pain ahead

Israeli’s choices

We will start with a photograph of my helper, Harry Truman (no relation to Harry S. Truman) this morning as he watched me photograph the colourful sunrise.

The sunrise invoked awe as so many do here.

Finally pink-tinged clouds closed out the event. I regret I didn’t quite capture the associated reflection on the Creek but you get the sense. Life can be so good if we bother looking at it.

Or life can be horrifying as we are witnessing in Israel where the full picture of Hamas’ depravity will unquestionably generate Israeli Defense Force retribution. If I were in Israel right now, I doubt I could see many alternatives to that course. Hamas had to know that based on Netanyahu’s decades-long harsh rhetoric, partially borne of his own family’s loss when elder brother Yonatan died during a hostage rescue operation at Entebbe Airport in 1976, would result. There would be no argument for Israel to cave on stopping Hamas’ activity.

Seemingly endless retaliatory actions between Israel and Hamas are real to all because neither of these populations is enormous and the lands are small. Israel, as noted yesterday, has a population of just under 10 million, 6.9 million of them Jewish, out of global Jewry of 14 to 20 million. This latter number fluctuates depending how ‘Jewish’ is defined. In a world of 8 billion, Jews are a small, tightly woven community regardless whether they did Aliyah (returned to the land of Israel) or remain part of the millennia-old Diaspora, or dispersion—often involuntarily.

The Palestinian population in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel itself is 5.4 million, with 4 million of them in territories—Gaza and the West Bank—contiguous to the Jewish state borders while more than a million Palestinians are still in camps. Palestinians outside of this most immediate geography constitute another 5 million.

In sum, this is a region where people remain in constant touch with their relatives. That doesn’t mean it is easy for Palestinians but for Israelis the concept of a global Jewish community is a daily reality and one for continuity after thousands of years and many attempts at extermination.

It therefore is becoming sickeningly clear that the choice the Netanyahu government must make to respond to this crisis has desperate implications for some Israelis. Hamas reportedly seized roughly 150 hostages, including 14 Americans according to President Biden this afternoon, to be used as human shields. With ample evidence of atrocities over the past 96 hours, Hamas threatens to murder one hostage per building attacked by the IDF in Gaza. I have yet to hear anyone predict they are bluffing as their inhumane behaviour so far is truly sickening. Perhaps Hamas believes this will hold back Netanyahu’s government from retaliation.

Israeli leadership must confront how to prevent Hamas from believing they can ever repeat these attacks in any manner against the Jewish state. Many analysts predict the IDF, thought to be amassing forces along the Gaza border and known to have called up 300,000 reserves, will soon launch a massive ground assault on that small territory. I suspect it will be massive and leave nothing to chance because the sense of national vulnerability we are reading about within Israel is much higher than the 1973 war or any of the others.

Gaza is said to be the seventh most densely-populated piece of ground in the world, meaning there will be no where for Palestinian women, children, or men to hide. Hamas should have seen that as an outcome and likely is a partial reason they thought treating hostages in a similar manner could slow down the Israelis. The calls for a devastating assault are common in the United States and must be even more pervasive among those who suffered the rocket and bulldozer attacks over the past 96 hours.

Netanyahu’s coalition partners are at least as hard line on security as he is. Many, immigrants from anti-Semetic Russia over the past thirty years, have long sought to assure that Palestinians absolutely not become an Islamic-majority population in the Jewish homeland. These voices on the far right don’t even define those of mixed Jewish and non-Jewish marriages as Jews, seeking to strip them of rights of return to Israel, undermining one of the most fundamental principles upon which Israel was founded in 1948. These voices in Israel certainly do not want to see any government retaliation leaving any possibility for the Palestinians to recover from this likely retribution ahead.

Yet the hostages remain, menaced and vulnerable. Their families in Israel and around the world desperately plead for their release before the government acts so their family members become a higher priority. There is, of course, absolutely no guarantee Hamas will ever free them; it actually seems highly unlikely. But the families are desperate to save them, a wholly understandable human response.

Listening to interviews with several senior Israeli officials today, no one wants to see the loss of a single Jewish life but the nation will have to make—likely already has—a irrevocable choice: is retaliating to create a deterrent message more important for Israel’s long-term or is holding back to focus on those being used as human shields, people who were civilians in the wrong place at the wrong place the better choice?

The families may themselves be struggling with the unreasonable concept of negotiations with Hamas which I cannot believe can occur after their actions this weekend. Yet, the families understandably do not want their loved ones to die. It is a choice so like ‘Sophie’s Choice’, a raw, painful movie from the early 1980s about World War II. But this is not movie.

Military commanders advise their civilian leaderships regularly on precisely these unfathomable choices. We are still angsting about how we evacuated Afghanistan two years ago with a subset of that discussion relating to what we prioritised first, security for all or evacuating as many as possible with known risks. There is still no agreement on what would have been the better decision; it is just too damned hard to choose.

Israelis as a society have witnessed death countless times over the past hundred and twenty years as they built what became the Jewish state. The resulting mourning over deaths is often public and pervasive.

But this seems a somewhat more fundamental choice that may reverberate across the years ahead. That is not to say Netanyahu will ‘sacrifice’ the hostages as I, of course, have absolutely no knowledge of his government’s internal discussions. If the assault occurs, I do know, however, that the families are likely to always remember their loved ones might have had a chance, an option never taken. That not knowing will haunt all. The pain across that society and global Jewish community is palpable.

Far too many in the United States jump from their chairs to proclaim they know the right answer, frequently offering poor, if any, analysis or grasp of the implications from all sides. The Israelis at least are all fully engaged in this question, even if they won’t like the answer they get.

Actions create consequences.

I welcome your thoughts. It is a hard time. Thank you for taking time to read this. Please do send me any responses.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Globalpopulationreview.com, ‘Palestinians’, 10 October 2023, retrieved at https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/palestine-population