This isn't going to be long.
It's time for Israel to scale back. We've made our point. Are we really now going to hunt Hamas by shooting our way through the DP camps? It's not about killing people, it's about deterring Hamas. According to some Israeli sources, they've killed as many as 7,000 Hamas fighters. if that's true and the killed number of 18-20,000 is accurate, that would mean just about everybody killed that isn't Hamas is a woman or child. That's both an astonishingly high rate of success, an astonishingly low collateral damage considering the circumstances. It's also, if it's true, an astonishingly brutal series of statistics - speaking to just how awful Hamas's tactics really are.
Back in 2006, Israel went into Lebanon as a way of deterring Hezbollah. The action was controversial in Israel for not pursuing it to the point of ending Hezbollah, and it was controversial to the world for having done it all. Hezbollah is still there, but Hezbollah has never kidnapped another Israeli and it never again launched a full rocket war. Even if Hezbollah resumes where Hamas left off, the Lebanese have not stood for or a repeat of 2006 for nearly two decades. For seventeen years it's been deterred.
We are now at the point that any further Hamas deterrence is redundant. If you want to get rid of Hamas, don't try to deplete them completely. Even if the figure of displacement is inaccurate, there's no way that less than half of Gaza has been displaced, and it very well may be much much closer to the 90% figure Hamas fed us in the media. When well over a million Gazans have been displaced., the point is made, and it's up to Gazans to draw the conclusions of where their leadership has lead them.
Part of the reason I 'left the left' twenty years ago is that the left never understood how foreign policy works. You can't just support the good guys. You have to wade into moral ambiguity if you want any influence on how potentially bad leaders conduct themselves. Coming out mostly on the Palestinian side, even were it justified, would only get more Palestinians killed because Israel would 'go it alone' and be completely unanswerable to any ally about human rights concerns. If the dead are actually 20,000 at this point, Israel without allies could have killed 40,000 more by now or even many more than that.
The only way to apply pressure on Israel was to ally with them. But now that the US has proven its support, it's time to apply heavy pressure to move to the phase of filling in the tunnels as quickly as possible, and then comes phase 3: withdrawal. It's delusional to expect that anybody can replace Hamas but the Gazans themselves, and Israel has to get ready to leave and let a people hold their government accountable. And even if Gazans don't (they won't...), the chances of Hamas employing this tactic again are unlikely at best. And if they start going after Jews like us abroad, maybe this will finally be what convinces NATO that something has to be done about Hamas rather than us put up with Europeans treating another 6 million Jews like non-persons. But any further carpet bombing or targeting in crowded areas will just bind the Palestinians to Hamas as they wait longer and longer to go home and fear their mortality.
This is the time to move into phase 2 where the tunnels are effectively filled and the booby traps diffused. I was wrong when I defended the tunnels years ago and said that the tunnels were largely for economic purposes, so was the world, and so, I believe, was Netanyahu, who probably based his intelligence decision to be less vigilant about Hamas because he received the same intelligence the New York Times did that Hamas was using the tunnels mostly to smuggle in food and economic materials rather than the weapons of war. So the tunnels have to be filled. This is the priority now, not further depletion of Hamas's ranks.
...but even if that's what we want, even if that's what Biden wants, that's not going to be what Israel does, is it?
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