Israel's existential war is a favor to humanity.
First, understand Israel is carefully doing what's necessary to restore its security and release its kidnapped citizens. Then think about reconstruction and governance of Gaza.
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This is a guest essay written by Daniel J. Arbess. You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Iran literally rolled out a red carpet last week for Hamas’ political director (and Qatari resident) Ismail Haniyeh to take a victory lap after U.S. President Joe Biden administration’s let a United Nations Security Council resolution pass, calling for an “immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan” without condemning Hamas or conditioning the ceasefire on the release of kidnapped Israelis that have been held as human trade-bait by Hamas for six months.
It does not really matter whether the administration’s policies are politically motivated or just plain incompetent; either way, they are helping Hamas to survive, regroup, and persist.
What is going on here?
Haniyeh was accompanied in Tehran by a high-ranking Hamas delegation for talks with senior Iranian officials, including Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, with whom he reportedly held a joint press conference, stating:
“The occupation (Israel) has failed, and they have lost support worldwide. Their objectives have been thwarted, and they find themselves in unprecedented political isolation.”
The celebrations continued with Hamas reverting to its previous demands that Israel fully withdraw from Gaza, while releasing hundreds of convicted murders for the return of its kidnapped civilians, effectively ending the “hostage” release negotiations.
Hamas started the Gaza war by committing unimaginable atrocities against the very Israelis that invited Gazans to work in their homes and communities, whose lives they mapped and returned to rape, mutilate, and kidnap. Hamas also exhibits utter disregard for the lives of Gaza’s inhabitants (the majority of whom support, and many participated directly in, the October 7th atrocities).
We all know by know that Hamas terrorists surround themselves with civilians; use hospitals, schools, and playgrounds as weapons depots, command, and launching centers; and, of course, steal humanitarian aid for their own benefit.
Israel, by contrast, is methodically responding first with detailed warnings and relocating civilians. Israel’s civilian-to-combatant death ratio of 1.5-to-1 compares favorably with recent European Union and UN history of 9-to-1, and the U.S. experience of 2.5-to-1 in Mosul, Iraq (a far less complex combat environment).
John Spencer — the chairman of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, who served for 25 years as an infantry soldier and two tours in Iraq — argues in that Israel’s return to Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza during the last couple of weeks to root out hundreds of returning terrorists has “set a new standard” for urban combat operations, taking unprecedented measures to protect supposedly innocent civilians in the same buildings where enemy terrorists are being pursued — “above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”1
Spencer says U.S. and other Western militaries “would almost certainly be extremely reluctant to employ these techniques because of how it would disadvantage them in any fight with an urban terrorist army like Hamas.”
So why is the cover story of the current issue of The Economist called “At a Moment of Military Might, Israel Looks Deeply Vulnerable” and warning Israel that it could find itself all alone in the world?
“Genocide” was a crime defined by Germany’s actions in World War II, so they know that Hamas (whose charter purpose is to kill Jews) is a genocidal organization, not the IDF. England, France, and other European nations, for their part, have experienced enough jihadist violence to appreciate that Israel today is on the front lines of the struggle against the migration of Islamist terror that stretches West from Afghanistan through Europe, Africa, and South America to the border of Texas.
Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf states are sustaining or seeking peace with Israel; and they are certainly not rushing to pay more than lip-service sympathy for the Palestinians. Israel has plenty of international support; more importantly, Israelis have conviction in the virtue of their cause — and a rising new generation of young people who are spontaneously serving the security needs of local communities without waiting for government to do it for them.
Israel is fighting an existential war for its survival (and the Jewish People) against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. Security must be restored through strategic victory, which means removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for years to come.
In practical terms, this requires that Hamas and, in due course, the others lose both their military and governance legitimacy. The Hamas front is only midway through the first challenge, since the battle for Hamas’ last battalions in Rafah looms. Here again Israel is planning for the protection of non-combatants before proceeding, while the Biden administration objects. Nonetheless…
When (optimistically) Israel’s major military operations conclude in Gaza, and assuming (optimistically) no horizontal escalation to any of six other fronts, Israel will start implementing “day after” plans for Gaza.
The Biden administration managed to be both premature and behind the curve when it started this discussion already in late October, before Israel had fully processed or responded to Hamas’ atrocities. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was giddily declaring there would be “no return to the status quo” after the war ended.
Just weeks later, Blinken was at the World Economic Forum in Davos conditioning U.S. support for the pending Saudi-Israeli peace agreement on Israel moving forward toward a Palestinian state in partnership with a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority. The administration must be kidding itself to believe that substituting Palestinian Authority prime ministers while leaving the terror-sponsoring, 88-year-old Hamas-admiring Mahmoud Abbas at the top amounts to “revitalization.”
The fact that this war against the pathological Jew-hating terrorists had nothing to do with the “Palestinian conflict” did not stop Blinken from linking the two, and he effectively underwrote the argument that Hamas’ atrocities somehow “serve Israel right” for “occupying Palestinians for so long.”
No matter that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, only to watch the local Palestinians elect Hamas. Israel is not in fact “occupying” Palestinian land; it is developing its ancestral homeland, including territory recaptured in a defensive war 55 years ago. And Israel has for decades provided water, electricity, and all kinds of other support to both Gaza and West Bank Palestinians.
The Palestinian people (Jordanian citizens until they were abandoned by the Hashemite Kingdom in 1988) are indeed being “occupied” — by their own leaders, the congenitally corrupt Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and brutal self-serving Hamas in Gaza.
The Palestinian Authority might be even worse than Hamas, because they do not even pretend to have a religious pretext for Jew hatred. They act as if they are interested in peace, but when Yasser Arafat (Abbas’ predecessor) told his people he was entering the Oslo Accords “with a heavy heart” because signing would give the Palestinians more time to resist the presence of Jews in Israel, he really meant it.
The Oslo Accords disrupted 25 years of relative peaceful coexistence from 1967 to 1992, with violent resistance for the past 32 years. Upwards of 70 percent of West Bank Palestinians applaud the Hamas-led October 7th massacres, and Palestinian Authority leadership has still declined to publicly condemn them.
To its credit, Israel’s wartime leadership seems to recognize the opportunity for a positive outcome from the “day after” while juggling military imperatives and Blinken’s diplomatic mishaps. Israelis may be near-unanimously opposed to the idea of rewarding the Palestinians with statehood now, but the “day after” does open a back door to a new approach and new players for administration under Israeli security and multinational oversight. This could offer a better life to Palestinians without the Palestinian Authority or Hamas in both Gaza and eventually the West Bank.
A neutral group of Palestinians needs to be organized to assume administrative responsibilities, with a mandate to include reforming educational curricula to help de-radicalize the next generation.
One new social entrepreneurial initiative, “Arabs With Israel,” has recently emerged with its own effort to support exactly that. If this, or similar efforts, eventually coalesces into a new Palestinian administrative entity, one could imagine Gaza reemerging in due course as a self-governed Palestinian state — a Mediterranean Dubai.
“Israel Has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. Why Will No One Admit It? | Opinion.” Newsweek.
 | A guest post by
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Biden obviously cares more about pandering to progressive teenage antisemites and Islamist immigrants than the safety of not only Israel (who he was swearing his undying allegiance to merely months ago), but ultimately all of us. Meanwhile, Iran and Hamas celebrate and laugh at this absurd Western gullibility yet again. I always had lukewarm feelings towards Biden at best, but he’s really revealed himself to be a selfish and self-centered phony the past few weeks.
Finish Hamas.