Lone Candle

“Israel’s commitment to complete victory over Hamas has been one major obstacle to peace. To this point, Hamas has proven resilient enough to withstand Israel’s onslaught and tolerant enough of Gazans’ suffering to insist on retaining power, no matter the human cost. Hamas has evinced some interest in trading hostages for Palestinian prisoners, but it has shown none in total surrender. If Israel no longer demanded the latter, then peace might be at hand.”

…

“World War II analogies figure prominently in this line of argument. Last week, in a column titled, “Do we still understand how wars are won?” the New York Times’s Bret Stephens accused Israel’s critics of historical amnesia.
After all, he notes,the last time the United States fought a war in which its very existence was conceivably at stake, Allied bombers “killed an estimated 10,000 civilians in the Netherlands, 60,000 in France, 60,000 in Italy and hundreds of thousands of Germans,” while the firebombings of Japanese cities and atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed nearly 1 million Japanese civilians.

Stephens notes that we do not remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a genocidal leader. Rather, we fondly remember leaders “who, faced with the awful choice of evils that every war presents, nonetheless chose morally compromised victories over morally pure defeats.”

Today, Stephens writes, Israel finds itself waging such an existential war: Hamas has called for wiping the country off the map, and the Jewish state cannot know security until it destroys its enemy’s “capability and will to wage war,” a task that entails tragedies like the one that claimed 45 civilian lives in Rafah in late May. Rather than threatening to withhold arms transfers to force Israel into appeasing Hamas, Stephens argues, the United States must “understand that [Israel has] no choice to fight except in the way we once did — back when we knew what it takes to win.”

But this line of reasoning is morally and intellectually bankrupt. That we are more horrified by the mass killing of civilians today than we were in 1945 is a mark of progress, not amnesia. And in any case, Israel’s war with Hamas is not remotely analogous to the Allied cause.

By the time the United States and Great Britain began bombing Dresden and Tokyo, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were already in the process of mass murdering tens of millions of people. Hamas may have genocidal intentions, but it does not have genocidal capacities. Waging total war on Gaza is not necessary for averting the imminent slaughter of Israeli civilians; to the contrary, doing so risks the lives of the few Israelis whom Hamas is currently in a position to destroy.

Further, the Axis powers genuinely threatened the existence of neighboring states. Hamas is incapable of defending its airspace, let alone conquering Israel. The Israeli government is right to insist that Hamas must not be allowed to launch another October 7, but that attack was only possible due to easily avoidable failures of intelligence and border defense.

More fundamentally, Israel’s ends cannot justify its means in Gaza when those ends are themselves unjust. The Netanyahu government is not fighting to liberate Gazans from despotism and establish the foundations for a two-state solution. To the contrary, it is committed to Palestinian statelessness and dispossession.

The people of Gaza deserve better than Hamas, but the Israeli government has neither the capacity nor the will to give Gazans what they deserve. The best it can do for the moment is stop killing them.”

…

“It is quite understandable that Israelis do not like the idea of Hamas persisting in Gaza after October 7. No one should. But it does not follow that the very existence of Israel depends on Hamas’s elimination, let alone that these existential stakes give Netanyahu’s government the right to “fight in the way we once did,” even if that involves incinerating Palestinian refugees in their tents.
This is all the more true when one considers that Israel does not actually have a remotely feasible plan for eliminating Hamas, facilitating the formation of a stable successor government in Gaza, or pursuing a lasting peace with the Palestinians.

When the United States bombed Japan and Germany, it was not simultaneously engaged in the settlement of Japanese and German land. The Israeli government, by contrast, has been forcing Palestinian communities in the West Bank off their land, while subjecting the broader territory to a form of apartheid rule.

Establishing a postwar governing authority in Gaza that simultaneously boasts legitimacy in the eyes of its people and cooperates with Israel on security issues would be difficult today under any circumstances. In a context where the Netanyahu government remains committed to expanding settlements — and, in so doing, humiliating Fatah in the West Bank, Palestine’s only alternative power center to Hamas — it is wholly impossible. Until that changes, an uneasy truce with a Hamas-governed Gaza may be the best of Israel’s bad options.

But Netanyahu’s problem isn’t merely that he cannot install a replacement for Hamas without abandoning his coalition partners’ commitment to the West Bank’s annexation. It is also that his military has proven incapable of eliminating Hamas to begin with. As soon as Israeli troops began leaving northern Gaza, the militant group started reestablishing itself, forcing the IDF to return and reengage in fighting. By all appearances, Israel has no viable alternative to Hamas to offer Gaza’s 2 million people beyond unending war and occupation.

Stephens is not wrong that we remember the justice of the Allies’ cause more than the horrors of their war crimes. But the suffering of Dresden and Hiroshima would be harder to rationalize or overlook in a world where neither gave way to peace and prosperity, but rather, to an endless cycle of counterinsurgency wars and the illegal settlement of German and Japanese lands by American religious fanatics.

In Gaza, Israel is not choosing a “morally compromised victory” over a “morally pure defeat.” It’s choosing a morally abominable quagmire. The bereaved parents of Rafah will take no comfort in the thought that hundreds of thousands German and Japanese civilians knew a similar pain in the 1940s. We shouldn’t either.”

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/353134/israel-gaza-rafah-argument