In Gaza, collective punishment is probably what's needed.
“Gaza more resembles 1930s Germany, where an extremist party won elections, with the support of most of the people, and quickly unified the military and civil government into one entity.”
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Many of Israel’s haters have baselessly accused the Jewish state of “collective punishment” against Palestinians in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas war broke out (at Hamas’ doing) some six months ago.
Of course, not all Palestinians are Hamas supporters, just as not all Americans like the Democrats’ policies and not all Brits voted for Rishi Sunak’s party.
But many polls since October 7th suggest that a healthy majority of Palestinians are in favor of the Hamas-led massacres on October 7th, which is unsurprising. Palestinians for decades have been led by terrorists (e.g. Yasser Arafat) and terror organizations (e.g. the Palestine Liberation Organization).
Plus, both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have a “pay for slay” policy, meaning they financially reward Palestinians for committing acts of terror against Israelis and Jews, which has resulted in thousands of innocent Israeli and Jewish deaths, including 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass who was shot in the head by a Palestinian terrorist. The Palestinian Authority paid her murderer 300,000 U.S. dollars accordingly.
One could make the argument that Palestinians in Gaza are simply afraid to speak out against Hamas for fear of abuse, brutality, and even death. Fair, but then where are all the Palestinians outside of Gaza, and even outside the Palestinian territories, who are demonstrating against Hamas, or at least demonstrating in favor of a peaceful two-state solution?
From my vantage point, a handful of them exist on social media — John Aziz, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, and Bassam Eid come to mind — and that’s about it.
Again, this is not an all-or-nothing game, i.e. either all Palestinians are in favor or not in favor of terrorism. That is not how populations and societies work. They are measured by majorities and minorities, and it sure as heck appears as though the vast majority of peace-seeking Palestinians are in the minority.
“Gaza more resembles 1930s Germany, where an extremist party won elections, with the support of most of the people, and quickly unified the military and civil government into one entity,” according to Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser and ex-IDF operations chief. “In Gaza, with the support of perhaps 80 percent of the residents, Hamas has done much the same thing. It’s a de facto state, with all the characteristics of a state.”1
Hence why “collective punishment” might actually be not just in Israel’s favor, but also beneficial for stability and peace-making in the Middle East.
If you are familiar with “international law” then you know that, under the Fourth Geneva Convention, collective punishment is indeed prohibited during armed conflicts. In short, international law posits that no person may be punished for acts that he or she did not commit.
Forget about the fact that “international law” is a bunch of hogwash because many signatory countries violate it without repercussions, while many other countries completely disregard it (e.g. Russia, Iran, Qatar). The more interesting question is, how do you define “acts” that one “did not commit”?
First of all, we know for a fact that the 3,000 Palestinians who invaded Israel on October 7th were not all Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists by definition. Many of them were everyday civilians, folks that some refer to as “the innocent Palestinians.”
We also know that Palestinian civilians held and might still be holding some of the hostages. In one recent story, a released Israeli hostage held in Gaza said that Palestinian civilians “negotiated with Hamas to sell me,” adding: “When they were paid, I was taken straight into a tunnel.”2
Second, there is the philosophical question about a person who has the opportunity to prevent someone from dying, but consciously chooses not to. Is this person just as guilty as the person who actually kills someone? If you ask 100 lawyers, you will probably get 100 different answers.
Thus, one could make the case that just because “all Palestinians” are not terrorists does not mean that they are all 100-percent innocent bystanders to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s murderous ways.
In any case, when I talk about “collective punishment” I am not talking about militarily going after all the Palestinians in Gaza. Frankly, that would be a waste of military resources.
Instead I am talking about sending a deep-seated emotional and psychological message that gets burned into their hearts and minds and stays there long after this ordeal is over. And the message should be simple: This is what happens when you actively or passively support terrorism.
I have no doubt that this message has already entered the conscience of many a Palestinian in Gaza; hundreds of thousands have been evacuated from their homes and are living in tents and makeshift housing, which I am sure is not fun, especially during the past few winter months. This might be enough to make the majority of Palestinians realize that their actions (again, on a scale of passive to active) have miserable consequences.
But it might also not be enough, at least not yet. Hence why I am in favor of the IDF executing a major ground operation in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza which borders Egypt and is believed to be Hamas’ last major stronghold.
As you may have heard, there are some 1.5 million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah, having been evacuated to there from other parts of Gaza. This represents more than half of Gaza’s population, and evacuating the 1.5 million Palestinians there is a good thing.
Not only will it save lives and show them that Israel cares more about their lives than Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and even the Palestinian Authority do; the evacuation will also continue to burn into their hearts and minds a notion that goes something like this:
“This is what happens when you allow terrorists to take control over your society. If you do not like being evacuated from your home and moved around from place to place, stop putting up with — no less supporting — terrorism.”
Some people have tried to make the argument that Israel’s actions in Gaza will just make more Palestinians want to be anti-Israel terrorists, which is speculation at best. But even if it proves to be true, the goal of this war is not to obliterate Palestinian terrorism through and through. It is to eradicate Hamas’ governing and military apparatus from the Gaza Strip, a more than reasonable and realistic aim.
Ultimately, terrorists on the fringe of a society are far less dangerous than terrorists who run it, the latter of which has been the case with Hamas in Gaza since 2007.
And even if Israel’s actions in Gaza do propel more Palestinians to become terrorists, so be it. The Allied Forces did not hold back against Nazi Germany in fear that their operations would push more Germans to become Nazis.
Quite the contrary: Many Germans today are as non-nationalistic and pacifist as you will find, and the country as a whole is still severely ashamed of the Nazis’ actions leading up to and during World War II. The same can be said about the Italians and the Japanese.
My hope is that, in a few years’ time, many Palestinians will also be ashamed of what Hamas perpetrated on October 7th. This line of thinking will take a whole lot more than the current military intervention. As one of our guest writers, Nachum Kaplan, recently wrote: Gazan society will need to undergo intensive deradicalization.
“The international community has the money and political will to rebuild Gaza’s buildings and roads, but deradicalizing the Palestinian body politic is the most important task,” wrote Kaplan. “It is necessary for any lasting political (peaceful) solution to be negotiated.”
Of course, you cannot force the Palestinians to become deradicalized. They have to be willing players, at least a tiny bit in the beginning. Hopefully the type of “collective punishment” that I have laid out in this short essay will push them toward this desire and eventually to a more promising future for Palestinian society, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the greater Middle East.
“A top ex-general’s radical strategy for tackling Iran, saving the hostages, calming the north.” The Times of Israel.
“Palestinian civilians ‘negotiated with Hamas to sell me,’ former hostage says.” The Jerusalem Post.
There is a big difference that you are not acknowledging. The socio-theological worldview of post world-war II Germany is quite a bit different than that of the Islamo-Arab world. Their worldviews differ greatly on guilt and sin. The tradition of an understanding of sin made the German people realize that they had allowed their hatred to overrule their grace and they had sinned greatly. In the Islamic world “infidels” are appropriate recipients of divine just retribution and no “guilt” is necessary or even allowed. Please acknowledge that east-west differences in worldview make many calls to “rationality” moot.
I don't really believe in collective punishment. At least not in this case. Punishment implies the possibility of repair. When a murderer is put to death it's punishment because the idea is that the suffering has a corrective function both for the one put to death and the rest of a society that is capable of learning the lesson. There is no point in punishing the Gazans. Their leaders and their enablers need the punishment. All we can do with the Gazans is to relocate them to a place where they can get a new start. In the meantime, we must do everything that we can to stop them from killing us. If that involves killing them then that is their choice. They can just as easily lay down their weapons and surrender. They can return our hostages. The can hand over their leaders. They can pay reparations.