Achieving Victory in Gaza: Some Questions

The war in Gaza is hard. The postwar period will be harder.

Surrender

There have been calls for Hamas, or at least Hamas leadership, to surrender. Jerome Marcus so argued in a Wall St. Journal op-ed on October 23. President Biden urged surrender in a Washington Post op-ed on November 19 and a White House official did the same on November 18 at a gathering of Arab leaders and diplomats. On November 29, a bipartisan resolution introduced in the Congress called for immediate, unconditional surrender.

This past week video clips and news reports showing dozens of Hamas fighters surrendering to the IDF made the rounds, with some reports speculating that these were terrorists fleeing tunnels flooded with sea water. On December 8, an IDF spokesman told reporters, “In the last 48 hours, we apprehended more than two hundred suspects … Amongst the suspects transferred for investigation are Hamas commanders and Nukhba,” the unit responsible for the October 7 attack. (READ MORE from James Thunder: Here’s an Idea: Pay Russian Pilots for Defecting)

These captured terrorists will no doubt be interrogated, improving the chances for hostage rescue. Will those who surrender or are captured be tried? Where will they be held? Will the U.S. offer Gitmo?

Escaping the IDF Net

One of the expressed concerns with the temporary pauses has been the potential for Hamas terrorists to escape from Gaza. Just as large a concern should be the potential for Hamas terrorists hiding among bona fide civilians as they evacuate from northern to southern Gaza via corridors set up by the IDF. Videoclips of these evacuees show a good number of men of military age. Is anything being done to vet the men to determine if they are indeed civilians? Neither the Press Office of the Embassy of Israel, the Spokesperson for the IDF, nor the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel, has responded to my inquiry, although an IDF spokesperson, Lt. Col. Amnon Sheffler admitted publicly on Nov. 28, “Hamas terrorists moved together with civilians to the south.”

Free Gaza From Hamas

While the slogan among pro-Hamas demonstrators is “free Palestine,” as in “free Palestine of Israeli occupation,” we who support Israel should speak of freeing Gaza, liberating Gaza, from Hamas. For example, when IDF forces took Rantisi Hospital and killed Ahmed Siam, it “freed” 1,000 hostages of Hamas, civilians being used as human shields.

When an Israeli army intelligence officer spoke by phone to a resident of Gaza pushing him to evacuate to the south, the Gazan declined, reporting, in a taped and publicly released call, that Hamas had placed cars to form roadblocks, sent people home, and shot at people trying to leave.

Ron Dermer, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, said on Nov. 12, 2023, on Life, Liberty & Levin: “The key to helping those Palestinian civilians is to actually get rid of Hamas, to free Gaza from Hamas. That is how they can have a better future. Anyone who cares about them should be looking for Israel to win — win quickly and win decisively.” This I quickly observe is the phraseology of one part of the “Powell Doctrine,” named after then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell (1937-2021), namely, the morality of using “overwhelming” or “decisive” force:

Once a decision for military action has been made, half measures and confused objectives exact a severe price in the form of a protracted conflict which can cause needless waste of human lives and material resources, a divided nation at home, and defeat. Therefore one of the essential elements of our national military strategy is the ability to rapidly assemble the forces needed to win—the concept of applying decisive force to overwhelm our adversaries and thereby terminate conflicts swiftly with minimum loss of life.

Can Gaza Be Liberalized?

The deep support for Hamas among Gazans poses a enormously difficult problem in identifying who must surrender or be killed or captured to ensure the extermination of Hamas. Which of the men and women bore arms for Hamas, harbored Hamas fighters, provided supplies, built tunnels, or smuggled goods? (READ MORE: Muslim Women Visit Israel to Show Solidarity Against Hamas)

Similarly, after the victory, the deep support for Hamas among Gazans poses the enormously difficult problem of creating a postwar liberal and peaceful place like post-World War II Germany and Japan.

Some examples of the support for Hamas:

• “[Deborah] Cohen recounted how [her nephew, 12 year old Eitan] Yahalomi, who was kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack from his home on Kibbutz Nir Oz without his family, was put on the back of a motorcycle by the terrorists and driven across the breached border fence into Gaza. As they drove him through the streets there, she said, people came outside and began to jeer and beat him.”
• “When they [the hostages] arrived in Gaza in many cases they were spat at and abused by jubilant crowds coming out onto the street to celebrate Hamas’s victory.”
• Hostage Ron Krivoi escaped and was on the run and hiding for four days before locals captured him and returned him to terrorists.
• Palestinians have wildly cheered the prisoners, held or convicted by Israel of violent offenses, released in exchange for innocents held hostage by Hamas: “In the West Bank, hundreds of people burst into wild celebrations for a second night as a busload of Palestinian prisoners arrived early Sunday, despite efforts by Israeli security services for the release of the Palestinian prisoners not to be seen as a celebration. Teenage boys released in the deal were carried on the shoulders of well-wishers in the town of Al Bireh.”
• The results of market research conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) among Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank “indicate that an overwhelming percentage of Palestinians support the October 7 massacre (75 percent), reject coexistence with Israel (85.9 percent), are committed to the restoration of ‘historical Palestine’ as a final resolution (71.1 percent), and support the creation of a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’ (74.7 percent) as the end of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Interestingly, there is more support for the 10/7 massacre from the Palestinians resident in Judea and Samaria (83.1 percent) than those residing in the Gaza Strip (63.6 percent).”

Obviously, the postwar period will be extremely challenging. I am reminded that our experience with denazification in Germany and a similar effort in Japan became, in a short time, less focused on the past and more focused on the future.