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Israel’s decision to cut off all aid in March pushed the strip into the dire crisis it faces today. Israel said that it hoped the blockade would disrupt Hamas’s ability to profit from the goods coming in, weaken the group’s governance and pressure it to capitulate in cease-fire negotiations. This was not just a morally wrong choice — humanitarian aid should not be a political issue — but a strategically foolish one that misread both Hamas and the international community. A humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza was never going to force Hamas’s hand. The group needs very few resources to operate: just enough to continue to hold the hostages, carry out guerrilla attacks and continue making statements to influence public opinion.

The author of the post, Gili Getz, had this to say, and offered a different quote from the article:

Over the past three weeks, I've noticed a significant shift within the pro-Israel community in the U.S. largely due to the undeniable level of starvation caused by Israel and the decision to “occupy Gaza”. This shift will accelerate.

“When it comes to Gaza, Israelis live in an echo chamber, relying largely on local media, which often enacts self-censorship regarding Israeli wrongdoing and Palestinian suffering in Gaza. But it is also important to understand the powerful underlying emotions that have led many Israelis to close their eyes and ears to the suffering of Gazans and accept a different version of reality.”

Is there sad irony in the fact that the response from Israelis confirmed the thesis of the article? There was consensus in the comments around "finishing the job," annihilating Hamas entirely. Which led me to say:

To eliminate Hamas from Gaza, every living thing in Gaza would have to be destroyed. That wouldn’t end Hamas, just evict them from Gaza. Is that what you are advocating? Killing over one million children?

I got no response. But the tone of the conversation was that I was being unrealistic in seeking peace, the implication being that yes, starving as many people and killing as many children as is necessary to rip Hamas out branch and root is what must be done.

While surveys show total war is supported by only about 18% of Israelis, a majority are content to push their heads into the sand in one way or another. Ori Hanan Weisberg sums it up this way:

Ori said:

A follow-up to yesterday's post triggered (in all senses) by the Israel Democracy Institute's finding that 79% of Israelis are unconcerned about starvation/famine in Gaza.

Here is the graph of a poll from last week done by the Hebrew Ma'ariv daily newspaper on the subject:

Red (47%) - There's no famine and starvation in Gaza, it's all Hamas lies.

Green (23%) - There's famine and starvation and I care.

Orange (18%) - There's famine and starvation and I don't care.

Gray (12%) - No opinion

Ori goes on to say:

The denialists (47%), in my view, cannot be doing their due diligence. To say it's not happening at all is to deny mountains of evidence. The disengaged (12%) aren't better; in some senses they are worse. The first may plead media manipulation. The second only apathy, which I find perhaps the most damning. Atrocities don't occur without both denialism and disengagement.

Returning to the comment thread on Gili's post, this relevant exchange unfolded. A poster said:

You wouldn’t let Nazis roam around after WW2. It needs to end and we need to end them.

I pointed out that, in fact, Nazis were everywhere in Germany and beyond after WW2, including in the US. The commenter replied:

98% of Germans were Nazis. Are Palestinians 98% Hamas? Yeah maybe.

This mindset that we ought to kill 98% of Gazans but might not be able to serves to inhibit justice, not promote it. Yet there is a way forward, albeit one that requires cold calculation in place of hot, trauma-induced anger.

Only a maximum of 10% of Germans ever belonged to the Nazi party. Earning 37% of the vote in the Reichstag gave Nazis enough power for a full takeover. It’s more accurate to say the majority of the German population was complicit in allowing the Nazis to take over their country than to say that virtually all of them were Nazis.

In the last free election in Gaza, Hamas earned 40% of the vote and similarly took full control.

Evidence suggests that low-level complicity in enabling terrorists or genocidal sociopaths doesn’t make humans irredeemable. In World War II, a majority of Americans did not hold individual German citizens responsible for Nazi atrocities. As a rule, Nazi POWs on US soil were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. About 1% of the 400K POWs housed in the US found clever ways to stay after the war and eventually earned citizenship. Others returned to the US after being briefly repatriated. Treating Germans humanely paid dividends in helping to rapidly bury Nazism in Germany, to the extent that any viral, terroristic ideology can be buried.

In contrast, overly generous treatment of Confederate states in the aftermath of the Civil War led to traitors rapidly regaining political power in Washington, with which they killed off Reconstruction and enabled 100 years of Jim Crow violence and discrimination.

Given that these and many other robust historical models exist, a balanced, humane way to peace in Gaza might be found. Instead, Israel is well on its way to committing genocide in Gaza. Put that on Netanyahu and everyone who enables him, including the US. Without a major course correction, conflict in Gaza won’t end well for anyone, and won’t result in the security Israel strives for. And, by what means would Israel be rehabilitated after committing its own atrocity?

Postscript 1

One additional comment thread to unpack...

What about what Israel was doing to the Palestinians before October 7? Learn your history and it’s not your land.

This comment started out promisingly—there is much to discover by tracing history from Jewish immigration under British rule to present-day Gaza—then pivoted inexplicably and unhelpfully to the "it's not your land" argument of American progressives.

Gili issued this concise and civil retort:

It’s the land of both people. Don’t dehumanize and condescend here. I want this to end no less than you.

Another commenter traced the long Jewish history written into the land of present-day Israel, then said this:

The land belongs to both peoples and 2,000,000 Palestinians who enjoy living in a democratic state, as opposed to those in Gaza and the West Bank as well as Jordan.

Again, a promising start, but denigrating some Palestinians while praising others based solely on their current geographic location ignores Israel's complex historical connection to displacing Palestinians, creating problematic conditions for Palestinians in its immediate vicinity, and discrimination faced by Palestinians within Israel's borders.

Could common ground be reached were these two commenters to sit down with a regional map and history book?

Postscript 2

The ease with which both Hamas and Hitler rose to power as members of minority parties should give Americans great pause. Trump owns all three branches of government and earned a majority of the vote in 2024. His dictatorial inclinations are all full display and there is no sign that he will be brought to heel.

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Link: https://halwrightnewtown.info/blog/Israelis-Are-Almost-All-In-on-Genocide-a12/

March 25, 2024
Hardened Bigotry and Fading Hope
by Hal Wright

As Israelis and Gazans fall in line with their violent and incompetent leaders, a framework which could yield lasting peace becomes impossible to imagine, yet alone build.

I haven't blogged about Gaza since my broad characterization of the politics of the war a few months ago. The reason is simple. When something is falling, the next noteworthy event is when it crashes to the ground.

The horror in Gaza has worsened by an order of magnitude or more without tangible change to the fundamentals. Hamas and Netanyahu are doing what they promised, without regard for their standing in the world. Both have grown more popular within their own populations, as they have expanded, in word and deed, their dehumanization of the humans on the other side. And as Gazan civilians starve or are blown to bits, genocide moves closer to an apt description of the reality on the ground. Apologists on both sides make arguments hobbled by outright lies, and by glaring omissions: either that 10/7 happened (on the Hamas side) or that the Nakba happened (on the Israeli side). By not articulating a post-war plan for Gaza, Netanyahu has signaled his intention to turn Gaza into an open-air prison, deprived of resources and isolated as never before, for anyone who survives his onslaught.

Rafah is about to become the white hot center of Gaza. Barring an unlikely change in the momentum of the conflict, Netanyahu will set in motion one of the worst humanitarian disasters in history. By the numbers, Rafah already has the same population as Philadelphia, 1.5 million, crammed into 1/6 of the area, and with a small fraction of Philadelphia's life-sustaining resources. An invasion would result in mass civilian casualties and obliteration of those resources.

There is an element of desperation in Netanyahu's latest public statements and actions. Despite having predicted that the war in Gaza would extend for many months, perhaps into 2025, Netanyahu now claims total victory will be achieved within a few weeks of his invasion of Rafah. There is no longer much talk about bringing the hostages home, and no plan to do so. Thumbing his nose at international pressure and especially at the Biden administration, Netanyahu has continued to expand West Bank settlements. While his defiant posture is not sustainable for the long term, Netanyahu seems more interested in extending his time in power for the short term.

The details of the impending crash in Gaza, and the broad scatter of debris from that crash into the Middle East and elsewhere, remain to be seen. What seems certain, and it's horrible to contemplate, is that the body count of the crash will dwarf that we have experienced so far. Demolishing Gaza may prevent Hamas terrorists from using their tunnels to invade Israel from the west. But as we have seen this week in Russia, nowhere in the world is safe from terrorism, and Israel's enemies must be doubly motivated to continue the emerging cycle of vengeance.