There are two burning questions about the war in Gaza and its consequences. The first is why it has taken the Israelis until now to assault directly what they’ve known all along to be the centre of Hamas terrorist operations, and the second is the extent to which the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations and violence throughout most of the Western world is a complaint, however orchestrated and unspontaneous, against Israeli conduct in Gaza, and the extent to which it is a profound vein of anti-Semitism, unsuspected and inexplicable, in much of the world.
On the first point, the Israeli explanation for why it fights on in Gaza is essentially unanswerable: Israel was subjected to a barbarous act of war on October 7, 2023 and has acted entirely within its rights to respond as nations normally do to acts of war, by enacting General Douglas MacArthur’s famous aphorism that “In war, there is no substitute for victory.” That being the case why did Israel not follow the other half of that same aphorism of MacArthur’s: ”Once war has been forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring that war to the swiftest possible victorious conclusion at the minimum possible cost in (Israeli in this case) and allied lives?”
Such a policy would have required the earliest possible attack on the most dense complex of Hamas tunnels and installations, in Gaza City. Given the morally commendable Israeli tendency to trade inordinately large numbers of terrorist prisoners to secure the liberty of captured Israelis, it is understandable that Hamas thought that the hostages that it retained could be used as the ultimate free pass out of hostilities while preserving their organisation, however sheared and diminished in combat, as a going concern in the governance of Gaza, while retaining their authority over the population by their harsh and stingy control of the distribution of food, with the collusion of their minions in the United Nations.
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