Alan Zendell, October 14, 2023

It’s not complicated. When there’s a cancer eating away at your body, you employ every means available to excise and kill it. If you don’t, it will kill you.

Harsh words, but appropriate. Hamas’ charter says it exists for the purpose of killing Jews and destroying Israel. As the governing body of Gaza for eighteen years, instead of focusing on the health and well-being of more than two million Palestinians, Hamas devoted itself to killing Israelis. The attack on Israeli towns near Gaza that began ten days ago is unique only in its scale, scope, and inhuman brutality.

Palestinians and Israelis both have a long history of grievances. Half of the world’s thirteen million Jews (as of 1940) were murdered by the Nazis, with about half of the survivors still in Europe when the war ended. As to the territory that includes Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, we have the dying gasps of British imperialism to thank for today’s mess.

During WW1, the British guaranteed Arab sovereignty in the Holy Land in exchange for the uprising that ousted the Turks. In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, which guaranteed a Jewish homeland in the region, and in 1920, the League of Nations mandated all of Palestine to Britain. The British, with help from America and the rest of Europe secured the United Nations mandate that created the sovereign nation of Israel in 1948, but they reneged on their promise to the Palestinians who drove out the Turks. Instead, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank became protectorates of Egypt and Jordan.

Israel became the homeland for survivors of the Nazi holocaust and the Jews who staged a four-year long uprising against British occupation in 1943. In 1948, all of its Arab neighbors declared war on Israel, and a state of war has existed unabated for seventy-five years. Part of the problem is religious differences around the control of Jerusalem, which became part of Israel. Long-standing grievances exist on both sides, and religious extremists, both Muslims and Jews, exacerbated the situation, but two things are clear.

Israel built a society based on democratic principles and the rule of law, tamed a desert, and created a strong economy and quality of life for its citizens. It has never attempted to occupy its neighbors’ territories except when it has been invaded, while Israel’s neighbors have repeatedly attacked them, from firing rockets into civilian settlements to full-scale incursions. Even so, Israel reached peace accords with Egypt and Jordan after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the UAE in 2022. The current normalization talks with Saudi Arabia are likely what triggered Hamas’ attack.

The war currently raging in Israel and Gaza has some interesting nuances. While it is heavily supported and supplied by Iran, Hamas appears to have acted on its own. Hezbollah, another terrorist client of Iran has not entered the war directly, and while it constantly provokes trouble in the Mideast, Iran’s leaders know better than to directly engage with Israel and its allies, militarily. They supplied Hamas with thousands of rockets and other munitions, but the bigger message is that whether Iran intended that they be used to kill innocent civilians, Hamas used them to murder indiscriminately.

Hamas is far more dangerous than other terrorist organizations. We’ve been reminded all week that on a proportional basis, Hamas’ massacre of more than a thousand Israelis is fifty times as significant as nine-eleven was to America, and it was only the first action in what Hamas hoped would be a general Arab uprising. Most terrorist acts are relatively localized, but Hamas would love nothing more than to initiate a region-wide war with serious global implications. Hamas is obsessed with destroying Israel and Jews everywhere regardless of the cost to Palestinians, and it is willing to imperil the entire planet to achieve its goals.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the most serious concern of the United States and Europe was what would happen to its nuclear weapons. While much of that problem was resolved by President Clinton and Premier Gorbachev, no one had illusions about how many might still be out there. Ask yourself, based on their eighteen years of ruling Gaza, what would happen if Hamas acquired one or more of them. Is there any doubt that they would fire them directly at Tel Aviv?

Hamas has no respect for either human life or the rules of war and diplomacy. Allowing them to exist in a world in which almost anything can be traded on the Black Market threatens the existence of everyone on Earth. They have lost all reason, and are being driven by pure hatred. Like an out of control gang rumble, it no longer matters whon started it or why. Israel must destroy Hamas’ ability to kill. We should be grateful that they’re undertaking the task for us.

And while our otherwise divided government seems united in defense of Israel, Donald Trump has seen fit only to criticize Israel’s leaders and praise Hezbollah, this week.