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What does decency require in Gaza?

Published on 206 Comments on What does decency require in Gaza?

Nick Kristof believes Israel is justified in going after Hamas remorselessly:

Israel has the right to defend itself and strike military targets in Gaza, and there should be strong international pressure on Hamas to release its hostages. My reporting in Gaza over the years convinces me that Gazans themselves would be much better off if Hamas could be removed: Some American liberals don’t appreciate how repressive, misogynistic, homophobic and economically incompetent Hamas is in Gaza, to say nothing of its long history of terror attacks on Israel. All this explains why many Gazans are fed up with Hamas.

The problem is that he doesn't think a ground invasion of Gaza will work:

When I hear backers of an invasion speak of removing Hamas I have the same sinking feeling as when I heard hawks in 2002 and 2003 cheerily promising to liberate Iraq. Just because it would be good to eliminate a brutal regime doesn’t mean it is readily achievable; the Taliban can confirm that.

That resonates with liberal critics of the Iraq War. Boy does it resonate. But the truth is that the lessons of the American war on terror are equivocal. Things did not run smoothly, to understate the case, but in the end we destroyed al-Qaeda and then destroyed ISIS. The only reason we failed to do the same against the Taliban is that we didn't vigorously prosecute the initial fight against them, preferring instead to keep troops available for the planned war against Iraq.

In other words, we successfully dismantled two terrorist groups and only failed against a third because we weren't violent enough. It can be done.

On the other hand, it took us 20 years; 15,000 American dead; and a (literally) uncountable number of non-American dead—ranging from 200,000 to several million depending on how the counting is performed. It can be done, yes, but only at enormous cost.

I'm trying to talk myself into something here, but I'm not sure what. On both moral and realistic levels, you can't do what Hamas did and not expect a ruthless response. But the toll in innocent life is unimaginable.

So: How do you justify doing nothing? How do you justify doing something? They're both offensive to any person with a working conscience. But what's in-between? What does common decency require of Israel in its implacable mission of destruction against Hamas?

206 thoughts on “What does decency require in Gaza?”

  1. OldFlyer

    Can't think of too many places we've successfully chased terrorists out. Not sure what out lives, limbs and money bought in Iraq. They ran from ISIS, right after giving them all our hardware. It was with huge Kurdish losses that we finally drove ISIS out, which CheetoVonTweeto rewarded by exchanging the land they wanted for a Trump Hotel in Istanbul. They would be part of Iran in 15 minutes but for the troops we have there, WHICH iiuc Iraq has asked them to leave.

    btw if US wants to beat up Iran for complicity, I’m okay with that, BUT we really need to show proof Iran helped Hamas. I believe they did but without proof, I’ll bet Iran will remind everyone of our WMD justification for Invading Iraq.

  2. golack

    The only decent thing is to not let it get this far. An Israeli "settler" assassinated their Prime Minister years ago, and killed progress on the Two-State solution. Hamas attacks now, and that ends the progress made to normalization of relationships between Israel and a number of Arab states.

    But the attacks have happened and Israel has to respond. And there are no good scenarios. Bombing is only so precise, and close quarters for many of the targets insures civilian casualties. Going in means pictures of Israeli soldiers shooting at kids throwing rocks. All can be used for Hamas propaganda. The biggest issue/question is: What plans are there to administer the region once it is occupied? Who is going to rebuild the infrastructure?

  3. sdean7855

    Some American liberals don’t appreciate how repressive, misogynistic, homophobic and economically incompetent Hamas is in Gaza, to say nothing of its long history of terror attacks on Israel.
    Well yes. As could be said about Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, maybe Russia and other countries with a heavily theocratic bent....or even our GOP, with Mike Johnson in his nice suit.
    We deal with the Gaza, Palestinians and Israelis we have, much as we might wish it to be other.

    1. ProgressOne

      How does Israel agree to a two-state solution when the other state, and the people in it, seem incapable of forming a democratic state? Does Israel, and the free world, simply agree to recognize a new authoritarian state of Palestine? How is Israel supposed believe that this solves their security concerns? It's just a non-starter.

        1. ProgressOne

          If the will existed on both sides, it's still possible to form a new Palestinian state that is the West Bank plus Gaza. Israel would have to agree to turn over occupied areas of the West Bank. And the settlement issue would have to be resolved. But until Palestinians show that they can actually form and run a democratic state, with the transparency and checks and balances that this entails, I don't see a path forward.

          1. bebopman

            “until Palestinians show that they can actually form and run a democratic state, with the transparency and checks and balances that this entails, I don't see a path forward.”

            The u.s. constantly backs states that don’t “run a democratic state, with the transparency and checks and balances that this entails.” Sometimes we have to accept uhhhh “imperfect” partners. Should the u.s. stop backing Israel if Bibi gets his Supreme Court “reform”?

            1. Atticus

              There's a big difference between being imperfect and wanting to kill all Jews and wipe your neighboring country off the map.

      2. LonBecker

        The first thing they would do, if they actually cared about peace, would be to reverse a policy that changes facts on the ground to make a two state solution more difficult. In 2000 there was optimism about a two state solution. Today most people think that the two state solution is dead. People who support Israel come up with a lot of excuses for this, but people who actually support a two state solution but have given up on it have done it for one reason only, Israel's settlement expansion makes it look ridiculous.

        In 2000, Barak did not make a serious peace offer because he was not prepared to make concessions on the settlements. (He might have down the line, but what he offered was not a serious offer of peace because of the settlements). In 2008 Olmert made a better offer, but it still would have been unlikely to lead to peace, even if accepted, because Olmert insisted on keeping settlements that had been greatly expanded between 2000 and 2008 (for the purpose of making it impossible to incorporate East Jerusalem into the West Bank).

        Abbas was willing to allow Israel at least temporary control over the borders of Palestine, that is he was accepting something short of a real state, so that Israel could get comfortable with the idea of living aside of a Palestine Israel didn't fully control. But he wanted something that could actually be a Palestinian state someday. Olmert wouldn't offer him that.

        It is not convincing that the Palestinians would not take peace if it was offered when Israel refuses to offer even the possibility of peace.

        1. Steve C

          I concede that the settlements make getting to a Palestinian state more difficult, and show a lack of seriousness on the part of the Israeli government when they allow expansion.

          But the settlements in Gaza were removed. The settlements in Sinai were removed. Previous tentative agreements included land swaps for the more central and established settlements.

          Settlements are not permanent. Using them as the permanent validation for Palestinians not being peaceful is not helpful.

          1. KenSchulz

            Hamas has been incorrigibly rejectionist, yet Israel removed its Gaza settlements and withdrew its military. Fatah/the PA has slowly moderated, yet Israel expands settlements on the West Bank, and routinely conducts raids there with military units. When you reward extremism and punish moderation, what do you expect to see increase?

  4. illilillili

    I'm not sure that Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban are the right analogy here. Maybe terrorism in West Germany or Northern Ireland is the better analogy.

    In any event, the starting point has to be reforming Israeli political and social rhetoric and actions. It cannot be okay to condone terrorism carried out by Israelis.

  6. kahner

    bit bit off topic, but just read this in the nytimes:

    Israeli intelligence and national security officials, who had convinced themselves that Hamas had no interest in going to war, initially assumed it was just a nighttime exercise.
    Their judgment that night might have been different had they been listening to traffic on the hand-held radios of Hamas militants. But Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, had stopped eavesdropping on those networks a year earlier because they saw it as a waste of effort.

    This seems insane to me. They've been in a decades long military conflict and have a 20 billion dollar military and intelligence budget, but decided monitoring hamas' communications was too much work? wtf?

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/29/world/middleeast/israel-intelligence-hamas-attack.html

          1. Steve C

            Thanks. "Backed" may be a stronger term than I would use, but it seems clear that Netanyahu found Hamas useful and took actions to keep it around.

  8. cld

    Malcolm Nance,

    https://twitter.com/MalcolmNance/status/1718642046213238904

    REMEMBER: HAMAS declared this war on Israel and mass murdered civilians, one by one. Their strategic plan was to kill thousands of jews, take hundreds hostage and wait for Israel to invade for an urban war in Gaza knowing women and children above in the battle space would die. HAMAS planned this exact outcome. It is their war. They're responsible for every death.

    1. KenSchulz

      Germany and Japan began WWII, and Germany was the first to bomb cities indiscriminately. That doesn't mean we can't question the morality of Allied decisions to fire-bomb Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, or the atomic-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

      1. cld

        Those things were massively different than this which is, so far, an entirely ordinary and targeted bombing campaign with limited actual incursions.

        1. KenSchulz

          That does not put it beyond ethical examination. The U.S. bombing of Belgrade used precision munitions, one of which struck the Chinese Embassy and killed and injured people. The incident was blamed by the U.S. on an outdated map. The Serbs began the conflict, but were hardly responsible for the CIA employing idiots. It was, in your framing, an ‘entirely ordinary and targeted bombing campaign’ with no ground incursions at all.

          1. cld

            Well, it was, wasn't it? And one error while bombing Belgrade, despite being coupled with absurdly bad luck, doesn't seem that bad a statistic.

            The key point is that Hamas did begin this war, almost certainly at the ultimate instigation of Russia, with the expectation of causing among their own population sufficient death to create international outrage. For ethical examination that seems a pretty large target. What is the ethical approach to dealing with that group of people when it is obvious that at this point doing nothing will establish a precedent of increasing atrocity and your own vulnerability?

            How complicit Netanyahu has been in validating them over the years is immaterial to the question of what action should be taken against Hamas now, and particularly so in light of how they may be acting as a purposeful distraction from the war in Ukraine. There is probably some serious intelligence on this given that Macron is proposing an international coalition to eliminate them.

            1. KenSchulz

              It wasn't bad luck; it was someone at the CIA doing a sloppy job of verifying a target.
              I don't see how your speculations about the aggressor's motives or future intentions, even if proved correct, change the fact that victims of aggression still have agency and therefore must take responsibility for their own decisions. I believe that international laws and conventions take the same position. It would be absurd to say that China could have launched a massive nuclear strike to avenge the deaths of three people at the Belgrade embassy, and that the U.S. would have been responsible for the millions of deaths, because it initiated the violence.

              1. cld

                Because that would be massively out of scale and disproportionate.

                People arguing the Israelis are in the wrong never, absolutely never, provide an answer to any question or a solution to any problem that isn't really the elimination of Israel.

                What alternative do you propose that frees the Palestinians of being used by people like Hamas and allows Israel reasonable security?

                It's complicated isn't an answer. What's complicated, where is the complication? Each answer to each of those questions leads to this action against Hamas, unless you just think Israel should commit suicide. You have those two choices.

  9. Goosedat

    From 1954 to the present, the United States has used its veto power 34 times to block Security Council resolutions critical of Israel and that have attempted to hold it accountable for its violations of international law in Palestine. Israel has consistently ignored all resolutions pertaining to its crimes against Palestinians and bombed U.N. institutions and personnel, as it is doing in Gaza today.

    Decency requires acknowledging the failure to stop Israel's crimes against Palestinians since at least 1954.

    1. kenalovell

      And then DeSantis has the gall to say he'd consider pulling out of the UN because it can't solve the Israel/Palestine conflict.

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