211 - Saving the World: America's Role, Especially in Transforming Rage into Smart Tactics

Israel and Ukraine

            Just as the United States finally entered World War I on the side of Britain, France, and other greatly threatened European allies, and did the same (again belatedly) to save Europe and the world from German megalomaniacal oppression, so the United States more quickly and firmly has bolstered Ukraine’s attempt to resist Russia’s unprincipled invasion and, this month, joined Israel in opposing Hamas’ barbaric assault on Israeli civilians. 

As President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine affirmed Friday, “The world, particularly nations confronting aggression and terrorism, looks to America to lead in preserving our common freedom.”  He went on: “America’s investment in Ukraine’s defense will ensure long-term security for all of Europe and the world.” 

It might. President Biden, like Presidents Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt before him, rightly stands impregnably on the side of those who believe like most Americans that freedom is indivisible – that the more of globe’s peoples who are free to express themselves freely, to worship as they will, to criticize their rulers, and to participate without restraint in politics – the better not only the planet’s inhabitants will be but the better off Americans at home will be.  It was excessively in our own self-interests (even for the isolationist Charles Lindberghs of an earlier era) to back beleaguered Europeans against fascism.

President Wilson declared our intervention in 1917 an attempt to engage in war to end all wars. “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”

The League of Nations was a vastly flawed endeavor to extend Wilson’s objectives. Less flawed, but still lacking a conclusive mechanism to stop combat and bloodshed within nations or even between nations, the United Nations has proven a much more persuasive talking shop than the League ever was, and several of its secretaries-general, including the current one, have very effectively mobilized global public opinion and diplomatic decision-making for humanitarian results and, in key instances, for ending warfare breakouts. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has helped to make sure that aid convoys roll into southern Gaza to provide food and water for stranded Gazans. At least two have fortunately made it into southern Gaza as of late yesterday.

But neither Guterres nor anyone else can solve the ultimate conundrums of the Hamas-Israeli conflict or the very difficult wider Arab-Israeli battle.  Hamas’ Oct. 7 venal killing of Israeli settlers and soldiers was at least partially motivated by Hamas and Iran’s impulse to interrupt cementing the Abraham Accords, especially Saudi Arabia’s embracing Israel and exchanging diplomats. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s errant missile that hit a hospital parking lot and killed hundreds of Gazans did more to arouse Arabs against Israel than any accurate firings.

Jerusalem and Washington must now find their ways through minefields of animosity and long diplomatic neglect to extract 201 hostages from an enemy whose only leverage is in those bodies. The hostages stand in the way of extirpating the leadership of Hamas, another key overriding goal of Israel’s coming invasion of Gaza. So do tunnels and other booby-trapped defenses in Gaza. But the major obstacle to Israeli success against Hamas is to do so without further arousing global opprobrium for excessive overreach.  President Biden cautioned Israel to observe the rules of war. But he could not tell them how to annihilate Hamas while sparing collateral damage to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, most of whom have since 2006 been themselves held tightly in thrall by and autocratic Hamas hierarchy that brooks no democracy within the Strip.

Israel must also move carefully in order to avoid opening up a three-front war: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and in and on the borders with Lebanon.  Positioning American naval task forces in the eastern Mediterranean Sea adjacent to Israel, and preparing up to 4000 U.S. marines for combat, is intended to show Iran and Hezbollah that the Pentagon will not tolerate attacks on Israel from Lebanon.  It is also intended to deter any Russian military support for Hamas or Palestine (think Syria!).

That leaves us still with no easy way to quiet the West Bank and the Arab street – even in Egypt – throughout the region without major initiatives from Jerusalem that could improve the overall Palestinian position of statelessness, not to mention existential hopelessness. A promise to cease sponsoring new settlements in the occupied West Bank would help, and at least buy Israel some wider public support as it attacks Hamas and inevitably arouses the Arab street by collateral deaths within the Strip.  As Thomas Friedman enunciated in an excellent New York Times’ column yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu must break with the “Jewish supremacists” who favor an “apartheidlike society” in the West Bank.

Prodded by Biden, Netanyahu should also be thinking about what obliterating Hamas should accomplish. Obviously, Israel needs to make future outrageous attacks on itself from within Gaza are impossible. It needs to deter, for decades if not forever. That means removing those who constitute at least the core of Hamas strategically and administratively.

But who is going to run Gaza after its current corrupt, dictatorial, and murderous rulers are removed? Palestinian puppet rulers are going to be difficult to attract. So, after two decades, are popular Gazans with no ties to Hamas.   Egypt, which once ruled Gaza, now wants no part of it, and certainly lacks any desire to play host to 1 million or 2 million displaced Gazans.

Israel could turn a liberated Gaza over to the UN.  But, given long experience with UN agency actions in the region, that would hardly excite the Israeli right, or anyone close to Netanyahu.

In Zelensky and the freedom struggle in Ukraine, Washington has a clear-sighted, charismatic ally firmly backed by his people. The Pentagon may differ in nuanced ways with Kyiv in war tactics and strategy, but it has ample confidence in the overall mettle and fighting spirit of the Ukrainians.  Furthermore, Ukraine is indeed fighting for freedom worldwide, as Zelensky articulates so well.  His struggle against Russian imperialism is our struggle and the West’s struggle to combat totalitarianism and terror.

Israel’s struggle is as perilous and as important for the future of the world freedom as Ukraine’s. But it cannot escape the legacy of territory and dwellings that it took in 1948 and 1973. And Netanyahu, in particular, cannot brush away the more recent taking of Palestinian land and villages, day after day and week after week. Nor, because Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Front are terrorists long active shooting rockets into Israel, has Israel ever been able to help Gazans prosper.

Now, in this time of dire necessity, Israel (and Netanyahu if he is capable of overcoming his own enormous limitations of character) must rise to find almost impossible ways to batter Hamas while protecting the lives of intertwined civilians from complete destruction. Israel has done surgical strikes before; they are required again, urgently.  Possibly, and this is wild liberal thinking from afar, all of the hostages can be traded, together with culprits from Hamas, for Israeli pledges to halt its coming house-to-house invasion of the Strip. Anything that reduces civilian losses of life is good, but the hostages absolutely must be spared as well.  (Nicholas Kristoff wrote appropriately yesterday in the Times about moral imperatives; Gazan children must live as must Israeli children be kept safe.)

The Economist should receive the last word this morning: “Only America can save Israel and Gaza from greater catastrophe. Iran, Russia and China are profiting from the mayhem….The alternative [to peace] is the decay that feeds scavenger states like Iran and Russia. Biden is the only leader who can pull things back together. If he fails, and the security of the Middle East crumbles, it will be a catastrophe for America, too.”

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