The Final Days of Jeremiah B. Hamas: It’s Not a Day of War and Israel is Going to Arms
I knew we had lost a righteous soul when I left his funeral last week. To me it’s clear. My friend not only fought against Hamas during his final moments to protect his friends and family; he also fought against Hamas during years of activism against the occupation.
All our casualties and suffering in Gaza did not accomplish anything since our leaders wouldn’t work on creating a political reality that wouldn’t lead to more violence. While I believe in self-defense, fighting in Gaza taught me that if my government doesn’t change its approach from crushing Palestinian hope to committing to Palestinian independence, not only will this war kill an untold number of Israelis and Palestinians in addition to the thousands who already have died, but it also will not decisively end terror. A ground invasion is not a good idea.
Many of my Palestinian human rights partners who organize nonviolent protests are targeted and harassed by the Israeli military. I believe these policies have the goal of preventing pressure for a Palestinian state and permitting Israeli settlement development and creeping annexation in the West Bank.
The Wahdan Crisis: When Hamas Sensitive Israelis Learned to Leave Israel, We Returned and We Solved
I scribbled my thoughts on a piece of paper. I wrote that some members of my team had been tallying the number of soldiers killed and discussing whether this operation was worth the losses. “I think it could be worth it,” I wrote, “as long as we decisively eliminate the threat.”
As we withdrew from Beit Hanoun, we heard the roar of Air Force fighter jets overhead, followed by deafening explosions and towering plumes of debris and smoke rising from Al-Burrah. I was informed that in those moments eight of the members of the Wahdan family, most of them women and children, were killed, and that home soldiers from my unit occupied for days while the family was there.
Like the invasion that the Israeli military has said is imminent, that campaign was precipitated by atrocities carried out by Hamas terrorists. On June 12th of that year, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas, and then two Israelis murdered a Palestinian teenager. The horrific exchange escalated into a larger conflict; ultimately some 70 Israelis and 2,250 Palestinians were killed over seven weeks. The Israelis were told that we were going to take a big hit on Hamas.
When I was in Gaza in July of 2014, I helped clear houses by blowing doors open and firing shots into rooms to avoid ambush and booby traps. We were told Palestinian civilians had fled.
The ground was still shaking when we moved into Gaza on July 17 at the start of the ground invasion. We jokingly called the sound-and-light show as our Merkava tanks crashed through the fields next to us, creating relentless thunder and lightning.
I realized this wasn’t true as I stood over the corpse of an elderly Palestinian woman whose face had been mutilated by shrapnel. She had been in a pool of blood while lying on the sand floor.
Menon: The Indian Prime Minister in the midst of a World War II. The Israel-Hamas War in Gaza, Not the Fate of Israel
He continued, “But on sober reflection and in hindsight, I now believe that the decision not to retaliate militarily and to concentrate on diplomatic, covert and other means was the right one for that time and place.”
By avoiding attacking Pakistan, India was free to pursue all the legal and covert means needed to bring the perpetrators to justice and to strengthen the likelihood that such an attack would not take place, said Menon.
I am watching the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza today and thinking about one of the world leaders I’ve most admired: Manmohan Singh. He was India’s prime minister in late November 2008, when 10 Pakistani Jihadis, who were trained in Pakistan, massacred more than 160 people in Mumbai, including 61 people at two luxury hotels. What was Singh’s military response to India’s Sept. 11?
In addition, he wrote, “a war, even a successful war, would have imposed costs and set back the progress of the Indian economy just when the world economy in November 2008 was in an unprecedented financial crisis.”
The Indian example is important to me. More than an open-ended war to eradicate Hamas may serve Israel’s long-term security more than targeted use of force. Israel should be asking that question.
Meanwhile, with some 360,000 reservists called up, Israel’s economy will almost certainly be depressed if Israel’s ouster of Hamas from Gaza requires months, as predicted. It’s already expected to shrink more than 10 percent on an annualized basis for the last three months of the year. This after being ranked by The Economist as the fourth-best-performing economy among O.E.C.D. countries in 2022.
This is a half-baked plan. Who will lead Gaza on Israel’s behalf? What happens after a person working for Israel in Gaza is found murdered with a note pinned to his chest?
Netanyahu does not have a team of rivals supporting him. He is asking a group of people to make long-term decisions while knowing his prime minister is a low- character person that will blame them for everything that goes wrong if it doesn’t go well.
If Israel were to allow a cease-fire and prisoner exchange it would allow it to stop the military operation in Gaza while it considers what to do in the future.
Such a pause could also allow the people of Gaza to take stock of what Hamas’s attack on Israel — and Israel’s totally predictable response — has done to their lives, families, homes and businesses. Thousands of people were going to work in Israel every day and thousands of products were going to be available for export from the Gaza-Israel border a few weeks ago, what did Hamas think they were going to accomplish by this war? Hamas gets too much understanding and not enough hard questions.
I want to see Hamas’s leaders come out from their tunnels under hospitals and look their people, and the world’s media, in the eye and tell us all why they thought it was such a great idea to mutilate and kidnap Israeli children and grandmothers and trigger this terrible blowback on the children and grandmothers of their Gaza neighbors — not to mention their own.
I have always believed that you can reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the early 1900s to one line: conflict, timeout, conflict, timeout, conflict, timeout, conflict, timeout, conflict and timeout. The parties did not do the same thing during the timeouts.
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