What a difference 10 months make, at least during an American election season. On Oct. 7, thousands of Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel to massacre more than 1,200 innocent civilians. The horrors included the beheading of toddlers and the raping and dismembering of women while still alive. Five days later, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stood alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pledged: “The United States has Israel’s back.”
That was then. Now, with Israel close to finishing off Hamas amid a presidential election, Blinken has demanded that Israel not finish off Hamas, and thus let it rebuild and rearm. On Aug. 1, he declared that “a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was the only way to begin to break the cycle of violence and suffering.”
Really? Here are a few considerations that may have escaped the secretary of state’s notice.
First and most important are the existential stakes of the Gaza conflict. What is at stake is the very survival of the State of Israel, now surrounded by heavily armed Iranian-sponsored terror groups, all seeking to conduct a second Holocaust in the Middle East. These weaponized Iranian proxies include Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and several other lethal factions across Syria and Iraq.
Blinken’s demand for a ceasefire comes at the very moment when Israel is close to eliminating Hamas’s capacity to carry out more invasions and mass murders. To be clear: It was Hamas that launched this war and it is Hamas that has broken every prior ceasefire agreement with Israel. This includes the ceasefire that existed on Oct. 7.
The Oct. 7 horrors were just the most recent of several unprovoked acts of war perpetrated by Hamas against Israel—including in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021. These aggressions included the launching of thousands of rockets targeting Israeli schools, hospitals and civilian population centers.
Since Oct. 7, Hamas’s leaders have repeatedly declared that this was just the first of more invasions and mass slaughters to follow. Hamas’s many public declarations make abundantly clear that they will stop at nothing to reach their explicit goal of annihilating Israel.
Some nonetheless blame Israel for Hamas’s savagery, concocting bogus claims of Israeli “occupation,” which purportedly “drives” Gazans into the arms of extremists. But Israel completely withdrew its residents and security forces from Gaza 18 years ago, forcing its own citizens to abandon their homes and livelihoods.
Israel has also tried time and again to end the so-called “occupation” and create a sovereign Palestinian state incorporating both Gaza and Judea/Samaria. In fact, its leaders have endorsed specific plans for such a Palestinian state on at least six occasions: 1937, 1948, 2000, 2001, 2007 and 2019. Palestinian leaders rejected all six offers and each time resumed their terror war to annihilate Israel.
Yet despite this unbroken history of Palestinian annihilationism and the savagery of Hamas’s most recent invasion, Israel has waged this war in accordance with the highest ethical standards in the long and sad history of human warfare. America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved a substantially higher ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths than Israel in Gaza, even though Hamas’s terror brigades are among the most civilian-embedded forces in military history.
It also bears mentioning that the Hamas dictatorship has brutally suppressed its Palestinian citizens since long before the current war. Since Oct. 7, Hamas has fired on its own citizens, who seek to utilize Israeli escape routes from military actions and who merely approach food aid convoys to feed their families. Gazans have repeatedly told global media outlets that Hamas hordes all the incoming aid for its terror cadres, preferring to let their own population starve.
A ceasefire would let Hamas tighten its iron grip over Gaza, allowing it to continue brutalizing its own people and using them as human shields.
Hence, despite Blinken’s perfunctory assurances, a ceasefire would do nothing to advance the cause of peace. To the contrary, it would enable the continued mass slaughter of Israelis; the continued brutalization of Palestinians in Gaza; and the continued danger of an Iranian proxy on Israel’s southwest border.
No one committed to peace and decency should be advocating such a policy, much less pressuring Israel to adopt it. Both Palestinians and Israelis deserve better; namely, to be freed from the murderous brutality of Hamas. Freed not just until the next Hamas war but permanently freed from a Hamas that has been permanently destroyed.
The question for Blinken is which matters more: The sentiments of some American “swing-state” voters or the lives and livelihoods of innocent Israelis and Gazans? As the stepson of a Holocaust survivor, Mr. Blinken should not find this a difficult question to answer.
