In purely military terms, Israel is winning its war against Hamas. Its forces have driven Hamas fighters out of much of north and central Gaza, killing at least 10,000 while losing fewer than 300 Israeli troops.
But the war is taking a horrendous toll on civilians. It has killed more than 29,000 Palestinians, wounded nearly 70,000 and reduced much of northern Gaza to rubble. These figures come from Hamas-controlled public health officials and do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Over the protests of President Biden and European leaders, Israeli forces are preparing to assault Rafah, a city on Gaza’s southern border. Following Israel’s orders to evacuate, more than 1.4 million displaced civilians have fled there to escape the fighting in the north.
The plight of Palestinian civilians is eclipsing the global outrage that followed Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis and the taking of more than 250 hostages. This incenses many Israelis, who believe with reason that many Palestinians regard Hamas’s orgy of murder, rape and kidnapping as a legitimate response to Israeli “occupation.”
Hamas uses civilians as human shields and profits politically from their deaths. The more Palestinian “martyrs” it feeds into the maw of war, the louder the international clamor for cease-fires and false accusations by Hamas apologists that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
Nonetheless, the brute realities of war in Gaza confront Israeli leaders with a gut-wrenching choice.
Their forces are poised to deliver a knockout blow to Hamas at Rafah. But Biden wants a pause to allow Palestinian civilians to be evacuated before the attack. He’s right, but hard questions abound: Where can they go, and who will provide them with food, shelter and medicine in a war zone?
Egypt doesn’t want a flood of refugees, moving tanks to the border to underscore the point. Many countries, including the United States, have suspended aid to the U.N. relief agency for Palestinians following allegations that a dozen or more of its employees took part in the Oct. 7 rampage.
Many Israelis worry that a lengthy pause to deal with the humanitarian crisis would blunt their military momentum and turn into a permanent cease-fire that would leave Hamas intact in Gaza. In war’s cruel calculus, sparing Palestinian lives today could mean more Israeli deaths tomorrow.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas’s capacity to terrorize Israel. Unfortunately for Israel’s friends, Netanyahu makes a convenient villain for its enemies and Western critics.
To retain his perch atop Israeli politics, the mercurial politician has colluded with religious zealots nudging the country towards an autocratic theocracy and abetted land-grabbing right-wing settlers in the West Bank.
Netanyahu scorns Palestinian demands for an independent state, which he sees as Gaza writ large. His policy of ignoring Palestinian claims and focusing instead on normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia and Gulf Arab states was another casualty of the Oct. 7 bloodbath.
The opportunistic Netanyahu, however, is more consequence than cause. What’s pushed Israeli politics to the right in recent decades is the recurrent failure of peace processing and incessant terrorist and missile attacks from Gaza, the West Bank and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israelis regard Gaza as a botched experiment in Palestinian autonomy that discredits the “land-for-peace” formula. They pulled their troops (and settlements) out of Gaza in 2005, only to see Hamas seize power and turn the strip into a base for increasingly deadly attacks.
Instead of blaming Hamas for bringing ferocious Israeli retaliation down upon their heads, most Palestinians have rallied behind the jihadist group.
According to polling by The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research last December, 57 percent of Gazans believe the Oct. 7 attacks were justified while 37 percent said they were not right.
On the West Bank, an astonishing 82 percent said Hamas was right. Perhaps most chilling, more than 90 percent of all Palestinians said they did not believe Hamas committed atrocities on Oct. 7.
Seeking to avoid an indefinite Israeli reoccupation of Gaza, the Biden administration has urged Israel to hand off control to the Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank. But 60 percent of Palestinians in both territories want the corrupt and feckless authority to be dissolved.
These findings go to the heart of the matter. If Hamas emerges from this war as the foremost champion of the Palestinian cause, prospects for peace are nil.
Repeated attempts by Israel and successive U.S. presidents from both parties to negotiate a political settlement that would create a Palestinian state keep foundering on the same two obstacles.
The first is the split within the Palestinian community. How can Israel trust any agreement forged with the Palestinian Authority, when Hamas flatly rejects peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state?
The second obstacle is the insistence by all Palestinian leaders on a “right of return” to places millions fled when Arab nations ganged up to attack Israel in 1967 and 1948. Israelis understandably decline this invitation to commit demographic suicide.
It’s dismaying that U.S. progressives and left-wing students demanding “justice for Palestine” refuse to reckon with these realities. As long as Hamas runs Gaza, there can be no peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
And if Israel fails to dislodge Hamas, the best outcome it can hope for in this war is to extend the period before the next terrorist attack.
Unless and until the Palestinians choose new leaders who unequivocally accept Israel’s right to exist, justice, dignity and statehood will continue to elude them. The grand illusion of possessing all the land “from the river to the sea” can only yield endless war.
Will Marshall is the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute.