Israel’s Humiliated Critics

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 18, 2024

 

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is dead. So, too, are his fellow Hamas terrorists Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa, and Saleh al-Arouri. Thousands more Hamas combatants have been neutralized or captured by the Israel Defense Forces on the Gaza Strip’s battlefields. The insurgent network that hatched and executed the barbarism loosed against Israelis and Jews on October 7, 2023, is scattered, disorganized, and struggling to regroup. But the Israeli military has not let up on the pressure its soldiers are applying to Hamas forces wherever they attempt to reconstitute themselves.

 

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has offered amnesty to the remnants of Hamas and other Islamist terror groups in the Strip that surrender and facilitate the release of the remaining 10/7 hostages still in Hamas’s custody. That would bring “the end of the war closer,” he said. The conditions that will bring about an end to the hostilities in Gaza, therefore, can only be realized if Hamas recognizes its defeat. And if that defeat is not yet clear to its remaining members, it will have to be made clearer still.

 

That’s not how Israel’s critics see it. Vice President Kamala Harris took a moment on Thursday to celebrate Sinwar’s elimination — a figure with “American blood on his hands” whose death leaves “the United States, Israel, and the entire world better off as a result.” She even took partial ownership of Israel’s success. “In the past year,” Harris observed, “American special operations and intelligence personnel have worked closely with their Israeli counterparts to locate and track Sinwar and other Hamas leaders, and I commend their work.” Given the initial reports that suggest Sinwar himself revealed his position to an IDF grunt, American intelligence support doesn’t seem to have played a significant role in the Hamas leader’s neutralization. Nevertheless, Harris deemed this a “mission accomplished” moment. Even though the “threat Hamas poses to Israel must be eliminated,” a concession that this goal has not yet been achieved, “this moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza,” she insisted.

 

It’s a touch atonal to hear the vice president use the occasion of Sinwar’s combat-related demise to lobby Israel to relinquish its goals in the war that was imposed on it by the 10/7 attacks. After all, she sought that same outcome when Sinwar was alive.

 

Indeed, Harris has demonstrated an all-thumbs grasp of this conflict from its outset. Six months ago, she declared that, having “studied the maps,” she had determined that Rafah’s civilian population could not be relocated in advance of an IDF offensive. “There’s nowhere for those folks to go,” she said. Israel ignored her and speedily relocated roughly 1 million Gazans to safe corridors. Moreover, she declined to rule out “consequences” for the Israelis if they conducted “any major military operation in Rafah,” which “would be a huge mistake.”

 

Harris was ignored, and blessedly so. In the interim, the IDF has successfully exfiltrated some of the 10/7 hostages from their confines inside Rafah, and that is the city where Israeli forces finally cornered Sinwar. Harris’s fallacious assumptions haven’t led her to reconsider any of her priors, nor has Israel’s determination to see this war through to its preferred conclusion regardless of the posture of the Biden administration imposed any crises of conscience on its officials.

 

Harris isn’t alone. So many members of the Democratic establishment in the United States have taken the opportunity presented by Sinwar’s neutralization to argue for the very same cease-fire they backed when he was alive.

 

“I told the prime minister of Israel yesterday, let’s also make this moment an opportunity to seek a path to peace, a better future in Gaza without Hamas,” President Joe Biden said of his Israeli counterpart. While Sinwar’s death “represents a moment of justice,” it also opens the “prospect of a ceasefire.” Defense secretary Lloyd Austin agreed. The Hamas commander’s killing “removes a huge obstacle” to peace talks. “Sinwar’s death also provides an extraordinary opportunity to achieve a lasting ceasefire, to end this awful war, and to rush humanitarian aid into Gaza,” he told reporters in Europe. When asked by a reporter if the onus was now on Israel to embrace the concessions necessary to secure a premature peace in the Strip, Austin appeared to endorse that notion. “Of course,” Austin replied, there are new prospects for peace today, “and we would hope we can work together to take advantage of that opportunity.”

 

The Biden administration still places the burden of seeking and securing peace on the Israeli government, but with whom is Jerusalem to negotiate? Hamas’s leadership, such as it is, is disaggregated. There are no indications that whatever hierarchy exists today can speak for much less capably command its remaining fighters. Negotiations should be conducted on a case-by-case basis with the individual fighters willing to lay down their arms and submit themselves to Israeli justice. That would not merely be a just approach to the resolution of this conflict but a practical one. The alternative to that approach, the one that is being pursued by this White House, is a fantasy fueled by the Biden team’s perception that it must be seen to continually hector Israel’s leadership lest a handful of voters in Dearborn, Mich., turn on them. Outside the rubric of American domestic politics, the administration’s static understanding of the war’s rapidly evolving dynamics makes little sense.

 

The administration’s behavior may be nakedly opportunistic, but their myopia pales in comparison to the nakedly exploitative statements produced by those on the far left of American political discourse. With Sinwar dead, “there is now no justification” for Netanyahu “and his extremist government to continue their all-out war against the Palestinian people,” Senator Bernie Sanders declared. Funny, that. Sanders was equally convinced of the need for a cease-fire within days of Israel’s retaliation for the 10/7 attacks — before Sinwar’s death, but also Haniyeh’s, Issa’s, and al-Arouri’s, among thousands of other Hamas fighters. Neither Sanders nor his fellow far-left agitators in Congress or those making menaces of themselves on America’s streets and college campuses care whether Israel has achieved its strategic goals. Their advocacy would have, if observed, left Hamas entirely intact and unpunished for the atrocities it engineered on 10/7.

 

The progressive Left’s calls for a cease-fire now as Israel stands on the precipice of victory are as craven as they were when they were being issued even before Israel had responded to the massacre at all. “We need to call for de-escalation and ceasefire,” Ilhan Omar demanded even as Hamas’s barbarians were still being rounded up inside Israel. “An immediate ceasefire and de-escalation is urgently needed to save lives,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed within hours of the Hamas-led massacre, and days before Israeli ground operations targeting Hamas fighters inside the Strip commenced. Among the lives they sought to preserve were the Iran-backed marauders in Hezbollah and Hamas who would slaughter (and have slaughtered) Americans as readily as they massacred Israeli Jews.

 

When it comes to the interests the U.S. and Israel share, these and other Democratic voices have sacrificed the benefit of the doubt. They either do not comprehend what would have been lost if Israel had preemptively surrendered to its terrorist tormentors, or they do not care. Either way, their tactical and strategic understanding of this conflict and its implications has been so corrupted by their mistrust of the popularly elected Israeli government that they cannot adjudicate developments in this war with any reliability. On the matter of Israel, at least, they need not be listened to again.