That’s been said before - it hasn’t happened because it can’t be done.
Sure it can. Now, can you stop a new organization from taking their place? Nope. Is there a somber cost/benefit analysis that could be done that might show that destroying Hamas is not worth the cost? Potentially. But none of that changes the fact that the current organization will be burned to the ground.
Right. There will be scattered remnants who will either join other groups or try to reconstitute into a new one, and a bunch of new groups will likely sprout among the ashes in place, but the mission at this point becomes making it so this “Hamas” as we know it is out of the game.
And yes, once things get stabilized I suspect there will be great recrimination about policy decisions focused “in the wrong direction”. Israel’s rep for top tier security/intel was built largely on the awareness that the threat was on ALL “fronts” both literal and figurative, both inside and outside. And they missed something huge.
There are still plenty of Nazi groups in the world.
Do they kill large numbers of people?
I don’t think there’s any way to eradicate Hamas without the kind of drastic action (ie. ethnic cleansing of Gaza) that no civilised nation would ever undertake. The hatred in Gaza for Israel as a nation and for Jews as, well…Jews, is just far too deep and far too widespread to solve any other way. Atrocities like the ones we’ve seen over the past couple of days are going to keep happening forever. All Israel can do is stay vigilant.
Edit: If we’re being nitpicky, we can probably agree that it may be possible to eradicate Hamas. But it won’t be possible to stop other militant groups from taking their place, for the reason I mentioned.
Yet 50 years ago when Israel was attacked it was, as it always had been up till that point in history, by a coallition of Arab states. Egypt and Syria, Iraq and Jordan, Saudi Arabia and a host of other more distant Arab nations who sent reinforcements. If you’d asked most people then, Israel and those other Arab countries would never have peace. And yet, today it is nearly unimaginable that these other countries would get involved.
Nation-states are subject to diplomacy, can be persuaded by financial interests, have economies (free or otherwise) with citizens who feel that they can build a financial future with the labor of their own hands.
Gaza is in effect an open-air prison with horrendous conditions that offer no hope to the people who live there, only cradle-to-grave hatred for Jews that they blame for the situation.
What path exists for change in Gaza in its current form (excluding its utter destruction or re-occupation)? There are no carrots, few sticks, and no functioning institutions apart from authoritarian terrorist groups. Israel traded Gaza for peace, and got invaded from Gaza as a consequence. Hamas will be destroyed, but Iran or Russia will fund its replacement. Where does the change come from?
The change has to come through Israel’s next steps after the war. We can’t just smash Hamas and withdraw from Gaza again.
We should never have given Sinai back to Egypt without making them take Gaza as well. But we can’t completely pull out of Gaza either, not without letting this exact situation fester again.
We need to give Gazans something to lose. During calmer times, thousands of Gazans work in Israel. That’s great. That’s something that improves the lives of individual Gazans, and links their destiny to Israel.
We need more of that, and we need a regime in power in Gaza that recognizes that this is valuable to the Gazan people and something worth protecting.
And once we put those people in power, we’re going to need to be ready to stick around and defend them. People who weren’t even all that friendly to Israel but were pragmatic enough to work with us were already in charge in Gaza after the Israeli withdrawl, but Hamas took over and strung the old government up from balconies. So once we establish a friendly regime we need to protect it.
The earlier analogy to the occupation of Germany and Japan post-WW2 is an apt one.
There are videos of Turkish and Syrian warplanes (transports and fighter jets) arriving in Iran. I don’t know what that’s about, but it isn’t good. Maybe just for defense against ‘The Great Satan’, or maybe the Hamas attack on Israel is the start of something bigger. Let’s hope not.
Turkey’s Erdogan has just warned America to stay away, and that Turkey will defend Gaza ‘at all costs’. Does this mean that if Israel goes on to seriously degrade Hamas that Turkey will enter the fray against Israel?
In other news, an American carrier group is steaming into the region, along with two Ashley-Burke class guided missile cruisers.
And sadly, there are massive PRO Palestinian protests going on in the west, including a large one in New York. How nice.
To connect this to the OP, I think we really don’t know yet how this will play out. Certainly Israel’s intent is to wipe out Hamas. But the other side gets a say, and there seems to be more than one player on the other side.
I’m aware Turkey (like many countries) has made anodyne statements about the need to avoid escalation, but is there a cite for Turkey committing to defend Gaza?
I’m unable to locate anything with Turkey committing to defend Gaza, let alone ‘at all costs’, which would an uncharacteristically bold game-changing statement that I’d think would appear at the top of a Google search result.
I will say that watching the American leftist response to the Hamas’s massacre has completely and permanently discredited them in my eyes. My opinion of them was already in the toilet watching them defend Russia invading Ukraine, and excusing Chinese genocide, but now it’s permanently flushed down into the sewer watching them make excuses for Hamas desecrating the raped corpse of a German tourist.
(note here when I say “leftist” I’m talking about the tankie left, groups like the DSA, Greens, assorted Marxists, etc, not your standard garden-variety liberal Democrat).
I am going to retract that. The below video was multiply-sourced on Twitter/X, a subtitled video of Erdogan making a statement.
I tried to source it back, but all I could find was the text of a statement by Erdogan in Al-Jazeera saying that there can be no peace without a two-state solution, but not mentioning America specifically.
There is now a community note on that video saying that the subtites are wrong. Anyway, here’s the video.
https://x.com/jemimakhan09/status/1711050744781041732?s=61&t=RJpEck3wp7LlEO0cNO3zPA
I agree with all that. The right has its ‘tankies’ too. And there is a serious anti-semitism problem in western universities. Even when I went to college 40 years ago there were pro-Palestinian and anti-israel signs and handbills all over the place.
Today I saw a young woman with blonde hair in a New York pro-Palestinian march holding a sign that said “By Any Means Necessary”, which is a call to violence (it comes from a 1960 meeting of radical leftists). In support of Hamas. She’s probably a student at NYU.
Yeha, Gaza cant remain like it was.
Cite?
Here is the actuality-
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that Turkey was determined to ramp up diplomatic efforts to achieve calm in the fighting between Israeli and Palestinian forces, but added that a two-state solution was the only way to achieve regional peace.
Where DO you get your news? We have to constantly correct your “information” or ask for a cite.
cite? I mean a protest was planned by a small group of the far left. But massive?
Yes, the black-and-white conviction that Israel is an evil imperialist power murdering innocent Palestinians is much more widespread on the left than just “tankies”.
As an undergraduate I minored in anthropology and took a lot of courses that were part of the Middle Eastern studies program. A lot of the students in the ME studies program disliked Israel strongly and weren’t shy about letting you know. One student, an openly gay young man, was talking about an upcoming study abroad program that would take him to several countries over there, Saudi Arabia being one of them, and when asked if he was stopping in Israel made a face like someone vomited on his shoes and made it clear in no uncertain terms that he’d never visit Israel. And I couldn’t help but think to myself, “My, man. What do you think they’d do to you in Saudi Arabia if you slept with another man?”
I already retracted that claim, linked to the source of it, explained it, and explained how I determined it was fake. In the messages right above the one you posted.
Here’s a cite for you:
It wasn’t that hard to find. I just had to scroll up a few messages.
Yeah, but you didnt answer my question. You explained one error. How about all the others?
What others? Is this now a generalized attack on me? In which case, you might want to note what forum you are in.