Israel’s Scorched Earth Response is Exactly What Hamas Intended
By engaging in acts the international community universally condemns, Israel is playing right in Hamas’ hands and helping to radicalize more jihadists.
Let’s start by stating the obvious: Hamas is a brutal terrorist organization and its attack on Israeli civilians last week is inhumane and barbaric.
Now to the uncomfortable part.
Just as Osama bin Laden planned for and celebrated the United States’ overreaction to the 9/11/01 terror attacks, Israel may be getting sucked into Hamas’ invitation to further destabilize the Middle East by engaging in its own acts of inhumanity and barbarism.
Terrorists thrive on violence. Their goal is to instill fear and upset the established order.
Just as then-president George W. Bush was warned bin Laden was determined to strike within the United States and decided to ignore it and continue the longest vacation in presidential history because it would ultimately provide the pretext Bush needed to invade Iraq, the Israeli government had been waiting for its own pretext to rid Palestinians from Gaza.
The problem is, Hamas is not Palestine.
It is an extremist group that distorts Islam to exact a political agenda of intimidation and fear.
Yet, in a classic example of punishing the many for the sins of the few, over a million Palestinian citizens are fleeing their homes after being held responsible for the terror group’s horrific act.
https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1713148003551187331
Here is what Israel President Isaac Herzog said Friday about Palestinian civilians in Gaza:
It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians [being] not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.
I agree there are many innocent Palestinians who don’t agree with this, but if you have a missile in your goddamn kitchen and you want to shoot it at me, am I allowed to defend myself? We have to defend ourselves, we have the full right to do so.
Human Rights Watch confirmed reports of Israel using white phosphorus munitions during assaults on Gaza and along its border with Lebanon.
In anticipation of a ground invasion, Israeli soldiers and settlers, in their “complete siege,” have killed dozens of Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Common Dreams reported:
The Palestinian Health Ministry said that 11 people were killed by Israeli occupation forces and settler-colonists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem so far on Friday, raising the death toll there to 46 and the number of wounded to over 700 since Hamas and other Gaza-based militants launched a massive cross-border attack on southern Israel last weekend, killing more than 1,300 Israeli soldiers and civilians.
2,700 Palestinians, including more than 1,000 children, have been killed; hundreds of thousands have been displaced; and Israel has cut off water for Gaza’s 2.3 million residents.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced:
There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.
Starving civilians is, inarguably, a war crime.
Israel, it appears then, is willing to meet Hamas crime for crime.
https://twitter.com/fbhutto/status/1711337616820384140
Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard tweeted:
https://twitter.com/sfardm/status/1711417277503905927
Tufts University professor of international law, Tom Dannenbaum, added:
https://twitter.com/tomdannenbaum/status/1711328176616419710
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem stated last Monday that Israeli officials “who now call for killing, destroying, crushing, smashing, and even starving the residents of the Gaza Strip” in the wake of Hamas’ attack “forget that this is already Israeli policy.”
It added:
At this moment, Israel is attacking in the Gaza Strip, when it is clear that once again many of the victims are civilians — including women, children, and the elderly. Deliberate harm to civilians is always wrong and prohibited. There can be no justification for such crimes, not when they are committed as part of a struggle for freedom and liberation from oppression, and not when they are justified as a fight against terrorism.
By engaging in acts the international community universally condemns, Israel is playing right in Hamas’ hands and helping to radicalize more jihadists.
Consider that half the population of Gaza is under age 18 and airstrikes, checkpoints, and poverty are all they have ever known.
Those are conditions rife for radicalization.
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1713525125478228437
Just as the United States proved Osama bin Laden right by unleashing a scorched-earth policy against those we considered terrorists, even if they weren’t, Israel is blurring the lines between terrorism and justice.
Hamas needs to be eradicated and the Palestinian people need a country of their own.
A “two-state solution” is the official policy of the United States. But now, perhaps, there ought to be talks about a “three-state solution”: Israel, Palestine, and Gaza.
A “two-state solution” is the official policy of the United States.
But now, perhaps, there ought to be talks about a “three-state solution”: Israel, Palestine, and Gaza.
First we stanch the bloodshed, then we open dialog about finally turning the tide to reverse decades of carnage.
Turning Gaza into a parking lot, though, isn’t going to benefit anyone — not even Israel.