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Israel's "Allies" Should Reckon with Reality

(Spectator-UK) Stephen Daisley - Everyone wants an end to the fighting in Gaza. The urgency is understandable. Yet, Israel intends to continue fighting until it has a) freed its hostages or their bodies and b) sufficiently incapacitated Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad to delay a repeat of Oct. 7 in the near future. Hamas understands that Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was its greatest ever success, killing 1,200 Jews, turning the West against Israel and derailing progress towards Israeli-Saudi normalization. Support for Hamas is surging in the West Bank. If the international community wants Israel to stop bombing Gaza, the international community should take over Gaza and stop Hamas attacking Israel. But the global community, with its cherished norms and spottily applied international law, much prefers to chastise Israel from afar. Get any closer and it would have to confront some unpleasant truths about those it caricatures as villains and those it fetishizes as victims. It would find itself in Israel's shoes, learning on the job that messy as Jerusalem's military strategy sometimes is, it is based on bitter experience of the enemy and a necessary ruthlessness that matches the nature of the threat.
2024-03-20 00:00:00
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