{"id":19435,"date":"2024-10-23T11:14:06","date_gmt":"2024-10-23T08:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/?p=19435"},"modified":"2024-12-03T14:28:15","modified_gmt":"2024-12-03T12:28:15","slug":"israel-must-not-end-the-war-despite-sinwar-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/israel-must-not-end-the-war-despite-sinwar-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel Must Not End The War Despite Sinwar Success"},"content":{"rendered":"We, who want this war to end yesterday, must keep fighting tomorrow and tomorrow, until the aggressors \u2013 Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran \u2013 cave in.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Israel\u2019s soldier-heroes killed Yahya Sinwar, President Joe Biden declared: \u201cThis is a good day for Israel, for the United States, and for the world.\u201d Vice President Kamala Harris agreed, echoing Biden that \u201cIsrael has a right to defend itself, and the threat Hamas poses to Israel must be eliminated.\u201d Even Thomas Friedman, who has spearheaded The New York Times\u2019 condemnation of Israel\u2019s war and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for supposedly prolonging the campaign for political reasons, acknowledged: \u201cit is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the death of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet somehow, these military geniuses \u2013 like most others \u2013 failed to add four words: \u201cand I was wrong.\u201d But they were \u2013 and still are.<\/p>\n

They were wrong by constantly pressuring Netanyahu and Israel to end the war \u2013 months ago. They were wrong by opposing Israel\u2019s entry into Rafah, where Israeli soldiers caught Sinwar in the broad net Israel needed to cast so wide and for so long after Hamas\u2019s bloodbath. They were wrong by unfairly politicizing Netanyahu\u2019s stubborn determination to crush Hamas. And they were \u2013 and are \u2013 wrong, to treat this war as some video game that only kills really, really bad guys, with no innocents getting caught in the crossfire as the fight ends quickly and painlessly.<\/p>\n

Urban warfare is grueling \u2013 especially with Hamas terrorists cowering behind Palestinians who also hate Israel. Don\u2019t forget: \u201cThere has rarely been a military campaign like this, with Hamas leaders living and moving through hundreds of miles of tunnels, organized in multiple stories underground, determined to protect themselves with no care for the civilians suffering above ground.\u201d Guess who said that? Biden last week.<\/p>\n

Israelis appreciate the munitions America has supplied, and Biden\u2019s tremendous moral support. Still, the obsessive attempts to restrain Israel terrify me as an American historian. SUCH MORAL and strategic confusion does not bode well for America\u2019s defense posture. It telegraphs weakness to America\u2019s enemies, who see the disdain with which too many pro-Israel Democrats treat Israel, along with so many Americans\u2019 impatience with the kind of sustained conflict required to defeat evil.<\/p>\n

Such callowness cultivates among America\u2019s population a sniveling, simplistic, and unrealistic approach to foreign relations that underestimates the need to unleash tremendous firepower when fighting totalitarians and terrorists. And this remote-control moralizing has stained Israel\u2019s reputation among too many Americans \u2013 let alone the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

Sinwar\u2019s reign of terror ended only because Netanyahu and Israel defied conventional wisdom and world opinion \u2013 including most American leaders and many American Jewish leaders. Deploying unremitting, prolonged pressure on Gaza worked. The Wall Street Journal headlined: \u201cIsrael Killed Sinwar by Forcing Him From the Tunnels.\u201d<\/p>\n

The IDF has destroyed over 40,000 military targets this year.\u00a0Nevertheless, both Southern Lebanon and Gaza still overflow with weapons depots, command-and-control centers, and Jihadists vowing to destroy the Jewish State. Consider the stockpile\u2019s scale. Imagine the courage, military prowess, weaponry and determination required to eliminate so many threats \u2013 while also actively repelling attacks. And maybe, just maybe, Americans and others should question their \u201cconceptzia\u201d \u2013 (mis)conception. They, too, tolerated this buildup.<\/p>\n

They then decided the war could be lightning short. And, even now, many resist learning the lessons of the need to grind down the enemy, a valiant effort that eventually ensnared Sinwar. Alas, refusing to incorporate new, inconvenient, politically incorrect facts into their worldviews, Biden, Harris, and Friedman instantly returned to the same stale rhetoric they used to try to restrain Israel for months.<\/p>\n

Harris, whose words most count now, insisted: \u201cThis moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza, and it must end such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.\u201d<\/p>\n

We in Israel crave those goals. But this year has confirmed that achieving them requires a long, bloody process \u2013 and much more patience. Indeed, we cannot \u201cend the war in Gaza\u201d until \u201cIsrael is secure.\u201d And if the Gazans are truly innocent, they should turn on Hamas and force it to surrender, while freeing the hostages.<\/p>\n

Until that happens, Israel must maintain the military pressure, and prepare its security zone along the Gaza border, including taking Gazan territory, so the Palestinians learn that every future attack will result in more territorial losses. MEANWHILE, let\u2019s end the hostage negotiation farce \u2013 by exposing the self-destructiveness of Israel\u2019s Hostage Deal movement. Politicizing the issue keeps raising Hamas\u2019s price to free the hostages. The movement should only protest \u2013 and harass within the limits of the law \u2013 Qatari and Turkish diplomats, as well as those in North America, Australia, and Europe. Qatar and Turkey host and bankroll Hamas. Bibi-bashing may feel good \u2013 but it\u2019s counterproductive.<\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal reports that Sinwar kept \u201curging\u201d Hamas officials \u201cto refuse a hostage deal. Hamas had the upper hand in negotiations, Sinwar said, citing internal political divisions within Israel, cracks in Netanyahu\u2019s wartime coalition and mounting US pressure to alleviate the suffering in Gaza.\u201d A more unified global front against Hamas might have freed the hostages sooner; it remains the only way to end their suffering, which weighs on all people of conscience.<\/p>\n

In short, we, who want this war to end yesterday, must keep fighting tomorrow and tomorrow, until the aggressors \u2013 Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran \u2013 cave in. Only then, once Israel is secured, will those Palestinians who actually want \u201cdignity, security, freedom, and self-determination\u201d \u2013 rather than Israel\u2019s destruction \u2013 have a shot at making progress, too.<\/p>\n

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post\u00a0<\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We, who want this war to end yesterday, must keep fighting tomorrow and tomorrow, until the aggressors \u2013 Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran \u2013 cave in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":19442,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topics-middle-east","library-op-ed","library-publications"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19435"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19828,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19435\/revisions\/19828"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}