For those who are unable to read the whole piece due to The Atlantic's paywall, here is the whole text. I agree it is well-worth reading. Lazarus does not come up with an easy prescription, either. Just the least awful of the alternatives we can imagine at this point. That is the agony we all face.
I Don’t See a Better Way Out
I envy those who know exactly how Hamas can be stopped without any more killing, because I don’t.
There are those who see a nonviolent way forward in Gaza right now: A cease-fire, an exchange of prisoners for hostages, a UN protectorate. I envy them, whatever clear answer they might have to how Israel should respond to the massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis and the kidnapping of more than 200 others by a fundamentalist terrorist organization that rules over and hides among an impoverished civilian population of 2 million people. I envy those who know exactly how Hamas can be stopped without any more killing, any more suffering, for any more people in Israel and Gaza.
Because I don’t.
I have dedicated much of my professional life to seeking peaceful change in this conflict, trying to listen to and understand Israelis and Palestinians and find ways to work toward peace or justice or coexistence or mutual understanding or anything better than what there is now. For eight years, starting in 1996, I worked for Seeds of Peace in Jerusalem, promoting peaceful conflict resolution with hundreds of young Palestinians and Israelis, their families, and their communities. I’ve spent the years since researching, writing, and teaching about Israeli-Palestinian peace-building. So many people whom I love and admire are now caught in this nightmare, including Vivian Silver, a 74-year-old Israeli peace activist who disappeared from Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7 and is presumed to have been kidnapped, and the families of numerous friends in Gaza. I see no way out of the nightmare so long as Hamas continues to rule the Gaza Strip, and no viable way to remove it from power without an Israeli ground offensive.
I’ve read some thoughtful pieces explaining why a ground offensive is a terrible idea. I agree. A ground offensive will inevitably add more dead and wounded and bereaved Israelis and Palestinians to the already unbearable tallies of the unspeakable Hamas killing spree and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that has killed more than 3,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Even if Israel takes every possible precaution to protect civilian lives in Gaza—and the U.S. government must continue to pressure the Israeli government to that end—more innocent people there will be killed, harmed, and displaced. Hamas has no doubt prepared fortifications, traps, ambushes—it has had years to plan for its chance to capture and kill IDF soldiers on its territory. Hezbollah may use an Israeli ground offensive as a pretext to widen the circle of death and destruction to northern Israel and southern Lebanon, if not beyond.
I’ve read thoughtful pieces demanding an immediate cease-fire. I share the values of those who are calling for it. I do not think and have never thought that killing innocent people, deliberately or inadvertently, is a way to achieve justice or peace. On a visceral level, I want my friends and family and their friends and families to survive, to be protected, to be safe—in Gaza, in the West Bank, and in Israel. All of the violence and suffering and abuse that Israelis and Palestinians have inflicted on each other over generations has led only to more hatred, more violence, and more suffering. All I have ever dreamed of, prayed for, worked for, in this context, is an end to it all.
And that’s the problem. I don’t see how the cycle of hatred, killing, and suffering ends while there is a fundamentalist terrorist organization explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews—read its 1988 founding charter; the message is not subtle—equipped with legions of fighters ready to kill and die to achieve its goals, an arsenal of missiles, and a powerful state sponsor, Iran, that enables its violence and shares its explicitly genocidal agenda.
Neither the organization, its ruthlessness, nor its agenda is new. Hamas used terrorist violence to undermine every round of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization since the early 1990s—and succeeded, with the assistance of Israel’s oppressive occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories and the terrorism of Israeli extremists. But Hamas has just demonstrated an upgraded capacity for murder and mayhem, developed across 16 years of territorial control over Gaza—notwithstanding Israel’s blockade, multiple devastating wars, and the suffering Hamas has inflicted on the population it claims to represent.
October 7 was not a run-of-the-mill terror attack committed by a secretive cell; it was a sophisticated militarized assault by several thousand heavily armed men seeking to kill and kidnap as many Israelis as possible before dying as martyrs, as 1,500 of them reportedly did. That attack was accompanied by the launching of hundreds of missiles into Israel (some falling short and leading to Palestinian deaths that Hamas must consider “collateral damage”).
To be clear, it was also not a conventional military assault. Once Hamas cadres breached Israel’s defenses, they had complete freedom of choice. They could have sought out exclusively military targets. Instead, they did the opposite, murdering and kidnapping entire families of defenseless civilians, continuing the carnage over hours and days, until they fled back to Gaza, were captured, or were killed.
Hamas views its attack as a historic achievement, and that means it is only a matter of time before it will attack again. Israel’s strategies of containment (“quiet for quiet”), suitcases of cash from Qatar, and deterrence all failed. Hamas has no interest in peace negotiations, despite the wishful thinking that has afflicted some analysts in the past. The only way to prevent further attacks of this kind is to render Hamas physically incapable of executing them.
As President Joe Biden and many others have rightly cautioned, the U.S. made grave mistakes in its response to 9/11, including the invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attack, and an ill-fated 20-year attempt to build a democracy in Afghanistan without committing the necessary resources. But the original U.S. military response to the murder of 3,000 people—the invasion of Afghanistan, the reduction of al-Qaeda’s capacity to mount operations, and the removal of the Taliban government from power—was no mistake. It was the definition of military necessity. Israel faces a situation that is, if anything, more acute, because Hamas’s fighters are located not on a different continent but right next door.
There is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A responsible Israeli government would prepare a political strategy for the day after this war, one that empowers Palestinians who wish to end the conflict by creating a path to dignity, security, and self-determination for their nation—and the U.S. government should demand no less of its ally. Of course, the current Israeli government is no “partner for peace,” but Israel’s voters are likely to punish the politicians responsible for the debacle of October 7, 2023, just as they did after the Yom Kippur War, 50 years before. Unfortunately, though, no one can vote Hamas out of power.
The only way to avoid a ground offensive is to provide a realistic strategy for removing Hamas’s ability to attack Israel on this scale again. That alternative must be convincing not to liberal observers in the West, but to the actual decision makers in Israel, who disastrously failed to protect their citizens on October 7. If anything is clear in hindsight, it is that cease-fires do not provide sustainable security: Hamas used the years since the 2021 cease-fire to prepare its 2023 assault.
An Israeli ground offensive is a grim prospect, which will cost even more Israeli and Palestinian lives, with no guarantee of success. I say this with deep sorrow—but I have yet to hear any credible, effective alternative.
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