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The President Must Show More Clarity On The War In Gaza [1]

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Date: 2023-11-21

Polling shows that President Joe Biden is behind Donald Trump in a presidentia; head-off. A constellation of factors are at play: the president seems less dynamic than Donald Trump, the media has done a terrible job at alerting the public to the dangers of a Trump presidency, there is a disconnect between how the economy is doing and what people feel, and, recently, it has been the president’s support for the war in Gaza which has hurt his support, not only among Arabs and Muslims, but even among young Jews .

Source: FiveThirtyEight

In the two weeks after Hamas’ genocidal October 7 attack on Israel, the American public support for Israel shot up. It is easy to focus on what students in American universities said, the praise given for Hamas’ attack, and the lack of moral clarity of a few, but the broader picture is that Americans reacted with due horror. Republican leaders fell over themselves to declare their support for Israel, and to condemn Hamas, with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Flo) urging Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to “finish the job”, former U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, echoing him and urging Netanyahu to “finish them”, and venture capitalist, Vivek Ramaswamy daydreaming about severed Palestinian heads mounted on spikes. Biden declared his intention to support Israel and he has been the most pro-Israel president in history.

Absent from this conversation, was what Palestinians thought about Hamas. Firstly, Hamas is an organization of just 30,000 members operating in a region of 2 million people. The Israeli Defence Forces, on the other hand, have 169,500 active military personnel in the army, navy, and paramilitary, and can call upon 465,000 reservists. Technically speaking, Hamas is not an existential threat, because they cannot topple Israel. Israel is simply too strong for Hamas, and this has been very clear. It should also be said that Gaza does not have an army, so the region is wholly defenseless. Any intervention into Gaza risks the obvious, looking for a needle in a haystack, and torching large parts of that haystack in the process. The only way this sort-of makes sense is if Gaza as a whole is rabidly pro-Hamas and involved in terrorism. So it does matter if Palestinians support Hamas.

Well, this question has been asked numerous times in publicly available polling, and that polling shows that Hamas is deeply unpopular , with three quarters of Palestinians opposed to Hamas, and favoring a peaceful, two-state solution. Some may balk at this, but consider that the last election in Gaza was in 2006, and that half the population is under 18, with many not old enough to have been alive when Hamas was last on the ballot. Even when Hamas won, they did not win a majority of the vote! That creates an obvious moral problem: Israel is effectively bombing Hamas’ opponents in order to punish Hamas. if it wasn’t tragic, it would be ridiculous.

There is also the question of proportionality: Hamas’ genocidal attack took the lives of 1,400 Israelis. That is a tragedy and a crime. Civilians can never be targeted. The question is when Israel’s response crosses over into “disproportional”. So far, 12,700 Gazans have died as a result of Israel’s bombing campaign. Are we really saying that 1,400 Israelis are worth the lives of 12,700 Gazans and counting? Netanyahu has signaled this will be a long campaign. Will Israel be satisfied when 100,000 Gazans are dead? 200,000? When will enough be enough? The deaths of Israeli citizens were a tragedy, but so too are the deaths of Palestinians,

Netanyahu’s government is the most rightwing in Israel’s history. It is made up of people who think out loud about flattening Gaza with a nuclear bomb , there have been plans to repopulate Gaza and the West Bank with Jewish settlements, it is filled with bigots such as Bezalel Smotrich, the security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, convicted of supporting a terrorist organization, has been arming dangerous extremists, handing out guns to extremists known to be dangerous, and the pair of them have been engaged in a silent campaign of violence in the West Bank, killing at least 190 people since October 7. Not only is this true, but Netanyahu has no reason to fight a short campaign: standing trial on corruption charges, his political future is dead, and he knows that he will stop being prime minister the week the war ends. He has no incentive to end the war.

This is profoundly ironic because for years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas, with the Times of Israel saying, “now it’s blown up in our faces” . The paper details how Netanyahu created a policy of isolating the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, and bolstering Hamas in Gaza. This was open policy, with Netanyau himself telling his cabinet in early 2009, that opposing a Palestinian state meant transferring funds to Hamas in Gaza, and separating the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

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