Israel must open its eyes

GAZA STRIP: I think it’s fair to describe me as a Christian Zionist. I believe in the necessity of the Jewish people to have their own safe, secure homeland. And while I have never thought Israel was perfect (far from it), I have seen the antisemitism and genocidal intent animating its enemies in the Middle East, including Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

I can see the extraordinary antisemitism and bias in the larger international community. When a United Nations that includes North Korea, Syria, Russia and China condemns Israel more than any other nation in the world (by far), you know that the Jewish state is being singled out.

I’m also a veteran of the Iraq War who served as judge advocate for an armored cavalry regiment during the surge in Iraq in 2007 and 2008. Before I became a journalist, I was part of a legal team that defended Israel from war crime accusations after Operation Cast Lead, the Gaza war of 2008 and 2009.

I know that Israel had the right under international law to destroy Hamas’ military and to remove Hamas from power after the massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. In other words, Israel had the right to respond to a terrorist force like Hamas the way the United States and its allies responded to a terrorist force like the Islamic State group after it launched its terrorist campaign across the Middle East and across Europe.

So, yes, I consider myself a friend of Israel. But now its friends need to stage an intervention. The Israeli government has gone too far. It has engineered a staggering humanitarian crisis, and that crisis is both a moral atrocity and a long-term threat to Israel itself.

Civilian casualties were inevitable when Israel responded to Hamas, but the suffering of Palestinian civilians is far beyond the bounds of military necessity. The people of Gaza, already grieving the loss of thousands of children, now face a famine — and children once again will bear the brunt of the pain.

If you’re skeptical of this claim (and I know many supporters of Israel are), consider two factors — the numbers and the timing. As The New York Times documented in an article Friday, the amount of aid flowing into the Gaza Strip has sharply diminished.

Before Israel ended its ceasefire with Hamas and blocked aid shipments in March, the amount of aid entering Gaza had soared to well over 200,000 tonnes per month. Then it dropped to virtually nothing, and even after Israel lifted its blockade in May, the amount of aid flowing into Gaza was a small fraction of what it had been.

Compounding the problem, the method of distributing what little aid is available requires thousands of Palestinians to travel long distances, which imposes an extreme hardship on the most vulnerable people — the very old, the very sick and the very young. Palestinians also have to cross military lines, which creates its own risk of violence as thousands upon thousands of hungry civilians encounter heavily armed soldiers who are on high alert.

In Iraq, I participated in humanitarian missions that involved far fewer people, and I can tell you that these missions can be remarkably tense. It takes extreme discipline to keep the peace. Consequently, even as the amount of aid has diminished, the number of violent incidents during aid distribution has skyrocketed. Hundreds of Palestinians in search of food have been killed, many of them by Israeli soldiers.

So there is less aid, and it’s harder and more dangerous to obtain.

The decrease in aid would be dreadful on its own, but what makes it incalculably worse is the timing. Israel’s aid blockade came after a year and a half of war, when Hamas is decimated, Gaza’s government is largely dismantled and chaos reigns.

The dominant power in Gaza is Israel, not Hamas, and Israel, not Hamas, is the only entity with both the power to control aid distribution and the ability to obtain and distribute aid in the Gaza Strip. There is no way for civilians in Gaza to feed themselves. They are utterly dependent on Israel, and Israel removed the United Nations from the aid distribution network without replacing it with an effective alternative.

Anyone who has spent time fighting al-Qaida or the Islamic State or Hamas knows that those groups think civilian suffering advances their cause. They don’t burrow into cities and wear civilian clothes and hide behind hospitals and mosques simply to conceal themselves; they do so knowing that any military response will also kill civilians. They want the world to see images of civilian death and suffering.

So why is Israel giving Hamas what it wants?

Hamas should lay down its arms. It should release every hostage. But Hamas’ war crimes — including its murders, its hostage taking and its concealment among civilians and civilian buildings — do not relieve Israel of its own moral and legal obligations.

There has always been a better way to defeat Hamas, and no one knows this better than veterans of the Iraq War. We’ve watched Israel make the same mistakes we made early in the war, when we repeatedly attacked and destroyed terrorist cells but the terrorists always came back.

We played a deadly and destructive version of Whac-a-Mole, reducing neighborhoods and streets to ruin, only to bomb the rubble weeks and months later when al-Qaida returned. The only way to stop the cycle was to seize ground, hold it and protect and secure the civilian population until we could hand control over to local authorities.

That approach has a double virtue. It’s not just kinder to civilians; it’s far more effective militarily. I’m not just saying this. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq during the surge — when we turned the tide of the Iraq War in part by protecting the Iraqi population — has made this argument over and over and over again since Oct. 7.

This is a moment of short-term strength and long-term vulnerability for Israel. Its triumphs in its fights with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran mean that its foes are militarily the weakest they’ve been in more than a generation. At the same time, however, European and US public support for Israel is in a state of collapse.

A May YouGov poll found that public support for Israel in Western Europe was the lowest it had ever recorded. A July Gallup poll found that only 32% of Americans approved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

But don’t take collapsing support for Israel as proof that nations support Hamas. On Tuesday, all 22 members of the Arab League and all 27 members of the European Union called on Hamas to disarm, release all remaining hostages and surrender control of Gaza. This was a vitally important step — a clear indication that key nations in the world utterly reject Hamas.

It matters when President Donald Trump — the man who ordered US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities — describes what’s happening in Gaza as “real starvation” and says, “I told Israel maybe they have to do it a different way.”

Israel’s defenders can rightfully complain that nations with far worse human rights violations receive far less scrutiny. Where are the protests, they ask, against North Korean gulags? Or against the Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs? But again, Israel has moral responsibilities, regardless of Western hypocrisy, and it still needs those Western friends.

No nation — not even the United States — can thrive without allies, and Israel (despite its nuclear weapons) is far more vulnerable and dependent on international friendship than the United States or Britain or France. If Israel creates a lasting rift with its European allies and shatters the long-standing bipartisan American consensus on aiding Israel, then the long-term consequences could be grave.

It’s easy to forget that it was President Barack Obama, a Democrat, who signed the largest-ever US military aid package with Israel — a $38 billion, 10-year deal that helped supply Israel with many of the weapons it has used in this war. It’s easy to forget that President Joe Biden, a Democrat, twice deployed US forces to help defend Israel from Iranian drone and missile attacks.

Is Israel better off if its alliance with America depends on whether a Republican is in the White House? Can it even count on Republican support in the long run? Putting aside for the moment the rise of antisemitism in the online right, “America First” has never been a concept hospitable to foreign aid or alliances.

One of the most frustrating aspects of our political discourse is the expectation that once you’re identified on a side, you are somehow betraying your side if you speak up when it goes terribly wrong. Partisans are used to ignoring their opponents, but there might be a chance they will listen to their friends.

Israel’s friends must speak with one voice: End the famine in Gaza. Drop any talk of annexation. Protect the civilian population.

Defeating Hamas does not require starving a single child.

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