“Believe people when they tell you who they are.”
Maya Angelou’s classic warning should have been believed in 1988, when Hamas declared in its founding covenant its intention to slaughter Jews. Instead, Israel continued to tolerate Hamas out of a combination of ideological convenience — it suited Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to have a divided Palestinian polity — and international reluctance to topple the group. That was until Oct. 7, 2023, too late for the 1,200 people slaughtered that day.
Brilliant technology is never an adequate substitute for sound strategy.
Successive rounds of fighting between Hamas and Israel never altered Israel’s policy of containment toward Gaza. Why? Because, as Yaakov Katz, a co-author of the excellent new book “While Israel Slept,” wrote me, technologies like the Iron Dome gave Israel the false sense that “it was impenetrable.” Yet when Oct. 7 came, Israel’s high-tech marvels in signals intelligence, missile interceptors, smart fences and underground barriers proved useless against Hamas’s low-tech paragliders and bulldozers.
Israel doesn’t have a P.R. problem. It has a narrative problem.
It’s an unwitting irony that anti-Israel activists from Montreal to Melbourne, speaking European languages and living on land that was often stolen from the original inhabitants, have alighted on Hebrew-speaking Israel as the epitome of settler-colonialism. In fact, Zionism is among the oldest anticolonial movements in history, featuring struggles against overlords from Babylon, Greece, Rome, Constantinople, Istanbul and, until 1948, London.
The argument Israel’s supporters need to make is about the country’s indissoluble right to exist as a Jewish state — no different than, say, the right of the Irish to an Irish state or Greeks to a Greek one. It can’t be a debate whether Jews or Palestinians are the greater victim. Israel came into existence to end Jewish victimization, not showcase it.
Palestinian suffering is undeniable. Hamas is its principal author.
For those who spent the past two years chanting “cease-fire now” at anti-Israel rallies, they neglect to mention (as Hillary Clinton pointed out) that there was a cease-fire before Oct. 7, 2023, which Hamas violated in the most grotesque way possible.
As for those who rightly decry the suffering of Palestinian civilians, they must equally rue the fact that Hamas continually and deliberately put ordinary Gazans in harm’s way by waging war beneath, behind and between them. This war could have been ended at any time in the past two years by Hamas laying down its arms, which even now it is reluctant to do. Why did so many so-called peace protesters, who made incessant demands of Israel, never make any demands of Hamas?
There will be no Palestinian state if Hamas or other militant groups survive as a military or political force.
The only viable path to a sustainable Palestinian state is a cultural revolution among Palestinians that ends, once and for all, the fantasy of Israel’s destruction. That’s as much the work of educators and imams as it is of Palestinian politicians and foreign diplomats. And it requires an end to Hamas or to any armed group prepared to enforce a militant orthodoxy over other Palestinians. What, one might ask, are Britain and France prepared to do for that?
Want influence over the policies of Israel? Hug it close.
Why did Netanyahu acquiesce to Donald Trump and call off attacks on Iran, or agree to Trump’s 20-point peace plan? Because most Israelis believe — based on his decisions to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and bomb Iran’s nuclear sites — that he’s the best friend they’ve ever had in the White House. If leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Keir Starmer wanted to be similarly effectual, they’d take the lesson rather than play to their peanut galleries.
For all its undoubted horrors, this war may ultimately be remembered as liberating.
Liberating for the Lebanese, who, for the first time in two generations, have a realistic chance to free themselves from the yoke of Hezbollah’s insidious control over their politics. Liberating for Syrians, who would not have been able to topple Bashar al-Assad’s regime if Israel hadn’t first decimated al-Assad’s helpers in Hezbollah. Liberating for the Druse of southern Syria, who are being protected by the Israeli military. Liberating, potentially, for Iranians, whose leadership is now at its weakest point in decades thanks to the military humiliation it experienced at Israeli and American hands in June. Liberating for Gazans who suffered under Hamas’s Stasi-like domestic apparatus and its willingness to start wars it knew would bring suffering.
I fear that this is justifying a war in Gaza which is not the war in Gaza that Israel is actually waging. Public statement by Israeli leaders indicate that they view humanitarian principles as restrictions to be chafed against, at best. In that context, the role of Israel's allies should have been to moderate Israeli policy. Perhaps the Biden administration tried, but the results, if any, are not apparent.