The calls for a cease-fire in Gaza do not reflect reality.
Israel responded to attacks on its civilians by the governing authority in Gaza by declaring war. The Israelis reasoned — correctly — that Hamas’s presence in Gaza could no longer be tolerated, and that war was the only way to get rid of Hamas.
Now, Gaza has more than two million people living there who are guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time — much like the residents of cities like Dresden and Tokyo in 1945, which were subjected to massive incendiary air raids by British and American forces whose objectives were to eliminate Nazism from Germany and militarism from Japan.
A cease-fire in Gaza would leave Hamas in power there, much as a cease-fire in 1945 would have left the Nazis and the Japanese militarists in power in Germany and Japan. That war had to be pursued to its end, even though it meant massive civilian casualties. Can this war be any different?
In war, military necessity always takes priority. That’s one of the most evil things about war, that it admits of no other choice. Innocent people die because the enemy must be engaged and defeated, wherever he may be.
Could Israel open up a humanitarian corridor to, say, the West Bank, allowing civilians to escape the worst of the fighting? I don’t know if resources could be spared for such an operation; it might be argued that doing so would only prolong the war, leading to more casualties than would result from a quicker victory.
This is ugly, and it can only get uglier the longer it goes on. The sooner it is over, the better it will be for Israelis and Palestinians alike, I think.
President Biden did the right think deploying the U.S. Navy to deter Iranian and Hezbollah interference. I’m not sure his calls for a humanitarian pause are realistic given the momentum of the war.
I do think going forward that we need to wash our hands of the Middle East. It’s not our land, and these people have been resolving their own differences for thousands of years. The west — Britain, France, and the United States — should never have meddled in the region in the first place.