(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Why Israel Cannot Deescalate Until Hamas Is Eliminated [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-12 Every war throughout history has resulted in casualties among civilian non-combatants. It may have been somewhat easier to contain the damage back when we were fighting with swords and spears. But even then, the huge rocks flung by catapults or the flaming arrows flying through the air often hit more than their intended target. As weapons became more indiscriminately destructive, we tried to set some minimal boundaries for the treatment of civilians. The Geneva Conventions, meeting in the wake of World War 2, issued four treaties (and three protocols, for those who really want to bore people at parties) enumerating the acceptable protocols of war. It is hard for me to wrap my head around how surreal it is to come up with rules of what is fair and what is not when slaughtering other people en masse, but it is best to try to have some limits on war's inherent cruelty. Wars are unavoidably horrific and evil, and yet, sometimes necessary. I remember the bumper sticker which in the 1980s seemed to be almost as common as "I heart my dachshund". It said "War is not the answer". That always struck me as callow and naive. Whether or not war is the answer largely depends on the question. If, for example, the question is "How do we stop Hitler from conquering the world, committing mass genocide and subjugating most of humanity into slavery to serve the master race?", war is obviously the correct answer. Alternative answers like "Ask him please to not" or "Hold a humuus-in for peace" don't seem satisfactory. What to do about the recent terrorist attacks on the Israeli population presents another question where the answer is both awful and inescapable. I know there are calls by people for "restraint" and "deescalation". Some of these are made by good, sincere people who hate to see violence. Others are made by those with less noble intent as a tactical effort to box Israel in. Either way, they have to be seen for what they are, unreasonable and unrealistic. People reading this article may have very different views about the underpinnings of the long-standing Israeli and Palestinian conflict, You may support or oppose events that occurred decades or even centuries ago. You may support a one-state or two-state solution. You may support Israel but not like the Netanyahu government. You may support the Palestinians but not Hamas. None of that really matters now. What matters is where we are today. The attacks of the past week are not an isolated flair-up which can be repaired with a bit of diplomacy. They are the result of an ongoing dynamic which is unsustainable and cannot be allowed to continue. Hamas has one core raison d'etre, the destruction and elimination of Israel as a state. This is not a territorial dispute like Armenia-Azerbaijan where one side wants to move the border, or a civil war like Viet Nam where a nation has divided and one side wants to impose a particular government on the other. Further, contrary to the claims of some, this is not a fight for greater rights for the Palestinians. For a variety of reasons too long and detailed to cover in this article, the Palestinians live very difficult lives, and much more attention should be paid to how to make their lives better. But that is not what Hamas is fighting for. If you read the Hamas Charter, listen to its public statements, and track the lovely folks it chooses to align itself with, you will see that there are no concessions that Israel could make, no easing of intrusions on Palestinian lives, no investments in Palestinian infrastructure, no stopage of settlements or peaceful gestures that Israel could offer that would in any way mollify Hamas and calm this conflict. This is an existential dispute where Hamas doesn't believe that Israel has a right to exist in any form, and that Israeli citizens, particularly the Jewish ones, do not have a right to be on the land at all. Hamas not only believes this, it has demonstrated repeatedly, once again this week, that there is no act of violence or destruction that they will not commit if they perceive it brings them closer to their goal. So, again, whatever you think about the underlying conflict, the path forward is inescapable. I'd bet that if I removed the words ``Palestine", "Hamas" and "Israel" from this article, and just described a generic situation similar to the wind we face here, virtually everyone would agree. Israel cannot simply launch some counter-strike, and then sit back and wait as the terrorists in Hamas sit in comfort and plan their next massacre of Israelis. Nobody would accept that as the status quo. Thus, Israel has no choice. They must do whatever it is they need to in order to end Hamas in the Gaza Strip. They need to find and arrest or eliminate all of Hamas's political and military leadership and impose, at least temporarily, a new government structure. Brett Stephens of the New York Times suggested an Arab peace-keeping force, which makes some sense, although why the Arab nations would want to get involved in this is unclear. This almost certainly requires a full ground incursion, and that will be violent and bloody. There’s no denying that. Israel should do all it reasonably can to allow civilians to escape into Egypt and to avoid gratuitously harming non-combatants. This task is made more difficult by the propensity of Hamas to put military assets in civilian infrastructure. In other words, if you hide missiles in the basement of an elementary school, you can go on TV and scream about how Israel bombed an elementary school if they try to take your missiles out. Once Hamas is eliminated, Israel should seek and reach out to the peace-loving Palestinians in Gaza and work with them to rebuild and to create a stable dynamic for a future Palestinian state negotiated with reasonable Palestinian leaders who are willing to coexist in peace with their Israeli neighbors. That is what we are all hoping for. But that is not what Hamas is, or will ever be. And as we've seen again this week, that situation has to change. 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