Israel has security that depends on Rafah
Why Israel didn’t invade Gaza in October 1972? What Israel should have done about it, and why Israel shouldn’t: A long-term Israeli response to Israel’s assault on Gaza City
In short, Israel would need to fight this war with the least collateral damage for Palestinian civilians and accompany it with a political horizon for a new relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, built around two nation-states for two indigenous peoples. Doing so would give Israel a chance to say to the world that this was not a war of vengeance or occupation, but a war to eliminate the Palestinian entity that was out to destroy any two-state solution — Hamas — and create the political space for a deal with the Palestinian Authority, which is still committed to a two-state deal. The approach of that would have won the support and funding of moderate Arab states like the U.A.E.
To understand why, let’s look back a bit. I argued in October that Israel was making a terrible mistake by rushing headlong into invading Gaza, the way America did in Afghanistan after 9/11. I thought Israel should have focused first on getting back its hostages, delegitimizing Hamas for its murderous and rapacious Oct. 7 rampage, and going after Hamas’s leadership in a targeted way — more Munich, less Dresden. That is, a military response akin to how Israel tracked down the killers of its athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and not how the U.S. turned Dresden into a pile of rubble in World War II.
Of course, there are formidable reasons for Israel to refrain from invading Rafah. The human shield is first of all. Assaulting Rafah will inevitably cause many civilian casualties, despite assurances by Israel that it will move the civilians out of harm’s way before launching the offensive. The civilian toll in the upcoming attack on Rafah will surpass the Hamas Health Ministry’s estimate of over 30,000 dead, which includes the thousands of Hamas fighters the Israeli military has killed in the past six months. Many of them were killed during ground offensives in Gaza City.
