Underdog No More

Hamas must go, but Israel should have built a sympathetic coalition before invading Gaza

This is the column I’ve been avoiding writing. I’m having a hard time watching the news. I don’t even want to think about Gaza, Hamas, Israel, or Benjamin Netanyahu. But, here we are.

I reflexively chided my niece for seemingly siding with Hamas on social media. But, in truth, she was siding with the Palestinians, not Hamas, an organization that is roundly hated by the vast majority of Palestinians, and particularly those it uses for propaganda and protection in the Gaza Strip.

I told her that you couldn’t expect Israel not to retaliate; she told me that retaliation shouldn’t look like genocide. I countered that you have a ruthlessly brutal enemy that sets up headquarters in tunnels beneath hospitals and elementary schools, using civilians, including children and hostages, as shields. Their game is to make Israel kill civilians if it wishes to kill Hamas.

She reminded me that two things can be true at once. It is true that Israel was brutally attacked, and it’s also true that, despite pleas from Europe and the United States, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, seeing an opportunity to end Hamas once and for all, is determined to do so.

Netanyahu got a Masters from MIT, then worked at the Boston Consulting Group as an economic advisor before beginning his political career. You’d think that he would have a more nuanced, if not more sophisticated, understanding of the nature of opinion. Blinken and Biden warned him that he shouldn’t make the same mistakes that we made after 9-11, where we pursued war in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of setting our sights exclusively on Osama bin Laden. We would’ve spared everyone a lot of blood and treasure. George W. Bush wouldn’t listen either; he allowed the Neo-Cons in his administration to talk him into an unwinnable 20 year war, handing Iraq over to Iran in the process.

But Bibi has been unmoved by the logic of history, and rather than allowing sympathy to build for the Israelis who were murdered in their beds, burned alive in their homes, and gunned down at a music festival, he chose this path. And to make things worse, he’s allowed the radical right-wing Israeli settlers to unleash new levels of violence on Palestinians living in the West Bank.

Predictably, Netanyahu’s license to radical settlers and his indiscriminate response in Gaza has met with an unprecedented, at least since the 1930s, rise in worldwide antisemitism. European and American Jews are afraid. They say, we are not Netanyahu or the radical right-wing in Israel, but all Jews are being tarred with the same brush.

At a time when the world has had enough of expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and even though the Palestinians have passed on numerous opportunities for a two state solution, the world, and particularly those under 35 who populate social media, say Israel has gone too far. It all begins and ends with Netanyahu and his cobbled together, tiny Knesset majority made up of outlaws and thugs that the Supreme Court would banish. That’s a primary reason that Netanyahu wants to place the power of the Israeli Supreme Court under his thumb.

Historically, every opportunity for peace has been met with violence. In 1995, Nobel Peace Prize winners, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, were each assassinated by their right-wings for daring to make peace.

There have been other opportunities, but they all ended when Netanyahu became Prime Minister for a second time in 2009. For a while, he paid lip-service to a two-state solution, but neither he nor his right-wing supporters has ever wanted anything to do with it.

As former president Obama said, "All this is taking place against the backdrop of decades of failure to achieve a durable peace for both Israelis and Palestinians, one that is based on genuine security for Israel, a recognition of its right to exist, and a peace that is based on an end of the occupation and the creation of a viable state and self-determination for the Palestinian people." 

Meanwhile, Jews everywhere wonder if it’s Germany in the ‘30’s again. Criticizing the Netanyahu government is not antisemitic, but reviving ancient tropes about Jews is, and it is happening everywhere, and in spades.

Not ones to miss an opportunity, Hamas supporters, Iran, Russia, and China, have unleashed what the NY Times calls “A War of Words,” exploiting social media to undermine the West with a sophisticated disinformation campaign attracting young Westerners on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram who are no longer sympathetic to Israel, or by sad extension, Jews. They’re happy to take those posts viral, making matters worse.

Israel has now managed to squander its great reserve of sympathy as it has transitioned from oppressed to oppressor. It’s hard to watch.

©2023 Jon Sinton