One definition of madness, of course, is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome. The Biden White House continues to demand a permanent Israeli ceasefire in Gaza with, presumably, the expectation that something more than the status quo ante bellum will result. That status quo, recall, wasn’t good news for Israeli Jews. Hamas, on October 6th, was structurally focused on the elimination of the state of Israel. Hamas, on October 8th, was structurally focused on the elimination of the state of Israel. As I write, the stated goal of Hamas remains the elimination of the state of Israel. They continue to dream of a land emptied of Jews from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea. For anyone on the side of justice, the innocent, and free society, any plan to end the present fight in Gaza with Hamas still capable of carrying out defensive or offensive military operations is insanity.
The Biden Administration’s ceasefire demands plays directly into Hamas’ old and tired plan. Hamas has always relied on a strategy that begins with human sacrifice. Not the strategy of sacrificing the lives of their Israeli enemies, but a strategy relying on the sacrifice of its own people. The plan is as simple as it is abhorrent. Hit Israel. Make them hurt. Provoke Israel into striking back. And then put enough Palestinian civilian lives in the line of fire that eventually America becomes uncomfortable enough to pressure Israel to stand down. Again. Until the cycle rekindles. Hamas has accomplished their perverse strategy by demonstrating a total lack of regard for the lives of the people it is supposed to rule. They’ve built hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath the lives of ordinary Palestinians: under their hospitals, places of worship, schools, aid stations, and clinics. They store munitions and other warfighting materiel in the same locations. They set up weapons sites, including artillery positions, in Israeli-declared safe passage zones.
No military operating under such conditions against so entrenched an enemy—or in anything like these conditions–will ever be able to avoid civilian deaths. Nevertheless, Israeli tactics have resulted in surprisingly proportionate civilian deaths. This is no accident. The Israeli Defense Force has done more than any military in history to avoid civilian casualties. These include the IDF’s use of precision guided munitions, to the creation and employment of technologies that increase the accuracy of non-precision guided munitions, to carefully gathering and acting upon pre-strike intelligence on civilian presence—including intel gathered from satellite imagery, scans of cell phone presence, and other observation techniques to the utilization of an array of warning systems to alert civilians of prior to air and ground attacks—despite the increased danger these such warnings pose to IDF fighters by putting Hamas on the alert.
And yet Hamas continues to win the public relations campaign—which is, arguably, the only thing they need to win in order not to lose this war.
We are just about six months shy of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest cluster of concentration camps in the Nazi lager system. I have frequently written about attending the 50th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. When that event concluded, they began to read over loudspeakers the names of all the lives that were lost at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The intention was to read continuing reading the names until the entire list was exhausted. There were an estimated 1.2 million souls consumed at that one camp. It’s probably a counterfactual but if we have the names of all those 1.2 million souls and if it took one second to read each name, then the reading of 1.2 million names at the rate of one name a second would have taken 13.8 days. After the Holocaust the world pledged “never again.” October 7th, 2023 was the single greatest slaughter of Jews since the end of the Shoah, was a parturitional evil, pushing forth a fourteenth day of names for the ledger. Never again has happened again.
Judenfrei and judenrein are terms of Nazi conjuration to describe elements of the National Socialist fever dream. Judenfrei means “free of Jews” and refers to emptying a given area of all its Jewish inhabitants. Judenrein, meanwhile,connotes the stronger and more comprehensive notion that a geographical area has been cleansed—sponged, scrubbed, or purified—of any trace of Jewishness whatsoever—including blood and even ideology. These terms of racial hatred were intrinsic to Nazi anti-Semitism.
This is not to suggest that the terms—or rather the appetitive vision they reference—is limited to Nazism. Shortly after the end of World War II, the depopulation of Jewish communities from Arab and Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa bear cousin-similarities to Nazi German aspirations. Following the Jewish victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, launched when a military coalition of Arab States attacked Israel following the Israeli declaration of independence, Arab states undertook systematic spoliation against their Jewish populations. Jews were stripped of citizenship and suffered increasingly oppressive mobility restrictions, the loss of religious liberties, the seizure of assets and property seized, the ruination of livelihoods and economic prospects, arrests and detentions, and, ultimately forced or essentially forced, exodus and expulsion.
And, of course, the Hamas invocation of the phrase “from the river to the sea,” describing aspirations enshrined in their founding documents, is a vision of nothing less than an Israel rendered judenfrei. There are those who insist this is an overstatement; that the Hamas vision is not an existential threat to the Jewish people, per se, but only to the Zionist project—the Israeli state itself—and its occupation. Jews, they suggest, would be allowed to remain in the land even after the elimination of Israel. This is silly. Since 2007, Hamas has “ruled” over a territory from which Israel disengaged in 2005. They have had nearly 25 years and—and billions of dollars in aid—to build—to even begin to build—something resembling a viable state. Instead, they built hundreds of miles of defensive tunnels in which to hide and plot and build and store weapons of offensive war. They made a fortress when they ought to have made a nation. And they leveraged and advanced an ideology of hate that erupted in a massacre. The claim that Hamas’ fight is against Israel and not the Jewish people is put to rest when hundreds of unarmed teenagers are gunned down at a rock festival, when nearly 4,000 Hamas warfighters and Gazan “civilians” breach a security fence to go door to door murdering parents in front of their children, when they set to fire fellow human beings, when they raped, and murdered, and kidnapped again and again and again.
The Third Reich did not simply conjure Auschwitz-Birkenau out of nothing. It birthed it from a slow gestation marked by the construction of an entire political, social, cultural, and ecclesiastical edifice focused on the macabre answer to the “Jewish Question.” This edifice metastasized into every component of German life, instrumentalizing every sphere in the hunt for land rendered judenfrei. When at last the free world took up its responsibility to finally respond to and kill the Nazi regime it celebrated with the pledge to never let such things happen again. And then October 7th happened. And, like Auschwitz, October 7th did not simply conjure out of nothing. In addition to carefully sown hate amongst far too many Palestinians, international madness allowed the massacre to happen. I’m not referring to the philosophical and psychological madness of antisemitism, which is real, was a catalyst, and which needs a serious reckoning. I am referring, here, to the constant demand—made every time Israel responds to an assault against itself, that it prematurely stand-down, or fight with kid-gloves, or stop before war aims are met.
This, too, is silly. If peace is to be won, fights must most often be fought until a resolution is reached. This is most often achieved only when you destroy the enemy’s capacity and will to continue the fight. Biden’s continued calls for cease-fire will only serve to allow Hamas to regroup, recover, and rearm. The fight between Hamas and Israel is an existential—one or the other of the two parties must be destroyed for this to stop.