Conrad Black: Destroying Hamas is Israel's righteous cause

 The end of the terrorist organization is the only way to achieve peace

The Gaza War seems finally to be reaching its climax. On one side, Israel’s opponents are accusing it of genocide and of trying to starve the Palestinians into surrender and Britain, France, and Canada are recognizing the completely discredited Palestine Authority as a sovereign government of “Palestine.” 

On the other, Israel is finally assaulting the citadel of its terrorist opposition, the intense complex of tunnels and redoubts at the centre of the City of Gaza. There will obviously be a profound inquiry in Israel into every aspect of this war, once it is over, and particularly into why Israel was taken by surprise as it was, and why it has taken until now for the Israeli Defense Forces finally to assault the ultimate strong point of Hamas. 

The implicit assumption of most of Israel’s critics that the October 7 incident was merely another skirmish in a long-standing border dispute between the Jews and Arabs towards an eventual demarcation between a Jewish and an Arab state is bunk. This was not just another border incident, following Britain’s cavalier promise of 1917 of making Palestine a homeland for the Jews without compromising the rights of the Arabs.

It has emerged in the aftermath of the October 7 attack, including from an all-party investigation under the auspices of the British House of Lords, that Hamas actually thought that it could send a flying column of only a few thousand heavily-armed terrorists unobstructed to the eight gates of Jerusalem and that the attack would trigger a general Arab uprising throughout Israel. It confirms that the October 7 attack was intended to plunge the whole territory of the old Palestine Mandate into general conflict whose ultimate objective was to destroy the state of Israel and replace it with an Islamist Arab state which would either kill, subjugate, or expel the Jews. 

All of these fates are familiar outcomes in the terribly tragic and frequently noble history of the Jews of more than 5,000 years. But the greatest assault upon the Jewish people in all of its history by the German Third Reich and its accomplices during the Second World War was decisive in the world’s resolve to give the Jews a state for the first time since the suppression of the Kingdom of Israel under the heirs of King Solomon by the Persians in the ninth century BC. Israel has determined that the Jews will never again submit to such a passive and tragic fate. The Nazi Holocaust murdered approximately half of the entire Jewish population of the world and an equivalent number ( but obviously not a similar percentage) of non-Jews.

The problem that has existed and has finally forced itself into the consciousness of all serious observers, is that the controlling influences within the Arab population of that territory believe that the existence of a genuine Jewish state in and on that territory is intolerable and that they can never accept it and will therefore never acknowledge the right of the State of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. 

This collides with the post-Holocaust Jewish view that the Jewish people finally again after a lapse of 29 centuries have a state of their own and they are determined that “never again” will the Jewish people be herded as passive victims to slaughter. They will preserve the integrity and the rights of the Jewish state at all costs and forever. Much of the “peace process” has so far been a hopeless cul-de-sac. The Palestinians could have had a state at any time in the last 25 years but they do not believe that any state that confirms the existence of the Jewish state is a satisfactory Palestinian state. In 2023, Hamas committed a heinous act of war with the support of Iran which became the champion of the Arab enemies of Israel as the Arab powers themselves became much more concerned at the encroachments of their ancient Persian and Turkish oppressors than they were at the presence of the Jews among them; radical Islam passed from the hands of the Arabs to the Iranian government, much hated though it is by the population of Iran.

Most of the Western world seems unable to take on board the fact that this is not just an interruption in the terribly difficult and syncopated progress toward enactment of the two-state solution. Some combination of unrigorous thinking and traditional antisemitism has caused the confection of an anti-Israel argument built on contradictions. This has been most clearly stated in the Financial Times on September 15, following the Israeli attack on the Hamas leadership meeting at Doha in Qatar last week. (The Financial Times is almost as viscerally hostile to Israel as the Guardian but couches its Jew-baiting in more intellectually presentable terms.) Israel was condemned for continuing to attack Hamas despite the mortal and irreparable damage it has already done to the terrorist apparatus of that organization and at the same time it was denounced for continuing its effort to exterminate Hamas when that objective is in fact impossible of achievement.

When that analysis is examined, Israel is effectively accused of attempting to do what is impossible and also of continuing to pursue what it has already accomplished. Neither is true and as with other wars which can ultimately be brought to a victorious conclusion by one side, Israel is perfectly within its rights to persevere until the entire military and terrorist apparatus of Hamas has been destroyed. The allegation of genocide is nonsense as genocide consists of a deliberate attempt to exterminate all or a substantial part of a defined group. 

Israel became exasperated with the Hamas habit of stealing food supplies for itself and starving the Palestinian people it supposedly represents, and reduced food assistance in Gaza in March but by May had recognized that this was a public relations as well as a humanitarian disaster and reversed course and is assuring that food is widely distributed. On a parochial Canadian note, Radio Canada should be congratulated for suspending the journalist (Elisa Serret) who explained to viewers that the United States was sticking with Israel because Jews controlled American politics.

Obviously, no people finds the thought of genocide more repulsive than the Jews, and if that were Israel’s objective it could certainly have achieved it. Israel should be encouraged and applauded for taking the one absolutely necessary step to make some sort of peace in its region possible: the destruction of the principal element in the Palestinian population that believes that peace in the area is impossible as long as a Jewish state exists. 

If Israel wishes to confound its unctuous Western critics, straddling gymnastically between incompatible positions, including Canada, France, and the U.K., it too should recognize the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah as Palestine, to rub Hamas’ bloody nose in its failure, as the PA has no chance of meeting all the French demands for democracy and integrity and the whole initiative is a farce. The destruction of Hamas as a terrorist force will not only prove that peace is possible; it will create the only conditions that could give peace in Israel and Palestine a chance.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/destroying-hamas-is-israels-righteous-cause