Mourners attend the funeral of Sgt. Roni Eshel in Kfar Saba, Israel, Sunday Nov. 12, 2023. Eshel was killed during Hamas’ bloody cross-border rampage on Oct. 7, 2023. At least 1,200 people were killed and some 240 captured in an unprecedented, multi-front attack on Israel by the militant group that rules Gaza. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit) Ariel Schalit/AP

Netanyahu is right that Israel is the best hope for Gaza’s own citizens

Quin Hillyer

November 12, 11:54 AM November 12, 11:54 AM Video Embed

Let’s liberate the people of Gaza.

It was not some ignorant, hateful, sheltered American college student who said that today. It was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in one arresting sentence during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.

ISRAEL SAYS IT WILL HELP EVACUATE BABIES FROM GAZA HOSPITAL

It was a stray comment, hardly Netanyahu’s main focus, but it also was consonant with his overall message both on NBC and on CNN’s State of the Union. The message was that the Palestinian Hamas terrorists are pure “evil,” and thus a proper enemy to the whole world, not just to Israel. And, part of that world beleaguered by Hamas’ evil is the civilian population of Gaza.

Despite repeated questions by CNN’s Dana Bash and NBC’s Kristin Welker springing from the premise that Israel is responsible for Palestinian civilian deaths, Netanyahu was right to insist that both the moral and the practical blame for those deaths belongs to the butchers of Hamas. It is Israel that provides “safe corridors” through which Israel all but begs the civilians to leave the war zone; it is Hamas that literally fires into those corridors. It is also Hamas that has put up roadblocks and, in some cases, even explosives to keep the civilian population in place.

Netanyahu said Israel offered fuel to keep power on at the hospital under which a Hamas headquarters operates, while Israel begs the international community to help set up “field hospitals” to which to move the patients. He said Hamas declined the offer of fuel.

It is indisputable that Israel has taken extraordinary measures to try to keep civilian casualties down. Still, as Netanyahu repeatedly insisted in both interviews, the primary goal is and must be to “eradicate Hamas.”

This is war. It is a war Hamas began through the worst atrocities this young century has yet seen.

And it is not a mere territorial dispute, but a war of barbarous evil Hamas waged deliberately against Israeli civilians, especially women and children. In war, civilized nations try to protect civilians. But the point of a war against evil is to win it. And if the evil side uses civilians as human shields, then it is the evil side that caused every single one of its own civilians’ casualties.

The Nazis, not the Allies, were responsible for civilian deaths when the Allies bombed Dresden in World War II. The Nazis, not the Allies, were responsible for 20,000 French civilians killed by Allied bombs during the liberation of Normandy. To this day, the people of Normandy revere the liberators whose stray bombs killed some of their own people, because they know those bombs were in service of evicting the most horrid regime modern Western Europe ever has known.

Likewise, even if they don’t know it, Palestinian civilians in Gaza are being liberated as Israel crushes Hamas. When Israel handed Gaza over to Palestinian “self-rule” in 2005, Gaza was a relatively decent place. In the 18 years since, Israel has supplied Gaza with water and energy, while the international community has provided tens of billions of dollars of assistance. Hamas, though, openly brags about taking water pipes out of use and turning them into missile casings. Hamas took humanitarian aid and spent it on tunnels for terrorist operations.

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Hamas, not Israel, has made the Palestinian citizenry impoverished and enslaved. And it has continued the practice of brainwashing generations into irrational hatred of Jews, rather than educating them in the ways of concord.

The lives of Palestinian civilians will be saved and improved after Israel crushes Hamas. That’s not why Israel is fighting — Israel is fighting an entirely just war for its own peaceful existence — but the liberation of Palestinian civilians will indeed be one of a successful war’s key results.

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