Israel should not, should not, SHOULD NOT go into Rafah: the city (town) in Gaza's south where a million to a million-and-a-half are currently situated, mostly refugees. In a territory where there are very few miles, Rafah has literally miles and miles of refugee camps. The more fortunate live in tents but live six or seven to a tent, surrounded by garbage they can't throw out and all the pollutants, parasites and infectious diseases which go with them. Rafah has no functional pharmacies and one functional hospital, the entire hospital has 40 beds and two operating theaters. Even the wounded who are administered to cannot be properly administered to, all their wounds are festering and cross-infecting one another.
Leaving aside any humanitarian issues, the fact remains, to be so close to the brink of something so cataclysmic and then let the suffering avoid the very worst is Statecraft 101. Speaking purely from a point of view of hard-headed realism, to pull out now is the perfect opportunity to let the lesson sink in of what happens if Gazans refuse to hold Hamas accountable. Whereas to not pull out is to ensure an attempt at a massive international and generational boycott that could leave Israelis and Jews more vulnerable than ever.
As I've said 100 times already, after Ehud Olmert ordered a pullout without warning in Southern Lebanon, most Israelis cried foul, but Hezbollah learned the most important lesson, and even as Hezbollah has vastly increased its rocket supply and efficacy, there's been minimal trouble on the northern border for nearly twenty years.
The idea that Israel's enemies will be defeated permanently, whatever the organization, has always been a delusion, but living in an uneasy perpetual detente with them, whether Hamas or Fatah or whomever else comes next, not peace but detente and cold war, is Israel's safest future in my lifetime.
Netanyahu knows all this, but at this point the war is perpetuated not for Israel, but for him and to appease the extremist twits in his cabinet. The longer the war goes, the safer Netanyahu gets. The more strongly Israel is boycotted, the safer Netanyahu gets. The more hated Jews become, the safer Netanyahu gets.
Netanyahu broke the State of Israel, not to keep himself from jail but for his own powerlust. He pretends he's the solution to the problem he caused, there's not a single Israeli who believes him, but they have to go along with it because the rule of law that keeps a democracy running no longer exists. Netanyahu broke Israel not to stop himself from going to jail, but because he wants unlimited power for the rest of his life. Israel's blindness about the necessity of compromise may have created the moral rot Netanyahu exploited, but Israel is only more morally blind than any other democracy because of its proximity to dictatorships, and any other country in Israel's situation would have acted exactly the same way. For those who think they're better than Israel, make no mistake, what happened in Israel can happen anywhere else, and for reasons far less justifiable.
On the other hand, I have interacted with people who are passionately anti-the Israeli point of view, whom when I mentioned Rafah, had never even heard of the city. I was literally giving them their own ammunition. To employ one of the ugliest words of our time, this is how 'performative' all this activism is. When people who know nothing about a conflict and read less are convinced of their points of view, they are the problem, not the solution.
Israel will lose so much if it goes to Rafah, including the Biden administration and bipartisan American support, and with Israel losing so much, so will American Jews. The Jewish world is on the verge of being implicated in something awful and avoidable. It's not genocide, it's probably not even ethnic cleansing, but it just might be a long series of war crimes that, whatever justification there might be for them, can result in a long series of crimes committed on Jews that such actions are meant to protect.
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