Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, flew to Israel to learn about the situation on the ground. The column that follows is an excellent summary, in my view, of the prospects for war and peace and what comes next. Most certainly, as the overwhelming majority of Israelis agree, Netanyahu has failed in his most basic responsilities to the people of Israel. The sooner he leaves, the sooner Israel can begin to plan for a lasting and just peace with its neighbors.
He writes:
People warned me before I came to Tel Aviv a few days ago that the Israel of Oct. 7 is an Israel that I’ve never been to before. They were right. It is a place in which Israelis have never lived before, a nation that Israeli generals have never had to protect before, an ally that America has never had to defend before — certainly not with the urgency and resolve that would lead a U.S. president to fly over and buck up the whole nation.
After traveling around Israel and the West Bank, I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any other time since its War of Independence in 1948. And it’s for three key reasons:
First, Israel is facing threats from a set of enemies who combine medieval theocratic worldviews with 21st-century weaponry — and are no longer organized as small bands of militiamen but as modern armies with brigades, battalions, cybercapabilities, long-range rockets, drones and technical support. I am speaking about Iranian-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen — and now even the openly Hamas-embracing Vladimir Putin. These foes have long been there, but all of them seemed to surface together like dragons during this conflict, threatening Israel with a 360-degree war all at once.
How does a modern democracy live with such a threat? This is exactly the question these demonic forces wanted to instill in the mind of every Israeli. They are not seeking a territorial compromise with the Jewish state. Their goal is to collapse the confidence of Israelis that their defense and intelligence services can protect them from surprise attacks across their borders — so Israelis will, first, move away from the border regions and then they will move out of the country altogether.
I am stunned by how many Israelis now feel this danger personally, no matter where they live — starting with a friend who lives in Jerusalem telling me that she and her husband just got gun licenses to have pistols at home. No one is going to snatch their children and take them into a tunnel. Hamas, alas, has tunneled fear into many, many Israeli heads far from the Gaza border.
The second danger I see is that the only conceivable way that Israel can generate the legitimacy, resources, time and allies to fight such a difficult war with so many enemies is if it has unwavering partners abroad, led by the United States. President Biden, quite heroically, has been trying to help Israel with its immediate and legitimate goal of dismantling Hamas’s messianic terrorist regime in Gaza — which is as much a threat to the future of Israel as it is to Palestinians longing for a decent state of their own in Gaza or the West Bank.
But Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza entails urban, house-to-house fighting that creates thousands of civilian casualties —innocent men, women and children — among whom Hamas deliberately embedded itself to force Israel to have to kill those innocents in order to kill the Hamas leadership and uproot its miles of attack tunnels.
But Biden can sustainably generate the support Israel needs only if Israel is ready to engage in some kind of a wartime diplomatic initiative directed at the Palestinians in the West Bank — and hopefully in a post-Hamas Gaza — that indicates Israel will discuss some kind of two-state solutions if Palestinian officials can get their political house unified and in order.
This leads directly to my third, deep concern.
Israel has the worst leader in its history — maybe in all of Jewish history — who has no will or ability to produce such an initiative.
Worse, I am stunned by the degree to which that leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to put the interests of holding on to the support of his far-right base — and pre-emptively blaming Israel’s security and intelligence services for the war — ahead of maintaining national solidarity or doing some of the basic things that Biden needs in order to get Israel the resources, allies, time and legitimacy it needs to defeat Hamas.
Biden cannot help Israel build a coalition of U.S., European and moderate Arab partners to defeat Hamas if Netanyahu’s message to the world remains, in effect: “Help us defeat Hamas in Gaza while we work to expand settlements, annex the West Bank and build a Jewish supremacist state there.”
Let’s drill down on these dangers.
Last Saturday night, a retired Israeli Army commander stopped by my hotel in Tel Aviv to share his perspective on the war. I took him to the 18th-floor executive lounge for our chat, and when we got into the elevator to go up, we joined a family of four — two parents, a toddler and a baby in a stroller. The Israeli general asked them where they were from. “Kiryat Shmona,” the father answered.
As we stepped out, I joked with the general that he could dispense with his briefing. It took just 18 floors and those two words — “Kiryat Shmona” — to describe Israel’s wickedly complex new strategic dilemma created by the surprise Hamas attack of Oct. 7.
Kiryat Shmona is one of the most important Israeli towns on the border with Lebanon. That father said his family had fled the northern fence line with thousands of other Israeli families after the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia and Palestinian militias in southern Lebanon began lobbing rockets and artillery and making incursions in solidarity with Hamas.
When might they go back? They had no idea. Like more than 200,000 other Israelis, they have taken refuge with friends or in hotels all across this small country of nine million people. And it has taken only a few weeks for Israelis to begin driving up real estate prices in seemingly safer central Israeli towns. For Hezbollah, that alone is mission accomplished, without even invading like Hamas. Together, Hezbollah and Hamas are managing to shrink Israel.
On Sunday I drove down to a hotel on the Dead Sea to meet some of the hundreds of surviving members of Kibbutz Be’eri, which had some 1,200 residents, including 360 children. It was one of the communities hardest hit by the Hamas onslaught — suffering more than 130 murders in addition to scores of injured and multiple kidnappings of children and elderly. The Israeli government has moved most survivors of the kibbutz across the country to the Dead Sea, where they are now starting their own schools in a hotel ballroom.
I asked Liat Admati, 35, a survivor of the Hamas attack who ran a clinic for facial cosmetics for 11 years in Be’eri, what would make it possible for her to go back to her Gaza border home, where she was raised.
“The main thing for me to go back is to feel safe,” she said. “Before this situation, I felt I have trust in the army. Now I feel the trust is broken. I don’t want to feel that we are covering ourselves in walls and shelters all the time while behind this fence there are people who can one day do this again. I really don’t know at this point what the solution is.”
Before Oct. 7, she and her neighbors thought the threat was rockets, she said, so they built safe rooms, but now that Hamas gunmen came over and burned parents and kids in their safe rooms, who knows what is safe? “The safe room was designed to keep you safe from rockets, not from another human who would come and kill you for who you are,” she said. What is most dispiriting, she concluded, is that it appears that some Gazans who worked on the kibbutz gave Hamas maps of the layout.
There are a lot of Israelis who listened to the recording, published by The Times of Israel, of a Hamas gunman who took part in the Oct. 7 onslaught, identified by his father as Mahmoud, calling his parents from the phone of a Jewish woman he’d just murdered and imploring them to check his WhatsApp messages to see the pictures he took of some of the 10 Jews he alone killed in Mefalsim, a kibbutz near the Gaza border.
“Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews,” he says, according to an English translation. “Mom, your son is a hero,” he adds. His parents can be heard seemingly rejoicing.
This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’
The euphoric rampage of Oct. 7 that killed some 1,400 soldiers and civilians has not only hardened Israeli hearts toward the suffering of Gaza civilians. It has also inflicted a deep sense of humiliation and guilt on the Israeli Army and defense establishment, for having failed in their most basic mission of protecting the country’s borders.
As a result, there is a conviction in the army that it must demonstrate to the entire neighborhood — to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Houthis in Yemen, to the Islamic militias in Iraq to the Hamas and other fighters in the West Bank — that it will stop at nothing to re-establish the security of the borders. While the army insists that it is hewing to the laws of war, it wants to show that no one can outcrazy Israel to drive its people from this region — even if the Israeli military has to defy the U.S. and even if it does not have any solid plan for governing Gaza the morning after the war.
As Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told reporters on Wednesday: “Israel cannot accept such an active threat on its borders. The whole idea of people living side by side in the Middle East was jeopardized by Hamas.”
This conflict is now back to its most biblical and primordial roots. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The morning-after policy thinking will have to wait for the mourning after.
Which is why I so worry about the leadership here today. I was traveling around the West Bank on Tuesday when I heard that Netanyahu had just told ABC News that Israel plans to retain “overall security responsibility” in Gaza “for an indefinite period” after its war with Hamas.
Really? Consider this context: “Accordingto Israel’s official Central Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 2021, 9.449 million people live in Israel (including Israelis in West Bank settlements), the Times of Israel reported last year. “Of those, 6.982 million (74 percent) are Jewish, 1.99 million (21 percent) are Arab, and 472,000 (5 percent) are neither. The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics puts the West Bank Palestinian population at a little over three million and the Gaza population at just over two million.”
So Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews are going to indefinitely control the lives of five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — while offering them no political horizon, nothing, by way of statehood one day on any demilitarized conditions.
Early on the morning of Oct. 29, as the Israeli Army was just moving into Gaza, Netanyahu posted and then deleted a message on social media in which he blamed Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment for failing to anticipate Hamas’s surprise attack. (Netanyahu somehow forgot how often the Israeli military and intelligence leaders had warned him that his totally unnecessary coup against the country’s judicial system was fracturing the army and Israel’s enemies were all noticing its vulnerability.)
After being slammed by the public for digitally stabbing his army and intelligence chiefs in the back in the middle of a war, Netanyahu published a new post. “I was wrong,” he wrote, adding that “the things I said following the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”
But the damage was done. How much do you suppose those military leaders trust what Netanyahu will say if the Gaza campaign stalls? What real leader would behave that way at the start of a war of survival?
Let me not mince words, because the hour is dark and Israel, as I said, is in real danger. Netanyahu and his far-right zealots have taken Israel on multiple flights of fancy in the last year: dividing the country and the army over the fraudulent judicial reform, bankrupting its future with massive investments in religious schools that teach no math and in West Bank Jewish settlements that teach no pluralism — while building up Hamas, which would never be a partner for peace, and tearing down the Palestinian Authority, the only possible partner for peace.
The sooner Israel replaces Netanyahu and his far-right allies with a true center-left-center-right national unity government, the better chance it has to hold together during what is going to be a hellish war and aftermath. And the better chance that Biden — who may be down in the polls in America but could get elected here in a landslide for the empathy and steel he showed at Israel’s hour of need — will not have hitched his credibility and ours to a Netanyahu Israel that will never be able to fully help us to help it.
This society is so much better than its leader. It is too bad it took a war to drive that home. Ron Scherf is a retired member of Israel’s most elite special forces unit and a founder of Brothers in Arms, the Israeli activist coalition that mobilized veterans and reservists to oppose Netanyahu’s judicial coup. Immediately after the Hamas invasion, Brothers in Arms pivoted to organizing reservists and aid workers to get to the front — left, right, religious, secular, it didn’t matter — many hours before this incompetent government did.
It’s a remarkable story of grass-roots mobilization that showed how much solidarity is still buried in this place and could be unlocked by a different prime minister, one who was a uniter, not a divider. Or as Scherf put it to me, “When you go to the front, you are overwhelmed by the power of what we lost.”
Some powerful Israelis are talking about forcing Netanyahu to face an election 90 days after the war. That might not be soon enough, in my (admittedly not so expert) opinion.
Thomas Friedman is a shill for Israel and the Western Governments. All tear jerking for Israeli plight and none for the Palestinian dispossession and suffering. Every Israeli settlement in the West Bank is illegal. Do you see the word “ apartheid” anywhere? The massacre in Gaza could be stopped by a single phone call from the US.
I have never read Thomas Friedman as a shill for Israel and the West. I suppose, like most columnists, he is likely to defen democratic societies, even flawed democratic governments like Israel and the U.S. Were you disturbed by the Hamas attack on civilians on October 7? Was there a good reason to brutalize the victims with beheadings, burning their bodies, raping women, killing children in front of their parents, then killing the parents too? Or the massacre of 260 young people at a dance party? The kibbutzim near the Gaza border were populated by peace activists. Hamas is using the entire Gazan population as its human shield. It has received billions in aid but plowed that aid into building an elaborate network of tunnels. And while the Palestinian people die in Gaza, the leadership of Hamas is living in luxury hotels in Qatar.
The “democratic” societies of Israel and the US has ethnically cleansed Palestine. Gaza has been a concentration camp for the last 16 years. As a benchmark, Hitler’s concentration camps were in existence for four years. Israel has imposed an illegal blockade on Gaza for the last 16 years and have periodically bombed Gaza and called it “mowing the lawn”. In 2014 during Operation Protective Edge, Israelis from Siderot watched the bombing of Gaza from a hilltop and cheered every blast. None of these are conspiracy theories- they are done in plain sight. US has been providing arms and ammunition to Israel along with diplomatic cover. Have you noticed that in the current genocide of Gaza, Israel is supported by settler colonial countries and the mother of settler colonialism Europe. I recognise that on October 7, innocents were killed and brutally murdered. I also recognise it to be a prison break. I’ll never condemn a slave revolt. I take my moral position from Normal Finkelstein (check out Finkelstein’s interview on the Katie Halper show). Israel is a settler colonial apartheid country and the thin rag of tear jerking narrative that Westerners use to hide the crimes of Israel is tattered.
If its Arab neighbors had ever accepted Israel’s very existence, the region would have no wars and would have enjoyed peace and prosperity for decades.
I recommend that you read this article:
I have read it. It is just an apologia for Israel. Does not mention that Hamas won the election in 2005, but talks about Hamas usurping power. He goes on to talk about settler colonialism as if it is a myth. Israel always wanted to create a state by ethnic cleansing. Suggest you read Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe and Shlomo Sand. Or look at their interviews in You Tube.
For many decades, when there was a major new breakthrough in the understanding of how language works, it was made by Noam Chomsky. So, on that score, he’s a brilliant guy. But his ideas about geopolitics are bizarre–way the f out in crazyland. And he never could write well. His books are often an interminable plod not because the ideas are so complex but because he simply can’t write clear, engaging, readable prose.
His political books are laborious to read because of his extensive documentation. He speaks truth which are anathema to power. If you want a more colloquial Chomsky watch his interviews. Also try his book “ Understanding Power”.
It sickens me that this person who supports Putin’s annihilation of entire Ukraine cities is allowed to lie.
Israel has a 25% Arab population so the claims of “ethnic cleansing” are a sick way to justify Hamas killing more Israeli families. There is no other country in the middle east with a recognizable Jewish population because they were not welcome. Expelled or killed off.
Jews have always lived in the middle east, and calling them “colonialists” because you hate Jews and you believe in the legitimacy of “colonialist-created” Arab-ruled countries but not in the legitimacy of a single tiny Jewish-controlled country is entirely about hatred for Jews and nothing else.
Jordan controlled much of that land for decades and no Palestinian state was established. The goal was simply like this person’s own goal, to annihilate Israel.
In 1947, Jews were 30% of Historic Palestine and Palestinians were 70% of Historic Palestine. Now ask yourself how did the Palestinian population reduced from 70% to 25%- the answer is ethnic cleansing. Israel has repeatedly violated International law and have imposed an Apartheid regime.
The United Nations created the state of Israel. After World War II, there were large numbers of Jews in Europe who were “displaced persons.” The state of Israel assured them there would be one place where they could call their home, where they would not be persecuted or expelled. Nearly one million Jews were expelled from Muslim nations. Israel was the only place they could go.
Why were Arab nations unwilling to accept Palestinians? They have far more land than the tiny nation of Israel. Jordan pushed Palestinians out in 1970. Egypt controls the crossing to Gaza and has said it does not want Gazans in Egypt. Saudi Arabia has huge tracts of empty land and a perennial labor shortage. Why don’t they accept Palestinians?
These are questions you should explore before accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing.” There are Israeli Arabs and Muslims serving in the Knesset. How many Muslim nations have Jews in their Parliament?
Read a book. Palestinians were ethnically cleansed out of Palestine. The same UN which created Israel also passed Resolution 194 which recognized that the displaced Palestinians have a right to return. Of course you will never hear apologists for Israel talk about UN resolution 194. Amnesty, HRW and B’Tselem has all said that Israel is an apartheid country. Israeli politicians have often used genocidal language against Palestinians.
Palestinians constantly use genocidal language about Israel. Not “often,” but constantly. Even now. The phrase “From the River to the sea” implies ethnic cleansing and genocide and elimination of Israel.
If the Arab nations accepted Israel, the Middle East would flourish with new technologies, cultural exchanges, higher education, desalination plants, rich farmlands.
Stop thinking hatred and dream of co-existence and a world of peace and prosperity.
👏👏
I was a Norman Finkelstein fan in my early 20s and I’m embarrassed for myself.
The use of the term “concentration camp” to describe Gaza is ridiculous and offensive to the extent it seeks (and surely it does) to draw comparisons to Nazi work camps and killing centers.
nalinaksha7696f22858, If Gaza had been a Hitler style concentration camp for the past 16 years, there would be no Palestinians left in Gaza. It only took Hitler 4 years to murder 6 million Jews. At least get your facts straight. The horror of what has gone on on both sides is enough without purposely mischaracterizing the situation.
Sobering and heartbreaking, Diane. Thank you for posting.
I can only say as a Christian minister that it is ESSENTIAL we all engage in powerful and courageous conversations right now with both Jewish and Muslim American neighbors. This is a moral imperative.
Even with Netanyahu gone, Hamas, Iran and all of its Shi-i terrorist groups/armies, must be eliminated or Israel and the Sunni (and other smaller) branch/es of Islam will never be safe.
Fundamentalist Shia Islam must be defeated no matter what the cost is in innocent lives, starting with Hamas.
When innocent people are used as shields, becoming weapons of war, willingly or not, then they become what is known as collateral damage.
As I have said before, and will say again since I’ve been to that hell.
War is hell and will always be hell. Once that hell is unleashed, fighting with humanitarian rules are not going to put that hell back in its box and keep it there.
All any rational person has to do to understand what I mean is look at what it took the United States and its allies to do, to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to end World War II.
Two atomic bomb dropped on cities in Japan killing more than 100,000 innocent civilians.
Carpet bombing cities full of innocent civilians using napalm and explosive ordinance.
There is no way to fight a ruthless enemy that follows no rules except to win by any means by limiting what your military can do.
Nazi Germany was defeated by the Soviet Union. But coming back to Israel, it is a settler colonial apartheid state that is now committing genocide openly with the support of the US and the Western powers. The Israeli leaders have repeatedly expressed their genocidal intent.
Again the lie. The Soviet Union AND other western countries you abhor were responsible for defeating Nazi Germany, and the Soviets were fine with Nazi Germany until it threatened them.
It is telling that the US helped rebuild the part of western Europe you hate into real democracies, while the Soviets crushed dissent (and democracy) in their sphere. And when the Soviet Union could not stand, those other countries chose NATO, not Russia, because they believed in democracy, not kleptocracy where poisoning one’s political opponents is acceptable instead of prosecuted.
Israel is a tiny country of 9 million people surrounded by tens of millions of Arab and Muslim countries (which expelled their Jewish populations long ago). It is ridiculous to suggest that this tiny country can commit genocide on a vastly larger population.
The anti semetic philosophy was in Europe not in the Middle East. The pogroms were in Europe – not in the Middle East. When Isabella and Fernandes expelled Jews from Spain, many of them went to the Ottoman Empire. Hitler did the Judeocide, why not establish the Jewish State in Germany instead of ethnically cleansing Palestinians.
Palestinians were not “ethnically cleansed” nor were they the objects of genocide.
If “who was there first” determines land ownership, then the Holy Land is clearly Hebraic. Jews lived in Jerusalem and other parts of what is Israel centuries before Islam existed.
But statehood is not determined by “who was there first.” If it were, all the US belongs to the indigenous peoples who lived here before Europeans did. But v that is not the case, and no one is making plans to go back where their ancestors came from.
You seem to argue that Israel should go away, just evaporate. That will not happen.
Once Palestinians agree to go-exist peacefully and give up their dream of “ethnic clesnsing” and “genocide,” once they stop claiming that Israel has no right to exist, then a two-state solution will be possible.
A two-state solution is the only way to peace.
There were anti-Jewish riots in Jerusalem in 1930. Anti-Jewish bigotry was not confined to Europe.
Nazi Germany was not defeated by the USSR but by a broad alliance that included the USSR. The USSR signed an alliance with Nazi Germany in 1939–two brutal dictatorships. But Hitler attacked his ally in 1941 and got his butt kicked. It took the joint efforts of Britain and the US to defeat the Nazi regime.
We put a devastated Europe back in its feet with the Marshall Plan. If only we had done the same in 1919, there would not have been a World War 2.
The Jews were expelled from Spain by whom? I must admit I’m not familiar with Isabella and Fernandes. Were they any relation to Christopher Columbustein?
They backed and bankrolled the genocidal murderer Columbus.
Jews did not bankroll Columbus. The King and Queen of Spain did. Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.
Your hatred for Jews is repulsive. I am a Jew. I take offense at your bigotry.
Look at who I was replying to. He wanted to about the connection between Isabela and Ferdinand and the genocidal murderer Columbus. It is a fact of history that Isabel and Ferdinand did bankroll Columbus and the resulting genocide of Native Americans.
Thanks for posting this, Diane.
Israel has Netanyahu and we have Trump . When will both populations realize that the far right , now and throughout history , are the harbingers of present doom and eventually Armageddon.
1400 dead Israelis and 14,000 Palestinians dead. And Israel is in danger? No I don’t condone Hamas’s assault on Israel. Nor do I condone the weekly dead and imprisoned Palestinians over the last 20 years. There will never be peace in Israel/Palestine. An eye for an eye til everyone is blind.
Chuck, I don’t condone violence from any quarter.
The only solution is two states. Terrorist groups like Hamas must abandon their hatred and seek peaceful co-existence.
I read that when Bibi Netanyahu visits the US, he sleeps in a bed at Jared Kushner’s home. Seems to explain a lot.
I have said it to friends and family many times, that Netanyahu and the Israeli Right has ceded the moral high ground through their treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank. Netanyahu should be tried as a war criminal. Not for his response in Gaza but for preventing the prosecution of an IDF soldier who walked up to a wounded Palestinian youth and shot him point blank in the head. That action caused the Defense Minister and the Army chief of staff to resign in disgust.
The question is how did Israel arrive at this point? In 2000 Ehud Barak who had run for PM on a Platform of land for Peace gave an offer to Arafat at Camp David. The Saudi Ambassador to the US Prince Bandar remarked that if Arafat turned it down it would not be “negligence but it would be Criminal”. Arafat not only turned it down but unleashed the Second Intifada. As suicide Bombers targeted weddings and bus stops the response in Israel was to build walls, Elect a hard right Government and give up on a two state solution, Sharon comes to office in 2001. Sharon who had been booted from his office as Defense Minister in 1983. Removed by massive street Demonstrations (400k ) the likes of which percentage wise no other nation has ever seen. Booted from office for his role in the Christian Phalanges slaughter of innocents in refugee camps in Lebanon. He gets elected on a promise to secure security in Israel. By 2005 he concludes that the only way to do so is a de-facto Palestinian state with or with out PLO / PA consent. Pulling out of Gaza completely with Plans to dismantle most West Bank Settlements as well walling off Israel from the two. His stroke put an end to the second half on the West Bank .
In a second act of criminality the people in Gaza elect Hamas on the promise of ” Palestine from the River to the Sea.”And driving the Jews into the sea. How is that working out?
If you read “The Source ” written by Michener in 1965, he describes a messianic world view of the Palestinian people in which through the centuries they have survived many invaders and are still there. A view that the Infidels will not outlast them. No need to compromise. Exactly what Barak has said recently about why Arafat criminally rejected a deal that left both Clinton,Barak and the other negotiators in the room shaking their heads.
To some degree “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” The civilians in Gaza certainly did not come out in the streets on October 7 to protest a massacre committed in their name or anytime in the past 15 years seeking a peaceful solution. If you claim they could not with Hamas in power than you have answered the question as to why Hamas has to go. . As the Citizens in Japan and Germany were just fine with Tojo and Hitler until the bombs started falling. There were/ are toxic ethos with all these movements including the Israeli right and sadly those that share these beliefs are not the only victims.
There is little choice for Israel other than to eliminate the threat. Negotiations did not work, nor did walling itself off from the threat. As Freedman points out it was the 30,000 workers allowed into Southern Israel who provided the intelligence that allowed October 7 to happen. So Netanyahu’s strategy of buying Hamas off with expanding economic incentive while feeding off each others hostility did not work either. Every time Hamas launched a strike Israel expanded a settlement and Hamas launched another strike.
What is troubling about all the calls for a ceasefire is that in just the last decade near 1 million Civilians were killed in Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Just yesterday this was the headline in Al Jazeera.
“Corpses on streets’: Sudan’s RSF kills 1,300 in Darfur, monitors say”
“They went house to house to search for men and killed each one they found,” said Montesser Saddam*, who barely escaped the killing and arrived in Chad on Sunday. “There were so many corpses in the streets.”
Does anyone recall mass demonstrations in the streets. Demanding peace ! In any of these conflicts. Statements about Arab genocide of the African population in South Sudan .
The hypocrisy is astounding.
Civilians were not asked to wander the desert for 40 years ,they were asked to go a distance of 3 to 8 miles to a part of Gaza that has witnessed substantially less bombing probably by a factor of 10x or more . At 72 I do 5 miles of walking a day in two hours. Yet the media narrative and that from relief agencies and the UN was that this was punishing the people. for the crimes of Hamas. Which encouraged people to stay put and provide Hamas with heart wrenching propaganda videos. Several thousand of them no longer have to worry about being collectively punished.
Joel,
I’m glad you have a long memory.
Netanyahu and his cronies have to resign. The sooner the better.
Hopefully, this disaster will end with a sturdy peace agreement and two states, backed by the Arab governments, the UN, and the IS.