The Secretary of State admitted that Hamas uses their own people as human shields and doesn’t care about their well being, but fails to explain how Israel can minimize civilian casualties when their enemy wants to maximize them, much less how a “humanitarian pause” would do anything except help Hamas itself.
“Hamas doesn’t care one second or one iota for the welfare, for the well-being of the Palestinian people,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last Friday during his second trip to Israel in less than a month. “It cynically and monstrously uses them as human shields, putting his commanders in command posts, its weapons and ammunition, within or beneath residential buildings, schools, mosques, hospitals,” he continued. Secretary Blinken was equally clear on the carnage Hamas wrought on October 7, saying “It remains almost beyond the human capacity to process, to digest” and it “is striking and in some ways shocking that the brutality of the slaughter has receded so quickly in the memories of so many.” He described a scene of such cold-hearted savagery it is hard to believe, except he actually watched it unfold on video. “I saw, for example, a family on a kibbutz, a father (of) two young boys — maybe 10, 11 years old — grabbing them, pulling them out of their living room, going through their very small backyard and into a shelter, followed seconds later by a terrorist who throws a grenade into that small shelter. And then as the father comes staggering out, shoots him down. And then the boys come out, and they run into their house, and the camera in the house is filming everything. And they’re crying. ‘Where’s daddy?’ one says. The other says, ‘They killed daddy. Where’s my mommy?’ And then the terrorists comes in, and casually opens the refrigerator and starts to eat from it.” Rarely do I praise Secretary Blinken or the Biden Administration in general, but in these two brief statements he manages to almost perfectly capture both the underlying dynamics and the overall stakes. Hamas has been in control of the Gaza strip for more than fifteen years after being voted into power overwhelmingly by the Palestinians themselves, but their primary objective is not now, nor has it ever been, actually representing the best interests of the Palestinian people. Instead, they are bought and paid for by Iran, which funds some 70 percent of their operations, and the entire purpose of their existence is to conduct a proxy war against Israel, with the ultimate goal of destroying the only democracy in the region, “from the river to the sea” as the saying goes. The Palestinians themselves are pawns, some witting, some unwitting, in this effort, to be used as necessary in furtherance of Iran’s designs on regional domination.
This is why Hamas is so reckless with Palestinian lives, literally building their headquarters and hideaways right under the feet of refugee camps, hoping Israel kills as many civilians as possible to win the propaganda war. Peter Berkowitz, writing for Real Clear Politics, noted that if Gaza is an “open air prison” as many pro-Palestinean pundits claim, Hamas serves as the warden, not merely another inmate. It is also why no peace agreement of any kind, however favorable to the Palestinians will ever come to fruition. In America, we frequently claim that politicians do not properly represent the will of the people and at times, there is some truth to the assertion, but the situation in the Gaza Strip is of another kind altogether. It’s as if the President of the United States and all of the leaders in Congress were hand picked by a foreign power, one who’s goals did not align with what is best for America and making all of their decisions on behalf of that foreign power rather than the American people. Putting this another way, Hamas goal is not to secure a brighter future for Palestine by reaching an agreement with Israel for a two state – or any – solution of any kind. The plight of the Palestinians doesn’t interest them or concern them. The destruction of Israel is all that matters, hence they launched the most savage assault in modern memory without a care for how Israel would respond, unconcerned about what would necessarily happen to their own people in the aftermath. Prior to the unprovoked attack on October 7, the two sides had managed to maintain something of a detente amid a constant, relatively low level of violence for almost a decade, violence that would be unimaginable in Europe or America, but which nonetheless was manageable in a region torn with strife for 70 years. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Palestinian deaths between 2015 and 2022 averaged 171 per year. Deaths on the Israeli side averaged a little over 14. Further, most of these deaths occurred through the usually regrettable means of war, “air launched explosions” and “live ammunition” accounting for well over two thirds combined. The situation was far from ideal by any means, but October 7 radically redefined the limit of death and destruction both now and in the future, as if they went from fighting with sticks and stones on a schoolyard to machine guns and machetes. In the course of just a few hours, Hamas killed 100 times as many people as the yearly average and the means was nothing short of barbaric, people quite literally hacked up and burned alive.
There are those that will argue that Israel is somehow responsible for this massacre or at least partially to blame for the ongoing conflict in the region. As former President Barack Obama put it, “You have to admit that all of us are complicit to some degree.” Blame, at this point, is completely irrelevant, however. Who did what in 1948 and onward until October 6 does not change the fact that Hamas perpetrated the most heinous massacre in decades, and therefore changed the dynamic forever. There is not a country in the world with the means to respond to this sort of almost impossible to believe escalation that would not do anything and everything possible to prevent such a thing from happening again. Israeli leadership cannot – by every conceivable obligation to their people and sworn duty to their country – simply can continue onward in some strange stalemate with Hamas as before. No one in their right mind could risk this happening again, making the only conceivable outcome the complete destruction of Hamas. Consider what the United States might do if thousands of people swarmed up from Mexico and savaged the entire town of McAllen, Texas, killing a third of the residents in cold blood. Does anyone truly believe the President of the United States would be concerned about the root cause of the region’s political woes rather than defeating the enemy as swiftly as possible? The question then becomes: Can Hamas be destroyed without causing significant casualties among the civilian population in Gaza? Sadly, it is hard to see how that is possible given the nature of the war Israel is embarking on. Urban warfare on this scale necessarily and tragically wreaks havoc on civilians, displacing them and killing them. Israeli Defense Forces will be entering a densely populated area with thousands of soldiers and heavy weaponry including tanks. Hamas will undoubtedly transform the combat zone into a minefield of improvised explosive devices, taking positions on the tops of buildings and other hard to reach areas with rockets, rocket propelled grenades, mortars, and other destructive weaponry. The result will be both brutal and bloody, what we have seen so far as Israel encircles Gaza City merely a prelude to a much more destructive phase of the war.
Modern analogs are few and far between, but the War in Iraq provides something of a comparison, where between 186,901 and 210,296 civilians were killed. Clearing the Anbar province in particular resulted in 9,000 deaths alone. Gaza City is unfortunately far more densely populated. One needs to go back to World War II for a potential parallel. The bombing of Dresden, for example, resulted in some 25,000 casualties. The bombing of Tokyo was far more destructive with up to 150,000 people killed. Anyone who believes Israel’s War on Hamas will not be somewhere in this range is either blissfully delusional and woefully ignorant, especially when maximizing civilian casualties is a critical part of Hamas’ overall strategy. For example, there was a significant outcry last week when Israel launched air strikes at the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza, killing somewhere around 200 civilians. Among those civilians, however, was Ibrahim Baira, a Hamas commander who helped plan the attack and had infiltrated the camp. Below the camp, there was also a network of tunnels Hamas had created to store weapons and move their troops, intentionally drawing fire on refugees of their own people. As the Jerusalem Post reported, “soldiers uncovered Hamas intelligence headquarters and associated documentation, complete with detailed maps, tables, means of communication and personal details about Hamas terrorists and commanders” on the scene. Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht responded to the outcry by noting, “This is the tragedy of war… We’ve been saying for days: ‘Move south, civilians that are not involved with Hamas, please move south.’” Tragically, it is almost impossible to believe that we will see less of this and not more in the days to come. Contrary to the calls from some like Senator Bernie Sanders who supports Israel’s right to defend itself and has pushed back against the notion of a ceasefire, there is no “better” way to fight Hamas because Hamas itself will not allow a better way. This is precisely the way they want it and they are hoping against hope that continued civilian casualties will cause an even greater global outcry, bringing enough international pressure to force Israel into a ceasefire. They understand that they cannot defeat Israel in a direct confrontation, but they can bring the war to an end by forcing Israel from the battlefield. Their survival strategy depends on it.
The Biden Administration surely knows this. Secretary of State Blinken said as much while in Israel itself, which makes it all the more confusing that they are simultaneously pushing for some indeterminate “humanitarian pause” that would only serve Hamas’ goals – if not transition into an outright ceasefire. Israel has a strategic interest in prosecuting this war as quickly and effectively as possible. A delay of any kind will only give Hamas the chance to better fortify themselves, move troops around, secure additional munitions, better embed themselves in civilian areas, etc., likely resulting in both more Israeli and, counter intuitively, more civilian casualties over time. Incredibly, Secretary Blinken admitted this was a risk while pushing for the pause. “A number of legitimate questions were raised in our discussions today including how to use any period of pause to maximize the flow of humanitarian assistance, how to connect the pause to the release of hostages, how to ensure that Hamas doesn’t use these pauses or arrangements to its own advantage…These are issues that we need to tackle urgently, and we believe they can be solved.” Left unsaid for obvious reasons: What is to prevent Hamas from taking the supplies in the first place? They control the entire area and if anyone believes they will prioritize care for the wounded over their own needs, see the statement from the Secretary of State above. The situation becomes doubly confusing when you consider that Hamas has rejected the idea of a pause or a ceasefire themselves, likely for propaganda purposes of their own, saying specifically that they will not stop prosecuting this war under any circumstances. They refuse to release the hostages in exchange for the potential humanitarian pause and they insist their goal remains the destruction of Israel. This has led even Senator Sanders to declare, unequivocally, that “Hamas has got to go.” Therefore, it is unclear what strategy President Biden and his team are pursuing by pushing for a pause they know will benefit the enemy, especially if we use the pause to supply them with food, water, medicines, and other goods. Are they serious or is this just public relations as well? Only time will tell, but those who seek to rid the world of barbarism should hope they both understand the stakes and have the stomach to make it happen because this will be brutal one way or another as real wars always are. The old expression “war is hell” has been around for generations for a reason.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 