Commentary
It is an underpublicized fact that the Israeli-Hamas war is unfolding as an overwhelming Israeli success. The Israel Defence Forces are now operating over practically the entire territory of Gaza. They have eliminated or shut down hundreds of miles of the Hamas tunnel network and uncovered and removed large quantities of Hamas arms and munitions. The Israeli general staff has revealed that for the first time, Hamas warriors are beginning to surrender on assurances of civilized treatment.
Contrary to the handwringing at the outset of the Israeli offensive to the effect that it would shortly become a much wider war, with Hezbollah and Iran happily taking upon themselves the onerous and historically unpromising burden of engaging in outright war with Israel, and with prospects of escalation beyond that, the activities of Israel’s enemies are mere tokenism. Hezbollah and Iran have made it clear that they want no part of a war with a fully engaged Israel.
The so-called Palestinian Authority doesn’t really represent Palestinians and has little authority. In the elections insanely required by George W. Bush in 2006, with a turnout of less than half of the eligible voters, Hamas narrowly defeated the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which was in a position to ignore the voting results on the West Bank. The PLO leader, the successor to the egregious Yasser Arafat, 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, makes U.S. President Joe Biden seem like a sprightly youth. Despite the usual moralistic noises, the Palestinian Authority has not gone beyond occasional small arms fire of a nature that is routine on the West Bank.
Though published statements are incomplete and unreliable, the Israelis do seem to have inflicted considerable attrition on both the personnel and the arms of Hamas and to be running them steadily to ground in all parts of Gaza at a cost to date of the lives of 98 Israeli soldiers. Of course, that would be the equivalent of 340 Canadian soldiers and over 3,000 American soldiers, but if we are, as appears to be the case, more than halfway toward the destruction of Hamas as a military force, it is substantially below the Israeli casualty numbers that had been feared.
At this point, we appear to be within another month or so of the outright annihilation of Hamas as a military force. It cannot be foretold with confidence that a large number of hostages who still remain will be saved. And it would be impetuous to suggest that Israeli casualties might not double or triple. But the outright extermination of Hamas as a military force and therefore a political force will be the greatest step forward in the peace process the Middle East has had since the Camp David agreements between Egypt and Israel in 1978. It would also be the greatest achievement of the Jimmy Carter administration, which came shortly before its greatest single failure—the departure of the Shah of Iran, which Carter encouraged, and his replacement by the corrupt and compulsively aggressive totalitarian theocracy of the ayatollahs.
Despite the wobbling in the Biden administration and its intermittent calls for allowing food and other supplies to the needy in Gaza—which would effectively mean to Hamas—the administration is still holding fast to its concept of Grade 1 political arithmetic that the majority of Democrats and Americans who support Israel in this conflict must not be alienated by a policy that is as ambiguous as straddling between American national interest and moral duty in this conflict between an advanced and kindred democratic state and a tragic population led by genocidal terrorists.
This requires standing up to the militant and influential woke, anti-West, anti-Semitic tumour that Biden has welcomed to the Democratic Party. Soon, Israel’s victory must be clear and its positive consequences must be evident even to the great majority of those now simpering about a ceasefire.
One of the consequences of the Israeli-Hamas war has been to de-emphasize the publicity and attention given the Russia-Ukraine war. The chief objective of Israel in Gaza is well-known, and two months after the initial provocation, it seems more fully and swiftly achievable than had been anticipated. The status of the war in Ukraine is more complicated because most of the West naïvely began that war with the assumption that Russia as a much larger state would prevail.
The Biden administration began with assurance from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, that Kiev would fall within a couple of days and Russia would occupy the whole of Ukraine within a month. President Biden offered safe passage out of the country to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his family. Such a flight was not what Zelenskyy had in mind, or, as the world has seen, what realities on the ground dictated.
Obviously, the Ukrainians have proved their point since then. But a large grant of further military assistance to Ukraine, as well as a substantial amount for Israel, is now being held up in the U.S. Congress by Republicans seeking the entirely reasonable objective of reducing the constant flow of migrants in the millions across the southern border from Mexico.
However, tying progress on the southern border to the continuing daily conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine—where the American national interest is very much at issue every day—is irresponsible. There is no publicly known strategy for bringing the war in Ukraine to a satisfactory conclusion, because the Biden administration, having originally treated Ukraine as a lost cause, then fell in with Ukraine’s declared war objective of retaking every square inch of what was formerly Ukrainian territory with the breezy assertions of “whatever it takes”—including the Crimea, which Russia reoccupied nine years ago.
The American and Western interest in Ukraine has been to assure that a Ukrainian nation of viable frontiers is recognized by Russia and guaranteed by NATO as a durable and legitimate sovereign country. It has also been to achieve this in a way that does not permanently compromise the West’s relations with Russia or make it impossible to entice Russia eventually from the arms of China and settle it into a comfortable relationship with the West. The vital interest of Western civilization requires that the long contest of over 300 years between Russia’s Western emulators—starting with Peter the Great, and its nativists including the current leader Vladimir Putin, and such cultural giants as Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn—be resolved in favour of the West and that Russia be welcomed back as an eminent Western culture and nationality.
Goals that are not now being clearly enunciated in Washington are the pursuit of a form of peace in the Middle East in which Israel is universally recognized as a Jewish state and where a viable if diminutive Palestinian state is also established, along with an end to the Russia-Ukraine war that establishes Ukraine absolutely as a legitimate sovereign country but makes enough accommodation for what appear to be the results on the ground to avoid a total humiliation of Russia and to permit the West to out-bid China for the affections of that country.
The dalliance of the Republican Party with primitive isolationism is a menace, and many elected officials and otherwise serious commentators are taking positions in respect of Ukraine and Gaza that are irresponsible. The Ukraine war requires an exit strategy and not the threat of abandonment, and Israel requires a mandate to achieve its objective and not constant hectoring about a ceasefire that would save Hamas from the summary execution that it deserves and that real peace requires.
