IT'S "AN EYE FOR AN EYE" NOT "A HEAD FOR AN EYE"

Why am I unsurprised to read Charlie Sykes’ Bulwark newsletter this morning and find that the same damn people who screamed and yelled and jumped up and down after 9/11 and said "You're with us or the terrorists" are doing it again.

Even someone who I think is smarter than that - like Ben Wittes - is telling everyone to shut up. Of his seven points of things not to say this week, six are entirely valid. But the seventh - don't tell Israel what to do - is completely invalid.

If there is one thing the United States could do in this situation, it would be to advise the Israelis "Don't do what we did!!!!"

Every damn thing we did 22 years ago, while telling anyone who tried to say "that's not such a good idea" that they were "with the terrorists," has resulted in a Middle East where the situation today is 1,000 times more awful than it was on 9/10/2001.

"Act in haste, repent at leisure" as they say.

Because Israel can smash Hamas into a million pieces is the reason they shouldn't.

The Old Testament calls for "an eye for an eye," not "a head for an eye."

6,000 years of recorded human history has no examples of where "a head for an eye" did not create a worse situation.

Both the United States and Israel have national mythologies that portray them as innocents, as always taking action for the best reasons. The result of this is, when things like 9/11 or now 10/7 happen, the reaction is “Why us? We did nothing wrong!”

And that leads to overreaction. That leads to demanding “a head for an eye.”

There is plenty of reason for Israelis to be in raging outrage from this unimaginable pain. The death toll is actually larger as a proportion of Israel’s population of 9.3 million (compared to 332 million in the U.S) than what the U.S. suffered on 9/11 - 700 Israelis killed would be the equivalent of 21,000 Americans, about six times the death toll of 9/11.

No one can explain right now how the government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to detect such a massive Hamas operation before it began.

There is an unconfirmed report that Netanyahu was warned that “something fierce will happen from Gaza” by the Director of the General Intelligence Directorate of Egypt, Abbas Kamel. The report says that Netnyahu responded that Israel was concentrating on events in the West Bank.

The liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in a major editorial, says bluntly: “The disaster that befell Israel…is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. [He] completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.”

Since the extremist government came to power, the IDF battalions in the West Bank have been reinforced by units from the Gaza region as they coddled the wilding attacks by the Israeli fundamentalist extremist settlers on Palestinians there. Israel’s security posture reminds one of the failure of the Bush Administration throughout the summer of 2001. Netanyahu’s extremist government focused not on defending Israel’s borders but on ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the occupied territories.

As Ha’aretz notes:

“After his victory in the last election, he replaced caution with the policy of a ‘fully-right government,’ with overt steps taken to annex the West Bank, to carry out ethnic cleansing in parts of the Oslo-defined Area C, including the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.

“This also included a massive expansion of settlements and bolstering of the Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as boasts of an impending peace deal with the Saudis in which the Palestinians would get nothing, with open talk of a “second Nakba” in his governing coalition. As expected, signs of an outbreak of hostilities began in the West Bank, where Palestinians started feeling the heavier hand of the Israeli occupier. Hamas exploited the opportunity in order to launch its surprise attack on Saturday.”

If that report of a warning ignored is confirmed, Netanyahu will have a lot to answer for. That kind of a charge ends careers permanently, even politicians with ten lives like him.

The Associated Press reports today that Hamas’ surprise was the result of a two-year misinformation campaign to convince the Israelis that Hamas did not want to fight Israel any more and that the Hamas leadership in Gaza was interested in promoting relations that allowed more Gazans to work in Israel, as has been the situation since the last fighting in 2021. According to this report, Hamas leaders allowed themselves to be criticized by Gazans and by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority for their “lack of fire.”

To me, that sounds like a lot more self-discipline than Hamas has ever shown in its entire existence. The organization is not known for attracting cooler heads. But maybe they learned'; perhaps they are listening to the Iranians.

Time will tell.

In the meantime, 250 mostly-young people killed at a music festival promoting peace qualifies as a massacre; it’s compounded by the majority of the hostages taken to Gaza come from this event.

Hamas militants gleefully taking hostage elderly Holocaust survivors and toddlers does not make for a good public image, but I don’t recall the organization ever seeming to worry about their public image in the West any other time.

Rather than examine the strategic and tactical failures that left the country vulnerable, Israeli officials are force-feeding the crisis into their existing paradigm. They are blaming Iran.

That echoes Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who blamed Iraq for the attacks mere hours after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. He was backed by a neo-conservative echo chamber eager for war with Iraq. The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol was the organizer and leader of that echo chamber.

Rumsfeld's response demonstrates what went wrong with the Bush administration’s policies in 2001. The government was unprepared for the threats we faced and were slow to comprehend the meaning of the attack. In planning the counterattack, they immediately began focusing again on the wrong threat.

I hope Israel can learn from the example of the United States over the past 22 years about what not to do now, but everything one knows about Netanyahu and the political movement he leads says that won’t be the case.

All reports say that Israel is preparing a massive air and ground invasion of Gaza. Israeli air attacks have already leveled dozens of building in Gaza and killed several hundred Gaza residents.

A ground invasion of Gaza - 2.2 million people densely packed into an area twice the size of Washington, D.C. that some describe as a giant open-air prison - would result in thousands of casualties.

This is exactly what the far right extremists in Israel want. It’s also exactly what Hamas wants.

There is no justification whatsoever for Hamas murdering innocent civilians with machine guns and grenades.

Nor is there any justification for Israel murdering innocent civilians with planes and missiles.

International law is clear: One side’s war crimes do not justify war crimes by the other side.

The Old Testament rule is “An eye for an eye.” It is not “A head for an eye.”

Targeted attacks on the Hamas leadership are certainly warranted, but a full-scale invasion of Gaza is just what Hamas wants.

Osama bin Landen launched his attack in part to provoke the U.S. into a war that he thought would weaken America and in so doing increase worldwide opposition to the U.S.

That’s exactly what happened. We are in a worse position today vis-a-vis much of the world than we were 22 years ago.

The “long and difficult war” that Netanyahu promised yesterday will not protect Israel, it will weaken it. Israel does have the ability to smash Hamas into a million pieces.

If it does so, the only question will be how long it will take for those pieces to reassemble into a Frankenstein’s monster far more terrible than the one that exists now.

One of the oldest rules of military strategy is, “Do not fight on the enemy’s terms.”

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