by I have been highly critical of Israel’s counterattack against Gaza, which appears to have killed a woman or child about once every eight minutes during the last three months. Many of my readers and friends disagree with these columns and are hurt by what they consider my injustice towards Israel.
Too often, opinionated people overlook the other side’s most compelling arguments. Instead, let me try to confront head-on the type of criticism I’ve received:
Israel was attacked. The children were massacred. The women were raped. So why are you criticizing Israel instead of the Hamas terrorists who started this war?
That’s a fair question. Yes, Hamas started this war with its brutal attack on civilians and has been indifferent to Palestinian lives. As someone who has reported regularly from Gaza over the years, I am appalled by the admiration some American leftists show for an organization as cruel, misogynistic, and economically incompetent as Hamas; It is an echo of the atrocious admiration that the left felt for Mao half a century ago.
Israel was understandably devastated by what happened on October 7, and I appreciate that trauma and share that sadness. But Hamas’s indifference to human life should never be an excuse for us to become indifferent. It is too late to save those massacred on October 7, but we can still try to reduce the number of victims in Gaza this month and this year.
I am also aware that my tax money has helped finance the bombings that ended up killing and maiming children in Gaza (the most dangerous place in the world to be a child, according to UNICEF) and this American complicity creates its own moral responsibility to speak out. . outside.
What do you expect Israel, or any country, to do after such a barbaric attack? It is tragic how many Palestinian civilians have been killed, but what could Israel do but strike back?
I think it is a fallacy that the Israeli army has a binary choice: raze Gaza or do nothing. I would like to see Israel step back on what is always a continuum.
For example, Israel had abandoned 29,000 bombs, ammunition and projectiles in mid-December, while the United States dropped 3,678 munitions in Iraq between 2004 and 2010, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Biden administration itself has repeatedly answered the question of what Israel should do. shipment military leaders to Jerusalem to offer advice and periodically recommended greater efforts to save civilians, rather than Israel’s pattern of what President Biden called “indiscriminate bombing.”
You ask for restraint, but what restraint did the United States show in Hiroshima or Dresden? Why do you now insist that Israel behave by very different rules?
Yes, I live in a glass house. And yes, I want Israel to follow different rules. It was revulsion at the horrors of World War II, including those of Hiroshima and Dresden, that helped lead to the 1949 Geneva Conventions creating rules of war to protect civilians from such mass killings.
In any case, two academic researchers using satellite images have found that at least 68 percent of buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged, which The Financial Times says is a higher proportion than was damaged in Dresden.
The massacre in Gaza is very sad, but we cannot stay halfway. We must root out Hamas and restore deterrence. That is the only way to guarantee Israel’s security.
Let me answer: does leveling parts of Gaza really make Israel safer? As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said He suggestedLarge-scale killing of civilians may result in tactical victory but strategic defeat.
The wars have a fairly imperfect record in achieving their objectives: entering Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq did not improve American security, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 did not boost Israeli security.
The longer this war goes on, the greater the risk of a conflagration involving Israel and Lebanon, an uprising in the West Bank, a major crisis in the Red Sea, or even war with Iran. None of that would make Israel or any other country safer.
That is one of my main concerns about this war: to me, it is not clear that the enormous bloodshed, public health crisis and the risk of famine really advance security, or that Israel has a viable plan for what follows the fighting.
More than 100 hostages are still being held by Hamas and may be suffering unimaginable abuse. The war must continue until we get them back.
Negotiations and exchanges have done much more to free hostages than bombings. So far Israeli troops have killed more hostages than they have freed (one at the start of the war).
If Hamas had mounted an attack on the United States comparable to the one on October 7, Americans would not be preaching moderation. The United States would be invading Gaza.
Yes maybe. In fact, we did something similar after September 11, 2001, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. I write my columns today about the Israeli war in Gaza in the same spirit in which I wrote countless columns two decades ago warning against the invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be repeating in Gaza the mistakes the United States made after 9/11 (except that Israel appears to have killed many more Gaza women and children in three months than in the entire first year of the war in Gaza). Iraq.)
The attack on October 7 was particularly savage and no doubt my perspective would have been different if I had been on the receiving end. But I think that after a terrorist attack, we must protect ourselves from the way fear makes us lose our way and despise and demonize the other.
Some Gazans tortured, raped and murdered Israeli citizens on October 7 because they viewed the world through an intolerant prism and stereotyped and dehumanized Jews. We must not reciprocate our own version of collective guilt that leaves large numbers of Gaza children wrapped in tiny shrouds.
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Update: Thank you readers for donating more than $6.3 million so far to nonprofits in my holiday giving guide, supporting girls’ education in Africa, job training in the United States, and helping students disadvantaged secondary school students. Contributions will be accepted until the end of January at KristofImpact.org.
