Stop the War
The Hamas terrorist attack was pure evil. Israel's War on Gaza is not the answer.
I have been paralyzed. I have wanted to write about this war. To offer a strategic assessment. To write about the best response to the horrific assault on innocent Israelis. To just get down in words some analysis of the conflict.
This is my profession. I have spent over four decades thinking and writing about mass destruction. I should be use to considering slaughter on the scale that we have seen this month.
But I could not.
I almost did when I saw Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoke a biblical reference that I have used to illustrate the ancient roots of the killing of people on a mass scale. To inspire Israelis last week, Netanyahu reminded them of the Jewish god’s command to the prophet Samuel to instruct King Saul on how to answer the sneak attack of the Almalekites on unprotected Israelites: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (Samuel 15:3)
But still I had no words. Tonight, I thought I would at least try.
I was strongly in support of President Joe Biden’s initial response to the October 7 attack. I thought it was pitch perfect and strategically sound. I agreed with his rapid request for funds for Israel’s defense and Ukraine’s defense. I wrote about Biden’s strategy of the “big hug and quiet punches.”
But last week my brother wrote me, sarcastically, as is his style: “Nice ‘punch’ the Joltin’ Joe is giving Israel. Not even going with the UN calling for a ceasefire.”
He’s right. After a very strong response to the Hamas terror, the President has gone quiet. He has not had a meeting with Palestinian-Americans whose families are trapped in Gaza. No prime time address on the horrors unfolding on our screens. No urgent trip to the region.
He has not been completely absent. It is clear that American pressure worked to get Israel to delay its ground invasion, to agree to open up (partially) the Rafah Gate so that a trickle of trucks can bring supplies to besieged Palestinians in Gaza, to end the Israeli cut off of communications with Gaza over the weekend, and possible to now shift the Israeli ground invasion from a scorched earth approach to more targeted attacks.
But this is far from enough.
America enjoyed the support of the world after the terror attacks of September 11. It took a year and a half for us to squander that support with our unnecessary and brutal invasion of Iraq, I told Zerlina Maxwell on her radio show this morning. Israel, too, enjoyed the support of the world after October 7. It took them a week to squander it.
Global opinion is shifting rapidly from horror at the Hamas attack to horror at the Israeli revenge.
I am currently in Madrid, Spain, at a conference on the Middle East. The European news media is dominated by images of the Israeli slaughter of innocent Palestinian men, women and children. Al Jazeera TV is broadcasting round-the-clock coverage of the bombardment of Gaza. Even for a region used to unspeakable atrocities, Israel’s war on Gaza is a whole new dimension.
It is no wonder that so many European nations voted at the United Nations for a ceasefire. These numbers are certain to grow. This Sunday, I briefly joined one of dozens of mass demonstrations against the war. Tens of thousands marched in Madrid.
To give you some sense of the scale of the killing, we are now in the twentieth month of Putin’s war on Ukraine. An estimated 10,000 civilians have been killed in the war, including about 600 children. Israel’s war on Gaza will likely kill 10,000 by the end of this week, one month into its war. Over 4,000 of those victims are children.
No one can deny Israel’s pain. Today, in Washington, the Israeli Embassy released a video with a compilation of body cam footage taken from Hamas militants along with clips from security cameras and social media posts shot Oct. 7. Israeli officials are showing the clips to reporters. It is too gruesome for me to detail here. Politico says the purpose is “to expose the brutality of the attacks on innocent civilians as a way to justify the ferocity of Israel’s retaliation that Hamas says has killed more than 8,000 people in Gaza, most of them innocent civilians. The campaign, culminating in a ground invasion of the enclave, shows no signs of relenting, with soldiers now encircling main population centers.”
If you can stomach a full description of the video, go here. Politico summarizes: “One of the most striking elements of the clips is the sheer joy and the wild exhilaration the killers expressed at every turn while killing children, the elderly and spraying bullets into homes.”
But this brutality is now overshadowed by what most of the world is seeing every hour on their screens. Just today, Israeli strikes on a Gaza refugee camp killed over 100 people. Al Jazeera reports that one of its reporters lost 19 members of his family in the terror attack. These are not Hamas fighters. They are mostly women and children with no connection to Hamas. As the saying now goes, they were killed for the sin of being Palestinian.
None of this is to justify in any way the Hamas terrorist attack. Or to say that Israel does not have the right to defend itself. But is this defense, or revenge?
When I can, I will write more coherently about why I believe that Israel’s attacks cannot succeed, why they will not protect Israel from future attacks, why they will not, as the incompetent, corrupt failure of a prime minister, Netanyahu, claims, “save the nation.”
For now, let me add my voice to the growing global chorus of those calling for a ceasefire.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken eloquently expressed in his Senate testimony today the pain of the victims of the October 7 attack. But his rejection of a ceasefire under the shallow excuse that Israel needs to “defend itself” not only fails to extend American empathy to the equally innocent victims of Israel terror bombings, it fails miserably as a strategic solution to the crisis that threatens to engulf the entire region.
Israel deserves better. Palestine deserves better. We deserve better.
Joe- How easy it it to lose the moral high ground. There are very few who don't recoil in horror at the attrocities committed during the Hamas attack. I couldn't bear to watch the video nor can I look at the pictures of the carnage in Gaza. I am struck with a single thought: all of those victims share one thing...they are dead. It matters little that they were killed by 'gleeful' attackers or by bombs dropped from the sky. (And as an American, I am ashamed that those armaments came from my country).
The verbal jujitsu that is coming out of the White House is shameful. I thought President Biden had more of a backbone. He's trying to have it both ways and it doesn't wash. If killing innocents is wrong, it's wrong everywhere.
We're being played into assisting in genocide.
Tom
Thanks for writing. I agree 100%. This is not self-defense. Israel had a right to self-defense on October 7 and failed to exercise it. The call to destroy Amalek is compelling and seductive. 10 - 30 million evangelicals in our country are rooting for Amageddon to bring on the rapture so they don't have to experience normal death. There is a convergence of fundamentalist beliefs and political, military & domestic interests. In 1991 I stood on a corner in Jerusalem with Women in Black vigil to end the occupation. No one is safe until everyone is free. Need to end the occupation and get new leadership for all. According to the Talmud it is a crime to humiliate people. This is why.