Ten Points On Hamas/Israel

The War Summarized

1. Israel’s fundamental goal is to enable Jews, after two thousand years of persecution and massacres, to be able to provide themselves with a safe home in their ancient homeland. (The vast majority of Israelis are also willing to make territorial compromise, if it would genuinely create long-term security.)

2. The fundamental goal of Hamas is to kill Jews and destroy Israel. That is the very definition of genocide.

3. Hamas is happy to bring about the deaths of innumerable Palestinian civilians in their pursuit of this goal. This is even part of their active strategy.

4. Hamas committed a brutal massacre of unfathomable cruelty (also knowing full well that this would result in many Palestinian deaths), along with firing thousands of rockets into towns, which they have sworn to try again and again.

5. Israel must destroy Hamas. There is simply no other way to stop them. There is nothing to offer them, no way to change their mind. Furthermore, if Hamas survives, it incentivizes others, such as Hezbollah, to follow their lead.

6. War is brutal. War is hell. War involves mistakes and negligence and misbehavior by some soldiers. War involves civilian deaths. Millions of German civilians died in WWII. The U.S. post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan caused an estimated 432,093 civilians to die violent deaths.

7. Likewise, there is no way to destroy Hamas without killing a lot of civilians. And since Hamas deliberately embeds itself among civilians, even in hospitals, there will be many civilian deaths. (At the same time, bear in mind that the numbers in Gaza include terrorists as well as civilians, and that a seventeen-year-old terrorist is classified by Hamas as a child.)

8. Israel has taken unprecedented steps to avoid civilian deaths, including warning people to evacuate areas of military options, and protecting them while they evacuate, whereas Hamas has tried to prevent civilians from fleeing such areas.

9. Israel, which has the military ability to kill hundreds of thousands, obviously makes efforts to avoid killing civilians. Even if you don’t believe that Israel has moral considerations, there is certainly practical necessity to avoid enormous political fallout which harms its military objectives. It makes no sense to accuse Israel of deliberately trying to inflict civilian deaths, and certainly not genocide.

10. Civilian deaths in any war are a tragedy; but to condemn them as morally wrong, and equate them to a terrorist massacre, is itself morally wrong. Furthermore, it encourages Hamas to cause civilian casualties.

And one more:

11. Strangely, nobody seems to care remotely as much about the millions of civilians killed in other conflicts, some of which are taking place right now, or about the many thousands of Palestinians killed by Hamas and other Arabs. This should give reason to reflect on what is actually driving the alleged concern for Palestinians.