Let’s look at what the most logical outcome to Hamas’ largest large scale attack on Israel might be.
You’re not going to like it.
First, some context in this Haviv Rettig Gur Times of Israel piece linked by David Bernstein at Instapundit:
It was a horror, interminable, impossible. Hour after hour, families sat huddled in their homes awaiting rescue from the Hamas fighters streaming through their towns and villages.
Families were butchered in cold blood. In one home, a terrorist shot the parents dead, took a child’s cellphone and started broadcasting it all in a livestream on their Facebook account. Grandmothers were pulled in wheelchairs to waiting vehicles ready to carry them as hostages into Gaza. Then came the mothers carrying babies. Footage circulated on social media, put there by Hamas, of an Israeli child asking his mother if the gunmen that surrounded them were going to kill them. “They said they won’t,” the mother replied as they were taken outside to some unknown fate.
The stream of videos didn’t stop. An IDF soldier’s body was paraded in Gaza. A young woman, bleeding, was pulled by the hair from a car after being kidnapped and taken into the Strip. And all of it was broadcast by Hamas to the world in joyful pride, sparking celebrations in Tehran, Ramallah and no small part of the online pro-Palestinian activist world.
And all the while came the stream of messages on Twitter and Whatsapp from Israelis still surrounded by the roving gunmen, friends and relatives begging for a rescue that never came.
Hour after agonizing hour.
Snip.
Until Saturday, Israelis believed they were strong and safe. On Saturday, they started to believe that they were neither.
In that simple shift, the Hamas attack was massively successful.
As Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesman Abu Hamza put it while the attack was still underway: “This powerful enemy is an illusion made of dust and capable of being defeated and broken. Our heroes made the enemy small and humiliated, feeling death everywhere.”
Theories abound about Hamas’s reasons for the assault. Many suggested it was an Iranian-ordered disruption of Israeli-Saudi normalization. Others focused on internal Palestinian politics and suggested Hamas was positioning itself, even at the cost of an inevitable and crushing Israeli retaliation, as the unquestioned leader of the Palestinian struggle after Mahmoud Abbas’s death. Still others said the reasons were simpler: The two Hamas leaders in Gaza who prepared and launched the operation were military chief Muhammad Deif and political head Yihye Sinwar. The first lost his family to an Israeli airstrike aimed at him, the second sat 22 years in an Israeli prison. Neither needed an overwrought geopolitical rationale to piece together such an operation.
There is probably some truth in all these theories. All make sense. But none are how Hamas itself explained the operation in real-time.
Here lies a part of Palestinian thinking and discourse that many of Palestine’s Western defenders ignore, both because it’s a hard sell to Western audiences and because they don’t really understand it themselves. Palestinian “resistance,” as conceived by Hamas, is about much more than settlements, occupation or the Green Line. A larger theory of Islamic renewal is at work.
As he announced the start of Saturday’s attack, Hamas military commander Deif said it was meant to disrupt a planned Israeli demolition of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And when Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh called on Saturday for “every Muslim everywhere and all the free people of the world to stand in this just battle in defense of Al-Aqsa and the Prophet’s mission,” he meant just that, that the fight was over holy things, over Islam’s redemptive promise.
This reclamation of Islamic dignity through the ultimate defeat of the Jews occupies a great deal of Hamas’s political thought, permeates its rhetoric and profoundly shapes its thinking about Israeli Jews and its strategy in facing Israel. Israel is more than a mere occupier or oppressor in this narrative, it is a rebellion against God and the divinely-ordained trajectory of history. And by showing Israelis in their weakness, the thinking goes, Israelis are somehow actually made weak. Redemption requires only the faith of its believers to be fulfilled, and seeing is believing.
The footage from Saturday, the snuff videos shared gleefully by Hamas supporters, including in some Western far-left circles, weren’t an aberration. Hamas gunmen didn’t get “carried away,” as some explained. They were the essence of the whole enterprise. They were Hamas’s basic message to Israelis: That they weren’t being killed and kidnapped just for tactical advantage in the struggle for Palestinian independence, but rather were being humiliated and dehumanized as traitors against God.
Snip.
The Israel that emerged from Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Deluge” operation was different from the one that went into it. A tectonic shift had occurred in the country’s psyche. The horrors inflicted by Hamas sparked rage and an intense feeling of vulnerability. Where Hamas had always seemed an implacable but ultimately containable enemy, it had now proven it could bring the danger into Israeli homes, could slaughter children and kidnap grandmothers while all the vaunted power of the Israel Defense Forces was helpless to stop it.
Hamas had made itself an intolerable threat.
The change is so profound and palpable that many Israeli analysts, apparently assuming that Hamas understands the consequences that this psychological fallout will have for Gaza, argued on Saturday that the terror group was surprised by its own success.
“In my estimation,” tweeted analyst Avi Issacharoff, “the military and political leadership of Hamas did not expect these successes. They meant to kidnap two or three as part of a massive killing spree. But this many? Their problem is that this success may turn into a Pyrrhic victory. It seems to me there’s now a consensus in the Israeli elite and among the public that what was won’t be anymore.”
Snip.
There are many different kinds of power. There is the power of the confident, safe and strong. But there’s also the very different sort of power of the wounded, weak and desperate. These are psychological states, not objective realities. And pivoting from one to the other changes everything.
“A wounded tiger,” Arthur Golden wrote in Memoirs of a Geisha, “is a dangerous beast.”
It’s an image with a long pedigree in Israeli strategic thinking. Moshe Dayan was said to have urged Israel to act like a “wounded tiger,” unpredictable and desperate, to deter its enemies from attack.
Palestinians sometimes use the image to mock Israel or shrug off the impact of an Israeli reprisal attack.
Hamas is now putting that old adage to the test. Israelis can handle humiliation; they are less moved by the politics of honor than are their enemies. But these heirs of a collective memory forged in the fires of the 20th century cannot handle the experience of defenselessness Hamas has imposed on them. Hamas seemed to do everything possible to shift Israeli psychology from a comfortable faith in their own strength to a sense of dire vulnerability.
And it will soon learn the scale of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot.
A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.
Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint.
I largely agree with this analysis. Also, for the first time since the Yom Kippur War, Israel has formally declared war on Hamas, which means that what will now ensue will be a very different type of war than Operation Cast Lead.
Let’s review how Israel had tried to deal with Hamas:
- Israel tried occupying Gaza. That didn’t work.
- Israel tried building walls and letting Hamas run Gaza. That didn’t work.
This leads inexorably to the only viable solution for Israel to prevent Hamas attacking and murdering Israeli citizens from Gaza.
- Palestinians will no longer be allowed to occupy Gaza.
No Palestinians in Gaza = No terror attacks from Gaza.
Occupation didn’t work. Coexistence didn’t work. But ethnic cleansing will.
Keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be the ethnic cleansing Nazi Germany inflicted on Europe during World War II. It could be the ethnic cleansing the Allies implemented in Europe after World War II. If you were an ethnic German east of the Oder-Neisse line, you were no longer be allowed to live where you were. If you were lucky, maybe you got to pack a few suitcases before being trucked west. That’s what happens when your nation starts an illegal war of aggression and loses.
The parallels with Hamas and Gaza are obvious.
Palestinians could be deported from the Gaza strip and replaced with Israeli settlers. Hell, Israel is rich enough that it could even financially compensate existing land owners. With Israelis running and owning everything, and no more money spent on murder tunnels and rocket attacks, Gaza would quickly transition from a clapped-out Arab city to a modern western one. In ten years, all that valuable seaside property is going to look more like the French Riviera than a Damascus slum.
And where will Israel forcibly relocate Palestinians to? Obviously the West Bank. Moreover, beyond war crime trials for the leaders, Israel doesn’t even need to slaughter Hamas footsoliders off the battlefield. They merely need to hand them over to the tender mercies of hated rival Fatah, who will no doubt be delighted to do it for them. And Palestinian-on-Palestinian bloodletting rarely makes the nightly news. In their heart of hearts, Fatah probably hates Jews almost as much as Hamas, but they no longer make such a public spectacle of their hatred. Why divert all that international guilt-geld into missiles and murder tunnels when it can be more profitably diverted to high living and Swiss bank accounts? Fatah’s current corrupt state is largely a regression to the Arab governing mean.
Would Egypt object? Formally, I’m sure. But remember that the current Egyptian government is in power because they literally deposed their own homegrown jihadist lunatics. An Israeli Gaza would probably offer Egypt a lot of economic growth possibilities, from more direct rail and road ties to be having low-labor-cost Egyptian maquiladoras for Israeli factories in Gaza.
How would the rest of the Arab World react to genteel ethnic cleansing of Gaza? The first answer is “Who cares?” The second answer is feigned indignation masking real indifference. It’s an open secret that other Arabs hate the Palestinians and treat them like dirt. No Arab state in 2023 is going to war over Gaza. The worst you’ll see is some more toothless UN resolutions, and maybe temporary suspensions of trade agreements, followed by quiet reinstatement 6 months to a year later. Hamas is backed by Saudi Arabia’s bitter rival Iran, so don’t expect many tears to be shed over their demise in Riyadh.
Expect impotent rage among European lefty types at their favorite victims/psychopathic killers getting snuffed out. But when has Europe needed an excuse to hate Jews? Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. Expect a few mostly toothless trade sanctions and cancellation of a few meaningless cultural exchange programs. They probably won’t even suspend Israel from the Eurovision Song Contest. Plus the Russo-Ukrainian War is still going to be the top foreign policy concern in the EU for some time to come.
And the Biden Administration? Certainly the ideological core of the Democratic Party is hostile to Israel, but Biden himself has made all the proper noises condemning Hamas. U.S.-Israeli defense and intelligence cooperation goes so deep into the deep state that it’s hard to see anything short of Israel tossing nukes around to sever it. And even that might not be enough. And Biden is unlikely to want to risk alienating Jewish voters (and donors) ahead of the 2024 Presidential election.
Israel has declared war on Hamas, and countries that lose wars (as opposed to police actions) typically lose territory. Spain lost numerous overseas territories following the loss of the Spanish-American War. Today no party in Madrid demands the reconquest of Guam.
After disposing of as many Hamas fighters as it deems necessary, Fatah might be too hard pressed to deal with the sudden influx of population to launch a futile intifada to recapture Gaza. Hell, Israel might even give some West Bank settlements back in order to transfer Jewish settlers to Gaza.
Keep in mind, I’m not advocating this as a course of action (not my circus, not my monkeys). I’m saying that if Israel has finally found the existence of a jihadist death cult that periodically kidnaps, tortures and murders Israeli civilians for the crime of being Jews on its doorstep intolerable, as now appears to be the case, then this is the one course of action that logic dictates is necessary to ensure, with absolute, 100% certainty, that it never happens again.
And if Fatah does decide to follow Hamas’ path of total war against Jews? Israel can build it’s defensive wall higher and deeper. If the situation becomes intolerable in 2053, or 2073, then the same solution may come into play again.
From the river to the sea, Israel would be free…of Palestinians.
Tags: 2024 Presidential Race, Avi Issacharoff, Ethnic Clensing, Fatah, Foreign Policy, Gaza, Hamas, Haviv Rettig Gur, Iran, Ismail Haniyeh, Israel, Jihad, Military, Muhammad Deif, Palestinians, Saudi Arabia, World War II, Yihye Sinwar
I’ve been saying this would be the logical outcome for three decades. Either Israel will cease to exist or the Gaza strip will cease to exist. You cannot have threat of a country being bissected in half.
And now Israel has the justification to make this happen. If they don’t then they are fools.
It won’t end the way you think. The Germans were rational people; they accepted they were defeated in WWII. There was no significant revanchist element in German society after that war, for whatever reason.
The Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank aren’t going to respond similarly. They’ve proven that.
This leaves one other option, and it ain’t “ethnic cleansing”, it’s ethnic elimination. I don’t like that fact, I don’t support what Hamas has made the only possible “solution”, but there it is. The Arabs dream of driving Israel and the Jews into the sea; that’s precisely the only thing that will work on them, being driven wailing and woeing into the Mediterranean Sea. Nothing else will convince them to reform; just like with the Comanche, the only way to fix the problem is to eliminate it.
Neither Egypt nor the Jordanians are going to accept the refugees; ain’t nobody else going to, unless they’re f*cking insane. We know what these people are like, we know what they’ll do, and we know what their track record is since 1948. Everyone that’s made the mistake of taking them in has been stabbed in the back, whether you’re talking Kuwait or Lebanon. Jordan learned the hard way; that’s why the PLO was in Southern Lebanon in the first place.
Kirk is right. There are no promises the Arabs can make that anyone, much less the Israelis, can believe. Like so many other groups of people, they are not agreement capable.
Like every civilization, its members need to make s compromise between survival and doing distasteful things that need to be done.
There are so many anti-Semitic, anti-Israel Jihadi groups in the Middle East that depopulating the Gaza Strip will do little to enhance Israel’s security. Hezbollah has more armed adherents and more missiles than Hamas and Islamic Jihad put together. And the Iranians are an even larger, better equipped, and richer threat.
The Israelis need a vigorous Second Amendment program domestically rather than their current tepid self defense practices and laws. A lot of Israelis were kidnapped and murdered yesterday because they foreswore rational self defense in the delusional expectation that the IDF would always save them from harm. And the Israeli government needs to make a brutal example out of proven enemies like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Without undue consideration of civilian casualties. Like what we did in WW II.
Benjamin Netanyahu: To our beloved IDF fighters, police officers and security forces personnel, you are the continuation of the heroes of the Jewish people, of Joshua, Judah Maccabea…
The reference to Joshua is assuredly not inadvertent.
Joshua 6:24-25 “Then they burned the whole city [of Jericho] and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the Lord’s house. But Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, because she hid the men Joshua had sent as spies to Jericho—and she lives among the Israelites to this day.”
“A lot of Israelis were kidnapped and murdered yesterday because they foreswore rational self defense in the delusional expectation that the IDF would always save them from harm.”
There are multiple video accounts showing Hamas gunmen patrolling the streets of Israel in broad daylight. The photos are taken from a high angle. A man with a scoped rifle could easily have delivered plunging fire from a balcony or upper story window on these exposed positions.
Instead of dealing death to the invaders, the spectators whimpered in fear.
Don’t overlook the fact that many of the people kidnapped, abused, and murdered in the ham-ass (h/t Nitay Arbel of Spin, Strangeness, Charm) were European and American tourists, many of whom were in town for a “peace rave”.
Neither Egypt nor the Jordanians are going to accept the refugees; ain’t nobody else going to, unless they’re f*cking insane.
So you’re saying the Biden Cabal will offer sanctuary to the survivors here in the States?
Murdering/abducting/raping German and US citizens is certain to bring down fierce reprisals.
very good analysis and discussion. thank you Lawrence Person.
@jabrwok,
So you’re saying the Biden Cabal will offer sanctuary to the survivors here in the States?
Given that there is apparently no limit to the arrant stupidity of the Biden Krime Krewe, I would not be a bit surprised.
Also, would not be surprised to discover that there are Iranian and Hamas operatives already here and in position to do similar things when the word comes, thanks in no small part to the open borders.
Question I have for the general American public is this: At what point do you morons recognize treason when you see it happening out in the open? All of this is predicated on policy and decisions taken during the Obama administration, both the acknowledged ones and the current one, because if you think Biden is anything other than a means to Obama’s third and fourth term, you’re nuts. There’s a reason Obama was the first president to ever stay in Washington after his term was up, and this is it. He and his cabal orchestrated the take-down of Trump, and are still going after him. This deal with Iran? Straight out of Valerie Jarrett’s playbook, and if you think they didn’t know about that Iranian spy cell? You’re as dumb and credulous as they come.
Treason. That’s what it was, that’s what it is, and that’s what it will continue to be. 6 billion dollars to Iran? If I were Israeli, that’d be casus belli for a strike on the US. I doubt they’ll do it, but we damn well deserve it, having tolerated Biden giving them that money.
About darned time.
A nation has a right to secure borders. A state that violates this is at war.
Gaza is about to get what it deserves.
Wish we cared as much about our border.
Before even reading, I’m stuck on “Final Solution” and “You’re not going to like it.”
Man that sounds foreboding as all get out.
@jabrwok
I thought the same thing. Indeed, as @kirk says, many of them are assuredly already here.
Hamas has just awakened a sleeping giant to their peril. They will now be trampled by this giant until there is nothing left. Then they will know painfully what Pyrrhic victory means.
Answer to Kirk and others about a solution to the Hamas-Israel war:
IMHO, if Hamas acknowledges Israel’s right to exist and the attendant consequences to it, it might solve the intractable problem of Hamas – Israeli relations.
Look at the West Bank. All is quiet on that front and one of the reasons might be the fact that Fatah has recognized Israel’s right to exist during Arafat’s time.
Egypt, too. Their leadership has not praised Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, something that would have happened if Egypt has not recognized Israel’s right to exist.
That is why the end result of all this might be a Pyrrhic victory of Hamas and with it, the realization that it would be better to recognize Israel’s right to exist instead of trying to eradicate it.
“Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh was quoted in Palestinian media outlet Al Ayyam as saying Israel ‘bears full responsibility for what is happening, by creating a climate of hatred (and) violence’ and violating international law. Shtayyeh said the INTERNATIONAL ALIGNMENT BEHIND ISRAEL encourages the Israeli government and military to commit more crimes ‘against our people’ in Gaza.”
It’s just Jooz, Jooz, Jooz, the whole way down. 😂😂
Kirk said: “Also, would not be surprised to discover that there are Iranian and Hamas operatives already here and in position to do similar things when the word comes, thanks in no small part to the open borders.”
I wouldn’t either. Nor would I be surprised to learn China or North Korea had operators already here and waiting on orders. an awful lot of the “refugees” seen in the media crossing the border seem to be fighting age males.
[…] BATTLESWARM: The Final Solution To The Gaza Problem. […]
Geographically the West Bank is a far better position to launch attacks into Israel than the Gaza Strip. If you move the crazy militant population there you are risking their hate might infect others and make an even worse problem.
Israel should have pushed the Palestinians into the Sinai before they gave the Sinai Peninsula away. The hate for doing so would have lasted a decade, maybe longer, but it would over long ago. Now, I’m not sure there is any solution that works.
Israel must respond massively.
I have to agree with the notion, the purpose of this Pyrrhic victory is to upset Israel-Saudi relations and undo the progress seen in the Abraham accords.
Absolutely the only real solution is to eliminate Gaza as a Hamas refuge and replace it with Israelis. Change the name while they are at it.
Let Iran take the Hamas Palestinians that survive. Don’t ask, just put them on ships and send them to th
Continued…
Don’t ask, just send them to the coast of Iran, let the Iraniand figure it out.
Line up a swath of bulldozers on the east side of Gaza, the full width of the area, and drive west until they reach the sea.
A comment over at Instapundit:
http://disq.us/p/2w4pju6
I agree.
“Theories abound about Hamas’s reasons for the assault.”
What happened at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on October 5th?
Taking territory is something that the UN was supposed to be against and we’re likely to see a coalition of countries fight against that.
Emptying Gaza and deporting Hamas to the Fatah-controlled West Bank for disposition according to Palestinian leadership, putting the non-Hamas Gazans back, and holding internationally supervised elections that don’t include Hamas as an option is a more likely set of measures. It’s also one that should accomplish the good results of the harsher measures outlined here with not nearly the opposition I would expect from any sort of Israeli territory takeover.
Gaza delenda est.
I’ve been thinking thoughts along these lines ever since waking up Saturday to the news of Hamas’ brutal and inhumane invasion of Israel. Gaza must be cleansed of its hatred-deformed souls. I hope it can be accomplished with a minimum of bloodshed. But whatever the means, it must be done.
I have no confidence the Biden administration will do the right thing. It’s mouthing the right words now, but it will speak differently when Israel takes the action that is needed. There are too many people in high positions who are in Iran’s pocket.
I just thank God Benjamin Netanyahu is leading Israel and not one of the squishes on the Left. He will not let the terrorist scum of Hamas escape the wrath of righteousness.
The West, including Israel, now fights “wars” with both hands tied behind its back.
The required actions to achieve victory are no longer within the moral compass of its elite leadership class.
Thus Russia in Syria was able to achieve victory from the air by targeting and obliterating civilian areas, hospitals, infrastructure, travel corridors, etc. This had the effect of breaking the will of much of the organized opposition and physically removing from the board those unwilling to capitulate.
In the past the West understood these fundamental aspects of engaging in warfare. It went without saying that war is a terrible business and once the decision has been made to undertake it, the best possible outcome, the one that minimizes human suffering, is a rapid resolution forced by the quick, overwhelming application of violence to the adversary. Of course, in some cases the most effective means of achieving victory involves blitzkrieg, or a decapitation maneuver, but only after having evolved to a higher plane, one where we lose every single war we enter, has the West questioned the necessity of violence in war. Now we think every enemy is a front we just hasn’t sufficiently bribed or made enough obsequious gestures to. Now we think winning hearts and minds by befriending the enemy will persuade him to modify his understanding of his core interests.
It’s so bad, even in the military brass (e.g. Very Modern General Milley), that one is given to lament that not only should he never enter another war, but that we ought not even maintain a military, because we only end up either using it for humanitarian purposes, or we get ourselves entangled in nation-building nonsense with obscurantist stone-age goatherds whose idea of a good time is bacha bazi, rather than bombing them, with extreme prejudice, to kingdom come.
And the worst part of the collapse of the West’s moral confidence is that it has perdured long enough to create and then crystallize the expectation in the rest of the world, including our adversaries, that we are asthenic, with no willpower to win, and prepossessed with a soteriological mania to rescue the poor, benighted nations of the world, who gaze back at us with even more contempt than we have for their backwardness. Of course they are largely correct, at least insofar as it applies to our pathetic leadership class, which is thoroughly infected with enervating belief in the woke, secular neoreligion. But even worse is that our enemies have absorbed all the bits of the woke mind virus that may be wielded against the West as weapons. We have inculcated them well on the list of indictments, such that not only do they expect the Wedt’s will to flag and for us to lose all our wars, but now they demand it!
I can only hope that Israel’s people and leadership, living so close to the hard of war, which wonderfully clarify the mind, still possess the will for self-preservation that is now absent from the Leftist idiots who call the shots in Western society nowadays.
“The Israelis need a vigorous Second Amendment program domestically rather than their current tepid self defense practices and laws. A lot of Israelis were kidnapped and murdered yesterday because they foreswore rational self defense in the delusional expectation that the IDF would always save them from harm.”
And just like that, the somnolent powers in Israel come to recognize the necessity of an armed civilian populace.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/10/09/hamas-attack-on-israel-is-a-lesson-on-the-dangers-of-gun-control-n1733391
NO! to moving the residents of Gaza to the West Bank. That just transfers and enlarges the threat from the West Bank.
Israel has the force projection capability of instead moving the residents of Gaza to Adib province in northwestern Syria, which is already full of terrorists. They can’t attack Israel from there, and the example will do wonders for the West Bank. Israel just lacks the will to do this, so tough for them. I wish them the joy of occupying Gaza.
I’ve said for decades, I will support the Palestinian “right of return” when the tens of millions of Germans kicked out of eastern Europe get to go back to their ancestral homes in what is now Czechia, Poland, and the Kaliningrad district. As for their own state, Tibet and the Kurds first.
You cannot compromise with people who want you dead.
Israel should kill or drive out every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip. Not just Hamas, because it is the Palestinian people themselves that are the problem. Turn Gaza into a parking lot.
Not mentioned here is the possible need for a nuke to accomplish this. A nuke killing 100,000 Gazans in one shot would show that Israel is serious, and like the bomb on Hiroshima, could avoid military action that saves thousands of Israeli lives.
Yes, I know anyone who advocates this is considered a hothead, but a tactical nuke, properly sized and placed would have a limited, short-term and ultimately tolerable negative effect on nearby settlements, which are presently vacant.
There are sites that tell you what type of damage and casualties to expect in a given spot with a 5-kt, 10-kt, etc. nuke (Hiroshima was about 20 kt).
Compare that with weeks, even months of house-to-house fighting, 2,000+ Israeli troops killed, and a growing chorus of Jew-hatred from the international media, leading to pogroms and massacres of Jews outside of Israel, perhaps even in America.
I think the nuke is the preferable option.
I fully agree that Israel should deport ALL residents of Gaza, WITHOUT compensating any of them (no one compensated Israel for the cost of damages, and defense(.
Deport them to Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia.
Judaea and Samaria would be a worse places than Gaza.
Push all Gazans to the beaches and invite the world to send ships to transport them.
Next deport all Palestinians in Judaea, Samaria, Jerusalem, etc., Jordan.
Since the fallout would settle on Israel (among other extremely negative consequences from reactions by other governments), I rather strongly doubt Israel would even contemplate that option.
For reasons unclear to me, Disqus comments refuse to load for me in Firefox right now.
[…] why it’s so tempting to endorse Lawrence Person’s “Final Solution To The Gaza Problem” over at his excellent Battleswarm blog. “Occupation didn’t work,” he reminds […]
[…] so. The question is, how far is Israel willing to go to eradicate the Gaza menace once and for all? Lawrence Person suggests that all Palestinians should be removed from Gaza and placed on the West Bank, while […]
@Lemuel Vargas,
“That is why the end result of all this might be a Pyrrhic victory of Hamas and with it, the realization that it would be better to recognize Israel’s right to exist instead of trying to eradicate it.”
You’re thinking like a Westerner, projecting your rational mindset and reasonableness onto the 7th Century template that exists in the Arab population. Doesn’t work; they don’t think that way, and you’re going to fail by analyzing them and this situation as though they’re the people you’re most familiar with, the sort you grew up around.
You’d be a lot better off presuming they’re alien space bats, and completely forget any idea that they’re people just like you. They’re not; they don’t think like you do, and they don’t analyze this situation the way you do.
Which has been the fundamental mistake the Israelis have made, down the years; they win a fight, they come in after and behave magnanimously, handing out largesse and rebuilding the things they broke. The Arabs see this, and think “Wow, we really won… They’re giving us tribute!!! Why won’t they submit to us, then…?”
The Israelis are guilty of projecting their own culture onto the Arabs. They’re not the same, at all; Israelis would prosecute any soldiers involved in a mass gang-rape that were so foolish as to broadcast it on FaceBook. The Arabs? They celebrate and encourage that sick shit. Do the math; these aren’t “fellow human beings”, but 7th Century recidivists that need extermination like the two-legged cockroaches they are.
And, if you disagree with me, thinking that I’m a loathsome creep for saying things like that? Well, my friend… Your standards of what it is to be “human” are a bit low, in my regard. These creatures have clearly demonstrated what they are, and that isn’t human, but outright demonic. Just like their faith of lies.
“And where will Israel forcibly relocate Palestinians to? Obviously the West Bank. ”
I’m game but this would effectively double the Arab population in the West Bank. Not only would this just move it to a different border with Israel but imagine the explosion among the current population this would cause. Sure, they aren’t much better but as a solution to the current conflict I just don’t see how starting an equal or bigger one would be much of a solution.
Lawrence Person says:
October 9, 2023 at 1:15 PM
For reasons unclear to me, Disqus comments refuse to load for me in Firefox right now.
The same happened to me with Disqus at Instapundit. I figured out that apparently Disqus has instituted ad blocker blocking that won’t let comments load if you are using Brave browser or Adblock Plus.
[…] so. The question is, how far is Israel willing to go to eradicate the Gaza menace once and for all? Lawrence Person suggests that all Palestinians should be removed from Gaza and placed on the West Bank, while […]
To Lawrence Pearson,
Let’s see. On one hand we have the world condemnation you claim but on the other hand if Israel does not deport them, then motions of Israelis will be killed.
I don’t know, Lawrence, it seems like a no-brainer to me.
Mr. Person:
The Europeans, the UN and the International Left, plus 2 billion Muslims want the Jews dead anyway.
You can’t worry about what they think.
Move Palestinians from Gaza to the West Bank? This is like moving all the cancer cells from your left lung to your right lung and instructing them to behave.
Israel has been far too restrained, shamefully restrained, in its responses to previous slaughters, and by projecting weakness and timidity has only guaranteed more slaughter.
Arabs don’t understand nuance and proportionality. They understand, and respond to, one thing only. Force.
Netanyahu should reject and ignore the endless calls for restraint and the toothless warnings that Israel must walk a fine line or face international condemnation.
He must do what must be done. Sterilize Gaza. Empty it of every dead-eyed subhuman Palestinian by any and every means possible. Stay strong and mission focused.
It’s long overdue. I’d have done it when that filthy coward Arafat unleashed the infitada. But if there were ever a time and opportunity to solve this problem definitively, it’s now. Just do it. Let everyone weep and moan and gnash their teeth. A year from now, the uproar will be over, Gaza will be a safe, modern seaside city, and the myriad other Arab terrorist factions will all
be extremely hesitant to strike at Israel.
A pretty thought, but unworkable for so so many reasons.
My longstanding proposal is to “fine” the regions a fixed fee of land for every rocket fired, Israeli killed, or terror attack attempted. (Say, 100m2 for each rocket, plus a higher fee for each murder.)
Every quarter, tally up the fee and move the wall. Bulldoze any structures in the way and that gives specific people a reason to fight against every terrorist action.
For this latest attack, well this is war and in war, losers lose a lot of territory. Do not make it Israel’s concern what the former residents do, just push the wall back a sufficient distance that there is a vast no man’s land that is easier to defend.
[…] so. The question is, how far is Israel willing to go to eradicate the Gaza menace once and for all? Lawrence Person suggests that all Palestinians should be removed from Gaza and placed on the West Bank, while […]
I would not stop there. If I were Israel, I would terminate as many of Hamas paymasters as possible. aiding and providing comfort to the enemy… I’d also try to create some chaos in Iran among clerics, civilian administrators and the military.
There seems to be some new issue with Disquis and Instapundit but Rick C posted a solution last night;
Add the Stylus extension. Add these rules:
.widget-ad__content { display : none; }
.revcontent { display : none; }
#disqus_thread { display : block; }
You’ll see red Xs in front of each line. Ignore them–they won’t stop the rule working. But if they bother you, take the space between “display” and the “:” out of each line.
Red Idaho also had some solution that worked.