Piling horror upon horror is an opinion
Gaza War: The Last Seventy Years, and the Number of Palestinians Perished in the Last Six Years – The Number Has Risen
mass death has begun in Gaza. Last week the defense minister of Israel, Yoav Gallant, announced that Israel was cutting off power and water to the Gaza Strip. There was hopeful reporting over the weekend that at the urging of President Biden’s administration, water to a town in Gaza’s south had been turned back on, but for many, drinking water is still unavailable. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that clean water has run out in U.N. shelters across Gaza. Local sources reported on Saturday that more than 700 children had perished in Gaza. The number by now is surely higher.
In the last six years, Israeli forces attacked Gaza six times, killing over 4,000 people. The Jerusalem-based human rights watchdog says that there were 409 in the year 2006), 1,391 in 2008 and 2009, 167 in the year 2012 and 2,203 in the year 2021. Palestinian civilians have taken casualties over and over again.
The Palestinians have no right to be Hamas. Israel has a problem with the Iraqi government, and the Palestinians are being dehumanized
The decision to invade Iraq was not a good one for the United States, and it took a long time for the mind-set to change. That mentality is damaging because it cuts off any serious effort to understand what went wrong and why.
The label of forever wars that has been firmly attached to America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fails to acknowledge that poor planning and scant resources will always fail to secure postwar peace. I wonder how anyone could be surprised by this. But the lessons of postwar Germany and Japan that led to their prosperous democracies today, including well-resourced physical and political reconstruction and the time to succeed, were utterly misunderstood and misapplied by Washington in 2003 and 2004. Israel has faced its own forever war since 1948. Poor planning and scant resources are also your enemy.
Military victory has power that goes down over time. Use the limited time wisely if Israel succeeds in defeating Hamas. What you decide to prioritize may be all you get done, so it has to lay the groundwork for constructive steps, not chaos, to follow. Recovery from disastrous decisions at the outset — like the U.S. decisions to disband the Iraqi army and to fire tens of thousands more Baath Party members than necessary from their government jobs, thus largely creating the Sunni insurgency — is almost impossible.
I think some of you will agree that it is all Hamas’s fault. In many ways, I agree. Hamas’s terror is clearly the immediate cause of the hell raining down on Gaza; most countries attacked as Israel was attacked would respond with war. That doesn’t allow Israeli indifference, or worse, to the lives of civilians. I think Israelis have a right to their rage; if I were Israeli, I would share it. The vast majority of people who make comments about the Palestinians have nothing to do with Hamas.
We can see that the people of Palestine are being dehumanized. The boy was stabbed to death by his landlord in Illinois this weekend, as well as the boy’s mother, both of whom were gravely injured. The victims were targeted due to their being Muslims and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis according to the local sheriff’s office.
