Obama and Biden’s effort at détente with Tehran destabilized the entire region and emboldened Hamas.
By Walter Russell Mead
Review and Outlook: Hamas’s surprise attack, aided by Iran, is a reminder of Israel’s existential peril—and the growing risk to U.S. allies. Images: AFP/Getty Images/Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly
The horrors don’t stop. The latest, as casualties continue to mount across Gaza, is the accumulating evidence that the killers from Hamas lacked even the humanity to grant their victims the mercy of a quick death. In far too many cases, the victims were tortured before they were killed.
But the horror is not limited to the Middle East. Decent people everywhere, including pious Muslims and fervent supporters of the Palestinian cause, recoiled from acts of barbarity that recall the darkest moments in human history. Basic decency, however, is not universal. There are Jew haters among us. Moved by bloodlust and orgiastic fantasies of revenge, they thronged the streets and squares of Europe and marched across American campuses.
There were those in the U.S. who justified violence against people with dangerous opinions in recent years by asserting that it was right and good to punch a Nazi. Today some of those same people have embraced the central cause of the Nazi movement. Jew hatred for them is a passion so pure, so justified, that those who torture Jewish children and slaughter helpless babies are heroes. The rest of us should take note and take care.
Meanwhile, not since the Russian invasion of Ukraine has the Biden administration exploded into political, diplomatic and military action as dramatically as in the aftermath of the massacres. President Biden has addressed the nation to share the pain and anger felt by Israelis and Americans at this horrendous and historic crime. Two carrier strike groups and other American military assets will patrol the theater with the aim of both preventing more Iranian proxies and Iran itself from joining their ally Hamas. And Secretary of State Antony Blinken has conducted a whirlwind tour of the Middle East, meeting with leaders from Israel to Qatar in hopes of containing the violence.
A crucial element is missing from this response. Even now, Team Biden does not seem to have internalized the reality that the American policy of “conciliate to evacuate”—to develop a U.S.-Iranian détente that would allow the U.S. to reduce its role in the region—remains, as it has since President Obama first began to implement it, a destabilizing force in the Middle East. It has discomfited our friends, disrupted our alliances, emboldened terrorists, and provided Iran’s mullahs with the resources to turn both Hezbollah and Hamas into formidably destructive forces.
The cynicism of Iran’s mullahs and their enablers is, in the end, the most shocking. Set aside the Israeli casualties and the blood of innocent Jewish children. Those who claim to rule Iran in God’s name do not care how many Palestinians die in the service of their ambitions. They despise the Sunni faith of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Hamas belongs, and if they could, they would persecute tomorrow the terrorists they arm today.
Iran is unappeasable, but this truth is too inconvenient for the Biden administration to admit. Instead, administration spokesmen continue to minimize Tehran’s involvement with and responsibility for the murders. Iran, which at this point seems to have little fear from an administration it believes it has cowed, is more open. It makes no bones about its support for the murders in Gaza. After the attack, when it was already clear how indiscriminate the killing had been, Iran’s foreign minister embraced the head of Hamas, a man who lives in luxury in Qatar, a country that Mr. Biden last year designated a major non-NATO ally of the U.S.
Hamas must be dealt with, and the direct perpetrators of these unspeakable acts must give themselves up for trial or be killed. But justice demands and prudence requires more. While the perpetrators of these horrors came from Gaza, those ultimately responsible do not live there. It is the leaders of Hamas living in luxury in Qatar and other havens far from the poverty of Gaza who provided the organizational leadership and gave the orders. And it is the mullahs and the agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran who provided the resources, training and encouragement without which the Hamas leadership would neither have dared nor been able to unleash this evil on the world.
The truth is simple. Iran is at war with Israel and with the U.S. It does not seek compromise or accommodation. It does not want its interests respected or its grievances redressed. It wants what it says it wants: a holocaust in Israel and the destruction of the U.S.
This does not mean that we need to send an expeditionary force or a fleet of bombers. There are many ways to skin a cat. We can and should learn from our errors after 9/11. But we must be honest with ourselves. We have a war on our hands with the worst kind of enemy. Wishful thinking won’t make it go away.
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Palestinian Lives Matter, Except to Hamas
Responsibility for civilian casualties in Gaza lies with the jihadists.
By The Editorial Board
As Israel prepares for its likely ground invasion to pursue Hamas in Gaza, the world is warning about civilian casualties. The moral point to keep in mind as the fighting gets intense is that the responsibility for those casualties will lie with Hamas.
Israelhas an obligation to do what it can to protect civilians, and it is doing so. It has warned Gazans to move to the south of the territory as it prepares its campaign. It is using precision-guided bombs when it can to target Hamas combatants rather than civilians. No one has a bigger strategic stake in reducing civilian Palestinian casualties than Israel given the propaganda fodder they provide its enemies.
Contrast that with Hamas, which gave no warning to the Israeli and foreign civilians it slaughtered on Oct. 7. Killing civilians was the explicit goal. Hamas has ordered Gazans not to flee, and its leaders hide weapons in hospitals, schools and mosques.
Israel built bomb shelters for its citizens. Hamas built a network of tunnels for its combatants but keeps its civilians above ground, where they can be used as human shields or casualties showcased on TV. It’s not too much to say that Hamas wants Palestinian casualties to stir an uprising on the West Bank and turn world opinion against the Jewish state.
Yet the United Nations and others criticize Israel more than they do Hamas. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has denounced Israel’s evacuation order but he says little about Hamas’s human blockade.
The world is also largely silent about Egypt’s refusal to let civilians escape through its Rafah crossing with Gaza. If Egypt fears Hamas terrorists escaping with civilians, it could still let women and children flee. Other Arab nations could also take in Palestinians until the war is over, but none have volunteered.
One accusation is that Israel’s bombing of Gaza is a form of unjust “collective punishment” against Palestinians. But Hamas runs the government in Gaza, which it has ruled since its election in 2006 and its forcible ouster of its Palestinian rivals in 2007. Governments that launch wars from their territory invite attacks on that territory.
Blaming Israel for these civilian casualties amounts to denying the Jewish state its right to self-defense. It means that Hamas can launch attacks on Israel with the goal of slaughtering women and children, but Israel can’t attack Hamas in Gaza because civilians might be unintentional casualties. It means Hamas would retain a terrorist sanctuary from which it can attack Israel whenever it has the means and opportunity.
No other country on earth would agree to the terms of defensive engagement that much of the world wants to impose on Israel. If Mexico launched an assault on El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, the U.S. would send in the military to find the killers and destroy their sanctuaries.
Israel has shown forbearance against Gaza in the past, targeting Hamas fighters and infrastructure. But Hamas was left in power in Gaza to rearm and plot its murderous assault on innocents this month. Israel now says its goal is to destroy Hamas, and doing so will save as many Palestinian lives in the future as it will Israelis.
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The Siege of Hamas Is No War Crime
Israel’s critics level false war-crimes charges to keep the Jewish state from defending itself.
By Eugene Kontorovich
Most victims of the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel weren’t yet buried when some prominent international voices—including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, and Josep Borell, the European Union’s top diplomat—suggested that Israel’s first efforts to defend itself are war crimes. This raises an important question: Does international law require a nation to choose between committing war crimes and having war crimes committed against it?
The answer is no. One of the great tragedies of war is that civilians often become victims. That is why countries like Israel resort to war only as self-defense, which, according to the United Nations Charter, is every nation’s inherent right. But if even unintentional harm to civilians constitutes illegal “collective punishment,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called Israel’s operations in Gaza, even defensive war is effectively precluded.
The law of war prohibits directly targeting civilians. Israel has made clear that its objectives are only military. “The IDF will destroy Hamas,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday, “and we will hunt down every last man with the blood of our children on his hands.”
But military targets can be attacked even when doing so may result in the loss of civilian life. International humanitarian law requires that civilian casualties from a particular action be balanced against “anticipated military advantage,” a rule known as proportionality. In practice, as this rule is understood by Western countries, even significant civilian casualties don’t necessarily make strikes on legitimate targets illegal.
Hamas has violated international law by hiding among civilians. But international law doesn’t reward the use of human shields. Instead, it makes clear that “the presence of civilians within or near military objectives does not render such objectives immune from attack.” Israel’s critics want it to fight in a way that would have made it impossible for democracies to wage war in every conflict from World War II to the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS, which killed about 10,000 civilians by some estimates.
A legal analysis of Israel’s response must take into account the barbarity and scale of Hamas’s attack. Israel now knows that Hamas’s goal is the annihilation of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Defeating Hamas isn’t simply a tactical military goal but an existential national one—a military objective of the highest order. There is no basis on which to bar Israel ex ante from a generally lawful means of warfare such as siege, or maneuver in urban areas.
Israel’s critics will denounce any significant measure the country deploys as a war crime. Israel has laid siege to Gaza, prompting the usual array of EU-funded organizations to accuse it of starving civilians and violating the law of war. But siege is a “legitimate” and ordinary part of lawful war, in the words of the U.S. Defense Department law-of-war manual. As West Point law professor Sean Watts put it in 2022, “Siege—or encirclement as military doctrine refers to it—is an essential aspect of modern military operations. . . . Only starvation directed specifically at civilians is prohibited.”
This should be obvious: An army need not help its enemy obtain provisions during a conflict. When military objectives and civilians are intermingled, siege aimed at the former also will affect the latter. As with other situations of collateral damage to civilians, international law permits a siege as long as it isn’t “for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population.”
There is no indication that Israel has any strategy of starving out civilians. Nor could it. Gaza has a long border with Egypt, which has long been used by Hamas to smuggle supplies. The evacuation of civilians is a standard measure to avoid humanitarian crises. Israel has moved tens of thousands of its own citizens away from the area along the Gaza border. Hamas, by contrast, has ordered its civilians to stay put, presumably to increase the tally of civilian deaths for propaganda purposes.
Egypt is cruelly denying entry to those fleeing the war zone. Israel’s critics clearly aren’t interested in saving civilian lives, because they aren’t offering to take in Gaza’s civilians. Nobody says refugees from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan should be trapped in conflict zones. European countries consider it a virtue to accept them as refugees. But to Hamas’s human shields, the world says: “Don’t go anywhere, we want you right where you are.
It is unclear whether such voices are merely naive or wish to leave Israel perpetually exposed to genocide. What is clear is that if these voices prevail, the commitment of modern international law will have changed from “Never again” to “Whenever they want.”
Mr. Kontorovich is the head of the international law department at the Kohelet Policy Forum, a Jerusalem think tank, and a professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School.
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Liberals Need a Reckoning With Anti-Semitism
Ideas like ‘decolonization’ and ‘intersectionality’ turn out to justify mass murder.
By Gerard Baker
Joe Biden memorably claimed that he decided to run for president in 2020 after he watched with horror the 2017 events in Charlottesville, Va., where a far-right protest ended in violence as a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one.
At his campaign launch in 2019, Mr. Biden described how he was appalled by the “crazed faces, illuminated by torches, veins bulging and bearing the fangs of racism.” They were, he said, “chanting the same vile anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ’30s.”
Plenty of vile, anti-Semitic bile has been publicly secreted in the past week and a half. Most of it hasn’t come from Tiki-torch-bearing wannabe brownshirts chanting “Jews will not replace us” or from the MAGA-friendly “neofascists” the president keeps warning us about.
It’s come from student groups on leafy campuses, where a conservative is as scarce (and unwelcome) as a misplaced pronoun. It’s come from academics whose theories about oppression and privilege have helped shape the Democratic Party’s modern credo of power, race and identity. It’s come from “democratic socialists” committed to “reforms that empower working people.” And it’s all come in the aftermath of the most devastating acts of mass violence against Jews since the Nazi era.
Mr. Biden gave a commendably robust denunciation of Hamas’s terrorism. But I still wonder whether he feels as alarmed by the threat to the “soul of the nation,” to borrow a phrase from a 2022 speech, from the sympathy large numbers of his fellow travelers on the left feel for Islamist slaughter as he does about that posed by the modern Republican Party?
To be sure, there’s more than enough racism and anti-Semitism on the right to go around. Donald Trump has done plenty to help sow that evil, for instance by hosting one of its proponents at Mar-a-Lago—though he famously didn’t say what Mr. Biden and almost the entire American media continues to insist he did, that there were “good” neo-Nazis protesting that day in Virginia.
But the past week has given us a moment of unusual clarity about the extremists in our midst who drape their hatred and intolerance in the clothing of “progressive” ideology.
We have learned fresh detail about the disordered intellectual condition of our most important educational institutions. The near-total control of the most prestigious universities and colleges by intolerant extremists of the left is breeding not only generations of entitled little authoritarians but legions of apologists for violence against their own perceived enemies.
The response of the authorities at Harvard to a statement by student groups blaming Israel for the mass murder, rape and kidnapping of its own citizens was instructive. First, nothing. (Unlike the murder of a black man in Minneapolis in 2020, the slaughter of more than 1,000 Jews, including Americans, wasn’t a moment for a moral “reckoning.”) Then, only after a wealth of donors to Harvard—along with other colleges with similarly Hamas-coddling tendencies—threatened to pull their funding, came a belated condemnation of terrorism. Finally we got a risible defense of “freedom of expression” from the president (of a place that in 2021 responded to a pressure campaign by left-wing students by canceling a course).
We’ve learned also about the fatal contradiction at the heart of one of the core ideological tenets of the ideology that dominates elite institutions. “Intersectionality” is the proposition that all victims of the various vectors of discrimination, on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, etc., are somehow interlinked.
In fact, some supposed victims of oppression are the most enthusiastic perpetrators of oppression against other groups. There can have been few more weirdly humorous spectacles this week than the protests of gay-rights groups expressing solidarity with Hamas, under whose jurisdiction homosexual activity can get you executed. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that tolerates sexual nonconformity.
And we’ve had a chance to glimpse the darker implications of another of the left’s favorite totems—“decolonization.” We had thought this term applied mainly to things like reparations for land expropriated many generations ago from indigenous populations, the return of museum artifacts taken over centuries or downgrading “dead white males” in history, literature and art.
But it turns out that for some on the left it may have to involve an occasional massacre. Walaa Alqaisiya, a research fellow at Columbia University, tweeted: “Time to understand that Decolonization is NOT a metaphor. Decolonization means resistance of the oppressed and that includes armed struggle to LITERALLY get our lands and lives back!”
Most Democrats and liberals aren’t anti-Semitic and don’t favor violence in the name of “social justice.” But they—and the rest of us—should reflect on where their logic leads.
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Anti-Zionism Is a More Malevolent Form of Anti-Semitism
It not only butchers Jews but consigns Palestinian civilians to the role of cannon fodder.
By Ruth R. Wisse
Anti-Semitism has scored its flashiest victory since 1945. While many commentators have called the attack by Palestinian terrorists the Jewish 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, Israelis recognized a more disturbing precedent: the Holocaust.
Comparison of the Palestinian slaughter of Israelis in 2023 with the annihilation of European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s doesn’t hinge on the comparable helplessness of Jewish victims. Those gunned down and tortured by Hamas terrorists were equally innocent, yet the next day’s mobilization of 150% of Israel Defense Force reservists confirms a difference. Zionism won for the Jews the ability to inhabit and defend their homeland. There is little doubt that this time Israel will prevail.
The equation of the Hamas attacks to the Nazi murders lies rather in once-normal societies that turned monstrous while trying to annihilate the Jews. Anti-Semitism transformed Germans, among the most cultured people, into Nazis. Anti-Zionism has twisted Arabs and Muslims into something that in a way is even worse. Hamas advertises its butchery as a recruiting tool for followers (including in America).
But Hamas is merely the latest stage of an ideological movement that was launched when the Arab League organized against Israel in 1948. The Arab-Muslim refusal to coexist with Israel was never a war in any normal sense. Just as anti-Judaism once condemned the Jews for killing Christ, and anti-Semitism then accused Jews of polluting the nations where they lived, anti-Zionism was an ideology that defined the Jewish state as the illegitimate occupier of Arab land.
This anti-Zionist ideology is arguably the most potent coalition builder in the modern world. When Arab and Muslim countries emerged from colonial oversight after World War II, their leaders united nationalists, Islamists and other rivals with the common goal of destroying Israel. As they joined in successive wars, some of these constituencies competed over who could damage the Jewish state the most. Hamas has emerged victorious in that contest, proving that it can kill more Jews in a day than the combined Arab armies ever did and that it can torment Jews as brutally as the Nazis ever did.
This presents a problem for Middle Eastern leaders who want to normalize their relations with Western democracies, since they can’t do it without repudiating the ideology that they previously embraced and generously nourished. The brutality of Hamas is the logical culmination of their aggression, and they fear it could be redirected against them.
Arab and Muslim leaders weren’t alone in promoting anti-Zionism. The Soviet bloc joined in passing the 1975 United Nations resolution that equated Zionism with racism, which forged the anti-Israel coalitions now prominent on every major American college campus. Soviet anti-Zionism, directed against Jewish religion and nationality, helped unite socialist internationalists with every other kind of anti-Semite. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, shares the goals of Hamas even as he competes with it for governance, and he was educated in anti-Zionism at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Palestinian West Bank celebrants of the Hamas massacre tell us what they would do given the chance.
This is how anti-Zionism has grown to exceed anti-Semitism in malevolence. To blame Israel for occupying Arab land, it was necessary to keep the Palestinian population permanently displaced. That is why the Arab League never accepted the partition of Palestine and why the Palestinians have never built their state in the West Bank or Gaza. Anti-Zionism demands the continuing sacrifice of the Palestinians. The destruction of Gaza is the real object of the Hamas attack on Israel. Butchering Jews to prove Arab bravery was the minor goal, but the main goal was to ensure that Jews are blamed for killing Palestinians.
Anti-Zionism misdirects attention from its carriers to its target, and even those of us who stand with Israel are inclined to follow their pointing finger. Will Israel overreact? How long can it expect American and Western support? How could Israel have allowed such a failure of intelligence? All such focus ought instead to be trained on the perpetrators—who will multiply unless they are contained.
Obvious questions reveal the corrupters of Arab societies. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, why didn’t the Palestinians create the infrastructure for an independent state? Did Western funding for permanent refugees create terrorists in waiting? How could so many Palestinians, once among the most advanced Arabs in the Middle East, have turned into purveyors of what President Biden correctly called “sheer evil”?
A second line of inquiry must open here. How did this depraved ideology penetrate America’s universities, its elites, and even the U.S. Congress to a degree that the German Bund in the 1930s never found possible? How did the idea of eliminating Israel galvanize the intersectional coalition of our disaffected minorities?
Middle Eastern studies and political scientists should have been investigating how this pathological behavior developed, and they must do so now. Late-stage anti-Zionism has reached a point of universal destruction. There is no time to lose.
Ms. Wisse is a professor emerita at Harvard and author of the memoir “Free as a Jew.”
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