At Least Someone Gets It

It's not Israel's Fault The War In Gaza Is Killing So Many Civilians and Here's Why

A lot of civilians have died in the ongoing war in Gaza. I’m not sure whose numbers I trust, but warfare in urban areas kills civilians. That’s a fact of life and it has been for literally centuries. Actually, that’s incorrect. It’s been happening for millennia. The oldest recorded siege was fought at Meggido circa 1500 BC, about thirty-five hundred years ago.

Denial of food and other supplies has always been a staple of siege warfare. That’s not nothing new. Wars are fought by killing people and starvation is a way of making people die. It’s ugly. It’s brutal. It’s freaking war for the love of all that’s holy.

Of course, that’s not to say that anyone with half a brain or any heart at all wants to see it happen or the war to continue any longer than it has to. I’m not advocating for mass murder (and no, what has happened so far is not mass murder, genocide or any other made up leftist crap. It’s war and Israel is doing its best trying to prevent civilian casualties. Name another country that has given an enemy time to evacuate its civilian population before bombing. The United States certainly hasn’t.

There’s another angle to this though: Germany never intentionally offered up its cities for bombings. Japan never thought to use the death of it citizens to change international opinion. The Battle of Britain was fought on one side by British pilots who were trying to keep their civilians alive. There was no thought of letting London burn to create sympathy for the British cause even while they were begging the US to enter the war. That, unfortunately, is not the case in Gaza right now:

After Hamas attacked Israel in October, igniting the war in Gaza, Israeli leaders described the group’s most senior official in the territory, Yahya Sinwar, as a “dead man walking.” Considering him an architect of the raid, Israel has portrayed Mr. Sinwar’s assassination as a major goal of its devastating counterattack.

Seven months later, Mr. Sinwar’s survival is emblematic of the failures of Israel’s war, which has ravaged much of Gaza but left Hamas’s top leadership largely intact and failed to free most of the captives taken during the October attack.

Even as Israeli officials seek his killing, they have been forced to negotiate with him, albeit indirectly, to free the remaining hostages. Mr. Sinwar has emerged not only as a strong-willed commander but as a shrewd negotiator who has staved off an Israeli battlefield victory while engaging Israeli envoys at the negotiating table, according to officials from Hamas, Israel and the United States. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments of Mr. Sinwar and diplomatic negotiations…

…As an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, Mr. Sinwar masterminded a strategy that he knew would provoke a ferocious Israeli response. But in Hamas’s calculus, the deaths of many Palestinian civilians — who do not have access to Hamas’s subterranean tunnels — were the necessary cost of upending the status quo with Israel.

American and Israeli intelligence agencies have spent months assessing Mr. Sinwar’s motivations, according to people briefed on the intelligence. Analysts in both the United States and Israel believe that Mr. Sinwar is primarily motivated by a desire to take revenge on Israel and weaken it. The well-being of the Palestinian people or the establishment of a Palestinian state, the intelligence analysts say, appears to be secondary.

This makes sense. Schools in the Gaza Strip, some staffed by the United Nations, teach Judeophobia in their classrooms. They teach martyrdom. They teach kids, in short, to kill Jews. That, more than anything is Sinwar’s goal. And he knows he can’t continue to do that once there’s a cease fire.

But what’s more, Sinwar has allowed the deaths of his own for political gain. Hamas doesn’t have the manpower, the gear or the training to win a stand up fight against the Israeli Defense Force. Sinwar knows it. He needs the world on his side to try to put pressure on Israel to keep them from doing what they need to do to win the war. In short, he’s a sick fuck who cares only about killing for the sake of killing. Civilians are just another form of ammunition to him.

When an enemy is willing to use human shields to protect their works they have made their civilians into a legitimate military target. When they build tunnels under hospitals and schools and use them to store weapons they leave Israel no option but to drop bombs there. There is no way to prosecute a war against an enemy that operates in civilian areas without killing civilians. Sinwar knows it and he uses it to his advantage.

I’d love to see this war over soon. I don’t like seeing kids get killed. I don’t like them to lose their parents either. But I’m not stupid. I know what a cease fire means at this point: It means that Hamas gets to reload for next round. They get the time they need to recruit, to rearm and to train new troops. They get, in short, everything they need to make October 7 happen all over again. Israel can’t afford that. Netanyahu isn’t dumb enough to fall for it. I’m not either.

If Sinwar wants to save the lives of his people. If he wants them to live in peace and prosper. If he wants to see the kids in the Gaza Strip grow into adults that can stand on their own two feet and their children grow up hale and healthy, he needs to do what’s right: Surrender himself and his movement to Israel. Urge those he leaves in charge after he turns himself over to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

That won’t happen, of course. Sinwar and his Iranian masters want only to kill the Jews that occupy what they refuse to admit is not Muslim land. You lost the war guys. This little brushfire bullshit is doing nothing but killing the people you claim to support. Admit it. Save the lives of your own. All you have to do is stop killing Israelis, some of which you share a religion with.