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Israel Needs Unconditional Surrender From Hamas
The Jewish state’s goal in Gaza should be the same as the Allies’ in Germany after World War II.
By Jerome M. Marcus
Israel needs to declare the precise goals of its Gaza campaign—for its own citizens and soldiers, and to establish the credibility of its efforts in the world’s eyes. The “destruction” of Hamas has no meaning in international law and is too vague for Israelis being asked to sacrifice everything.
History provides an example of what Israel should do. At the end of World War II, the Allies’ goal was clear: The German Third Reich must agree to an “unconditional surrender.” The Allies’ demand of Germany should be the model for Israel now. Hamas’s war crimes are equal in depravity to those of the Nazis; their magnitude is far less only because Jews now have a fortified homeland and an Israeli army. Hamas and the Nazis also shared the goal of Jewish genocide. Following the Allies’ example, Israel should announce that it will obtain Hamas’s unconditional surrender.
In 1945, in the presence of representatives of the Allied Powers, German High Command officials signed military surrender documents—the Reims accord in France on May 7 and the Act of Military Surrender in Berlin on May 9. The documents required German soldiers to cease military operations. The Allies’ control of German territory enabled them to enforce that order, which they did.
At the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the Allies agreed on a complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany, the transfer of land from Germany to Poland and the Soviet Union, and the expulsion of German populations from the countries Germany had attacked. The Allies also provided for “de-Nazification”—removing Nazis from positions of authority, eliminating Nazi political organizations, and the arrest and trial of war criminals.
The Allies pursued the removal of Nazis from positions of authority only halfheartedly; but Nazi political parties and organizations were effectively suppressed, and the highest-ranking Nazi leaders were arrested, tried and punished, including by death.
Israel should follow in the Allies’ steps. It must demand unconditional surrender. It must capture and, at least in the war’s immediate aftermath, take complete control of Gaza. It must crush Hamas, killing or capturing its top leaders. Israel must announce that it will try Hamas’s leaders in courts that it convenes for the trial of war crimes—similar to the Jerusalem District Court’s 1961-62 trial of Adolph Eichmann, a Nazi official who played a central role in implementing Hitler’s “Final Solution.” If found guilty, defendants must be executed, and Israel must carry out those sentences. (Israeli law provides for the death penalty in cases involving genocide or Nazi collaboration, and Eichmann is the only prisoner the state of Israel has executed.)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already made it clear that Israel has no desire to govern those who live in the Gaza strip. Just as the Allies worked together to govern Germany immediately after VE Day, Israel can seek partners in the initial government of Gaza. Its Abraham Accords allies—the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco—are the natural source for such help. These Arab states have much to gain from a Gaza that is at peace with its neighbors and free from the sickness Iran seeks to spread throughout the Middle East.
Germany’s surrender enabled French citizens, even those just across the border from the Germans, to live securely and without fear. Israelis in Sderot and other border towns deserve the same. Israel should take a section of Gaza along the border and turn it into a security corridor to ensure the safety of its own citizens. Egypt should do the same on its border with Gaza to end the smuggling of commercial goods and weapons by the Muslim Brotherhood and other illegal groups that could again enable Iran to destabilize the region. Israel and the other Abraham Accords signatories should similarly declare such Islamist organizations out of bounds in a peaceful Gaza.
Israel has a 75-year history of improvising brilliantly as it goes. But clarifying and announcing its plans now for Gaza’s future will promote the legitimacy of Israel’s actions and help it garner support for the steps it must take to secure peace. History teaches us what Israel needs to do.
Mr. Marcus is a Philadelphia lawyer and a fellow at George Mason University’s Center for the Middle East and International Law.
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There is something queer about this:
But not actually. No Arab or Muslim nation wants Palestinians in their country except Jordan, which is loaded with them. Why? Because wherever Palestinians go they cause trouble. They are an un-welcomed. lot. If you don't believe me, listen to the video below. She is a Lebanese Christian and absolutely correct.
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Just give it time it will resolve itself. The Queen might have to wear a Burkah but so what.
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Anti-Semite protests grow. Israeli's are lousy marketers. All BIBI need do is show pictures of what Hamas did and that should shut most everyone up but those who do not want to believe their eyes and there will be plenty of them or those who believe the pictures are fake and, yes, there will be plenty of them because anti-Semites do not die quickly nor hatred. Sick minds have a long shelf life.
And:
Hamas Puts Its Pogrom on Video
The scenes of Oct. 7 explain why this Israeli defensive war is different: It’s about Jewish survival.
By The Editorial Board
No one at Friday’s screening in New York of the raw footage of Hamas’s atrocities during its Oct. 7 invasion of Israel will forget what they saw. The journalist next to us, at the Israeli consulate in New York, was crying. Mouths seemed to hang open, even after the rampage recorded by jubilant Hamas terrorists on their GoPros had ended, and Israeli officials tried to make sense of what we saw.
Why did the Hamas men, upon confronting the dead body of a teenage girl, start cheering? Why did they argue over who would get to decapitate a Thai guest worker they had shot, then proclaim “Allahu akbar” with every swing at his neck?
“Allahu akbar,” meaning “God is most great,” was on their lips over and over as they shot defenseless civilians, dragged corpses and pumped round after round into the dead. There it was again on the terrorists’ return to Gaza, “Allahu akbar” coming from crowds as a Hamas man pulled by the hair a battered hostage with pants bloodied around her groin.
This isn’t Palestinian nationalism, or a proper understanding of Islam. This is nihilistic jihad. “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it,” Hamas’s founding covenant declares. “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
One of the Hamas men called his parents using the phone of a murdered Israeli woman, unable to contain his pride. “Put Mom on the phone,” he said. “Your son is a hero. . . . I killed 10 Jews with my own hands!” The phone recorded the call, so we can know his goal: “victory or martyrdom.”
Some Hamas men took their time to execute a terrified woman after cornering her and shining a flashlight on her face. One raided the fridge in front of the young children he had just wounded with a grenade that killed their father and brother. During the music-festival massacre, a terrorist paused to put a bullet through each of the porta-potties, one by one, lest a single girl escape.
There were also the shell-shocked faces, heavy breathing and stopped cries of young women hiding in bunkers and dumpsters, knowing they weren’t going to survive. Then came the photos: piles of bodies, bloodied and mutilated, babies burned, families burned together, some with hands tied.
The point of the screening, explained Aviv Ezra, Israel’s acting consul general, was to show that “this isn’t more of the same.” If you followed previous Gaza wars, you know what he means. Already Israel’s response has been subject to the same cries of moral equivalence, the same demands for a premature cease-fire, the same perversion of international law from its post-Holocaust purpose.
But there’s a difference this time. “There is no political solution with Hamas,” Mr. Ezra said, not after Oct. 7. Hamas in Gaza now “threatens the basic contract between Israel’s government and its citizens,” the never-again clause that Israel is a safe haven for the Jews.
As Israel continues its just and necessary defense against Hamas in Gaza and around the world, its citizens will not forget the Hamas-recorded images of Oct. 7. Neither should the rest of us.
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Israel Tries to Part the Fog of War
Footage captured by dash and security cameras and the terrorists themselves make the horror clear.
By Peggy Noonan
This is about describing and showing and making things clear. In the fog of war these things are never more essential.
Here is some first-rate describing, from Ruth Margalit in the New Yorker, in a piece called “The Devastation of Be’eri.” Be’eri is a kibbutz three miles from Israel’s border with Gaza. Hamas terrorists came there as Oct. 7 dawned. Explore Audio Center
Ms. Margolit wanted to know what the individual attackers looked like. She quotes an eyewitness description: “Like they had just come out of the gym. With crazy joy in their eyes, like they were high on something.” It’s the kind of statement you read and immediately know it was true. They were sleek young men, hopped up and murderous.
It tells you a lot about their purported cause. It tells you who they are.
This week we learned more about their actions. We learned it in large part because it wasn’t enough that the terrorists did it; they had to memorialize it. Some of them wore body cameras and took cellphone videos. The Israel Defense Forces compiled a video record, which also included footage from Israeli security cameras and dash cams, and showed it at a military base near Tel Aviv. Hundreds of journalists came. They were asked not to reproduce the 43-minute video but were free to describe what they saw.
From Graeme Wood in the Atlantic: “Men, women and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not.”
A man and his young sons are in their pajamas: “A terrorist throws a grenade into their hiding place, and the father is killed. The boys are covered in blood, and one appears to have lost an eye. They go to their kitchen and cry for their mother. One of the boys howls, ‘Why am I alive?’ and ‘Daddy, daddy.’ One says, ‘I think we’re going to die.’ The terrorist who killed their father comes in, and while they weep he raids their fridge.”
An IDF spokesman at the screening was unable to say whether the boys survived.
A terrorist uses a phone to call his family in Gaza. “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands,” he tells his father. “Put on Mom! Your son is a hero!” He tells them to open WhatsApp to see his pictures.
Andrew Neil of the Spectator wrote on social media: “Other footage shows IDF soldiers beheaded with their lifeless corpses left splayed in the streets.” The BBC noted the “stark detail” of the “sheer horror.” Hamas gunmen cheered with joy as they shot unarmed civilians on the road. There was “an attempt to decapitate someone who appeared to be still alive using a garden hoe.”
Isabel Kershner of the New York Times described a litany of images: “An emergency medical worker pouring mineral water from a bottle to douse the smoldering remains of charred bodies. . . . Brutalized young women, one of them naked. . . . Victims are seen gagged. . . . Faces are frozen in shock and agony. Women’s bones are broken, their legs twisted in impossible angles.”
Later, the Twitter account of the Israeli government showed clips of their interrogation of Hamas prisoners. One is asked what his mission was in Be’eri. “To conquer,” he replied. (The warriors now prisoners seem to be admitting people were murdered but denying they did it, blaming the other guy in the battalion. Interestingly, a few of them expressed resentment toward the leaders of Hamas, who live in luxury while they fought in the field. This managed to sound both rehearsed and genuine.)
Why did Israel put together these pictures and sounds and show them to reporters? There is already copious testimony from eyewitnesses and survivors. Hamas has never bothered to deny what it did. But the world needs proof it can’t forget or sweep away. This includes Hamas’s supporters in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But also: It happened. If it happened, you have to show it. Big history is coming, in which Israel will be saved or not saved, and you owe it to history to tell what tipped the world into this moment.
Anyway, the IDF did a first-class job of telling. Here is one way it can continue. All wars are of course now propaganda wars, and maybe always have been—“Bleeding Belgium” was more than a century ago. But now the propaganda is instantaneous, worldwide and expertly produced. The Israelis lost a big propaganda battle in the story of the Gaza hospital. By the time they and American intelligence were able to counter Hamas’s accusations, the Arab street had exploded. And yet Israel did the right thing: It didn’t immediately deny Hamas’s claims, it said it was investigating, gathered the data, presented it to the world, and its explanation—that it was an errant terrorist missile—was in the end widely accepted.
The Israelis played it straight. They should keep playing it straight, adopt it as a strategy. If they do, it will be understood in time that Israel’s communications apparatus is the only one that can be trusted. This will matter a great deal down the road. There will be temptations along the way to lie, fudge or dodge because nations at war make mistakes and blunders. There are misjudgments, accidents and failures. But something tells me that in this war you won’t be able to fight propaganda with propaganda, only truth.
I end with the observation that we are seeing a fairly stark generational divide over all that’s happening. Speaking generally, if you are middle-aged or older, chances are good you feel sympathy for and old loyalty toward Israel. The young are more prone to antipathy toward Israel, sometimes accompanied by rage, sometimes by almost violent accusations against the colonialist oppressor state. At the bottom of today’s progressive politics there is blood lust. They speak of justice and equity but that’s not what they want, they want dominance. It’s all about the will to power. Progressive students have absorbed the idea it’s good to be militant in your views, it shows you’re authentic. No, it shows you got the talking points.
I was with a more peaceable group the other night at the Al Smith dinner, the big annual bipartisan dinner of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. One of the speakers, Mary Erdoes, told the audience that anti-Semitism appears to be on the rise and our friends need to know who’s with them. There was an envelope at each plate, she said, and if you open it you’ll find a blue lapel button. Wearing it is meant to show identification and affiliation with our brothers and sisters. Suddenly at that madly noisy dinner, all you could hear was one sound, envelopes being torn open, and the sight of buttons being affixed.
It was a great moment of making it clear.
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Once the world embraced the fact that everything is relative, there is no black and white, the concept of proportionality was born and morality was told it no longer need apply. This, in my opinion, explains why Hamas was able to squeeze it's way onto the chess board of fanatic, sub-human behaviour.
If this becomes the new standard, by which all behaviour is judged, the world is in for a nasty, more dangerous, more poisonous lifestyle. Our lives were once more faith based but no more. God has become less relevant and incivility has supplanted the vacuum. God help us- oops my apologies!
Accept That Savagery Is The True Nature Of The World – And Deal With It
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