hasn’t won any converts. When even President Biden, who has embraced Israel from Day One, characterizes some of its air strikes as “indiscriminate bombing,” Israel has to change its ways, or keep sinking.
Did Israel have to drop unguided “dumb bombs,” which don’t have pinpoint accuracy, on heavily populated parts of Gaza? U.S. intelligence last week said that nearly half the bombs that Israel has used have been from that “dumb bomb” class. If Israel claims it tries to spare as many civilians as possible, it has to explain how it can achieve that when those are the kinds of munitions it’s using. But all a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces says is, “The IDF take all feasible precaution to mitigate harm to noncombatants.” Israel sinks deeper.
Israel has gone to some lengths to warn civilians to evacuate from parts of Gaza about to be struck. The IDF uses leaflets dropped from the air, texts and recorded calls to people’s phones. It has even added a QR code to the leaflets to let fleeing families see from neighborhood to neighborhood, even block to block, where it’s supposed to be safe and where it’s not. In other words, in contrast to virtually every other war in the past century, it actually broadcasts its plans for the next incursion or the next strike.
But if Israel is doing “more than other Western armies in recent conflicts to steer civilians to the safest places,” as the IDF says it is, then it has to do a better job explaining why those places to which it steers them then come under attack themselves. It has warned civilians to flee from Gaza City to the central city of Khan Younis, but then it has struck Khan Younis. It has then warned those people to flee farther south to Rafah, the town on the Egyptian border, but then Rafah gets hit. Families flee, then they come under fire and flee again. Israel has explained that when the terrorists move around, the IDF has to move in and find them. Netanyahu said late last week that his military even had the top Hamas leader in Gaza cornered in Khan Younis. But the world didn’t see that. All it saw was the suffering in that besieged city as people were trapped there with next to no food to eat, next to no water to drink.
Israel’s problems are exacerbated by a radicalized Palestinian population in both Gaza and the West Bank. A poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research shows that while a majority of Palestinians don’t back Hamas— some blame Hamas, rather than Israel, for their misery— its support is higher than it was before the war, and a big majority says Hamas was right to attack Israel.
A lecturer at a Palestinian university in the West Bank told The New York Times, “There is a lot of horror around the response, but despite that, Hamas is now undoubtedly the leader of Palestinian nationalism.” And that movement is spreading throughout the world. When Hamas, a terrorist organization, has become the victim, it is clear that however Israel explains its military campaign, it is failing, and still sinking.
Anti-semitism has been and always will be ubiquitous but until now, public opinion against Israel took the form of UN resolutions condemning the Jewish state. It takes a different form today, a more pernicious form. Nations with which Israel had started to forge bonds are angry. Western populations that generally were pro-Israel are changing their tunes. Whether Israel has to refine its tactics or explain them better seems, at this point, almost immaterial.
The Hamas attack on October 7th was not the first time enemies have tried to wipe out the Jewish state. But in its response, after a global wave of sympathy in the wake of October 7th, Israel has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s clear from last week’s ceasefire vote at the United Nations— a lopsided 153 to 10— that even old allies are backing away. Backing away just like my friend, the lifetime supporter of Israel who says, “They’re even losing me.”
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.... regettably what you’ve written today seems too true.
Two things puzzle me. Why are the Palestinians not fingering the location of the Hamas fighters who are the cause of this conflict so they can be routed and help end the violence? Does Israel not realize that it is manufacturing future terrorists by killing so many innocents? Vendetta is a natural human
response and seeing one's family killed is the best way to cause a deep seated revenge response.