Israel's looming Pyrrhic victory

“They’ll like us when we win.”

It wasn’t true when “The West Wing” character Toby Ziegler said it in the wake of 9/11 and it isn’t true now. 

Israel should understand that.

History has shown that in the long run, people don’t always just care about winning. They rightfully also care about how that happened.

Israel can’t act with relative impunity and expect even the Western world, let alone the Arab world, to sit on the curb and cheer when it’s all over. Or their own folks, for that matter. The present anger won’t go away without changes. 

Hamas terrorists are who they are. Who is Israel?

The Oct. 7 Hamas attack was atrocious. Brutal murders of civilians, including babies. Kidnappings. Rape. Home invasions. Indiscriminate missile launches.

Israeli Noa Argamani, 25, one of 240 reported kidnapped by Hamas Oct. 7

But none of it gives Israel carte blanche to prosecute its response however it wishes. Civilians are not the same as combatants.

Northern Gaza, early November

Germany’s horrible indiscriminate attacks on London didn’t absolve the United Kingdom for its indiscriminate attacks on German civilians — even in the eyes of the Brits themselves — and the Jewish state can’t expect respect for the sweeping latitude of its war in a more-informed time.

Even The Good War was no good when things got out of hand. 

The United Kingdom’s Bomber Command lost more than 55,000 crew members in World War II, mostly over Germany. But Britain for decades didn’t honor them as it did the far fewer fighter pilots who died defending the nation in the same conflict.

Britain, of course, faced an existential threat from the Nazis, and bombing was really its only way of fighting back after the near-disaster at Dunkirk and until the Americans could enter the fray.  And long after that, too.

But there was considerable anguish after Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave up on precision bombing as ineffective early on. He endorsed a policy of nighttime “area bombing,” a technique now more familiarly known as “carpet bombing.”

The English bombed great swaths of territory around military objectives, aiming at “worker housing,” and continued to pound more and more residential areas with the stated objective of demoralizing the German population. 

Churchill had written decades before that bombing civilians would be ineffective at demoralizing an enemy’s population. And he had more recent evidence, in London’s own brave citizenry, to that effect. But he did it anyway.

He explained later, “When we got back into the car, a harsher mood swept over this haggard (British) crowd. ‘Give it ’em back,’ they cried, and, ‘Let them have it too.’ I undertook forthwith to see that their wishes were carried out; and this promise was certainly kept.”

American bomber policy was different. Bombing of Germany was done in daylight, with the intent of just hitting military targets.

That is, until 1944. Then, the U. S. started area bombing, too. But in the daytime. That way, the German population could stay on edge day and night.

The British had a long list of German cities to decimate. One of them was Dresden, unimportant to the war effort. It was clobbered in February, 1945, perhaps as a favor to the Russians, as it might be an obstacle in their march to Berlin. The next day, American bombers finished the job.

It burned for days. There wasn’t much of Dresden left.

Dresden, 1945

Brits came to regret their own country’s bombing campaign after that. “Are we beasts?” Churchill famously asked himself, and referred privately to the bombing of residential areas as a campaign of terror. 

Americans didn’t yet join their English fellow-citizens in the angst over civilian deaths. They still didn’t after 100,000 people were killed and a million left homeless by 160 minutes of U.S. bombing of Tokyo in March of 1945.

Tokyo, March 1945, after the most destructive bombing in history (Wikimedia)

They did in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course. America has never gotten over August, 1945. Neither has anybody else.

Hiroshima, 1945 (The National WWII Museum)

Indiscriminate attacks that kill civilians are not forgiven with time. We might not forget that Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said Oct. 10 that hundreds of tons of munitions had already been used in Gaza, and that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

About 1,200 Israelis were savagely murdered by Hamas. About 10 times as many Gazans have reportedly been killed by Israel, a third of them children. The method of killing the Palestinians was not as bloodthirsty. But dead is dead.

The genuine and deserved sympathy for Israel is dissipating as the nation responds more brutally than appears necessary. Israeli leaders are understandably furious, but taking that fury out on unarmed civilians is unreasonable. It doesn’t matter how many Palestinians sympathize with Hamas. It’s unwarranted to punish people for the way they think.

Israel has cut off water, food and fuel to Gaza. Such general punishment is a war crime, and not a minor one, if there is such a thing.

It’s time to take a breath. Genuine negotiation to trade hostage release for a cease-fire is called for. As this is published, the Washington Post is reporting that a “pause” in hostilities by both sides, and some degree of hostage release, is being brokered by the United States. It would take courage, as it might not work well, strategically or politically. But in the long run, what’s going on now probably won’t work for Israel, either. Or the U. S., for that matter.

We can set aside everything else that’s gone on in the occupied territories over the decades and just concentrate on the events of post-Oct. 7, because what’s about to occur in Gaza is the pressing of a giant Middle East reset button. It may turn much of the world against Israel and its allies, and the world will be different when it’s over. It probably won’t be better. 

Israel will win. But it might not experience peace in any of its citizens’ lifetimes. And Jews worldwide may find their backs against the wall.