The Hamas terror organization shocked Israel and the Western world with their massive attack on tens of Israeli villages and Army bases that neighbor the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip was literally handed over by Israel to the Arabs back in 2005. The Arabs democratically elected the Hamas dictatorship to run their lives. This is a fact. The vast majority of Arabs in Gaza voted to elect terrorists into power. They democratically elected in a sworn terrorist group that moved immediately to marshal millions of dollars of international funding towards building up a powerful overground and underground terror state that would do all in its power to terrorize Israel.
For 18 years, the Hamas terror state succeeded in terrorizing Israel with thousands of missile attacks, but in a limited fashion. On October 7th, they succeeded in a big way in achieving their religious goal – killing Jews. In the most dreadful day in modern Jewish history since the Holocaust in World War II, more than 1,200 Israeli civilians were killed in the most heinous of all fashions. Hundreds of Israelis, young and old, were snatched and taken prisoner into Gaza by Arab terrorists. In one morning, Israel found itself thrust into a terrible war with a terror state that had prepared a massive terrorist-tunnel infrastructure for this exact scenario.
Israel prepared its forces over the course of a few weeks and went in hard – very hard. Even Hamas was surprised that Israel sent in tanks and engineering crews into its most crowded areas and went about destroying every building that was part of the terror infrastructure. Tanks were a critical part of Israel’s thrust. In Gaza, that meant, an enormous number of buildings, thousands of buildings, including United Nations schools run by UNRWA, and even Arab-run hospitals. There was no place that the Hamas terrorists would not use in order to kill Jews.
The Israeli counterattack has been a great success. More than half of the massive infrastructure has been dismantled, blown up, or covered up with debris. But the question remains as to whether Israel will snatch defeat from victory with a weak diplomatic end to the War. At the end of the 1956 Sinai Campaign and at the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel was pressured diplomatically on multiple fronts. In 1956, Israel relinquished nearly all of its military gains. In 1973, Israel made it clear that it would be willing to go back to the lines of the 1967 War, but it would not entertain further concessions.
Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy was actually a massive pressure campaign on Golda Meir, a direct continuation of his pressure campaign on her from before and during the Yom Kippur War. The main lesson to be learned from that situation was that when Israel buckles under US pressure, Israeli soldiers pay the price. Yes, Israel must deal with the demands of the superpower that it is most dependent on. But no, Israel should not sacrifice its soldiers in order to placate the demands of the consistently hostile US State Department.
