RULES OF WAR

The United States has come out in full support of Israel’s war against Hamas, but has cautioned the aggrieved nation to abide by the “rules of war” and to “take every possible step to avoid harming civilians.”

I am not a historian, but I am old enough to have been able (and eager) to read the newspapers during World War II, and later to read histories of that conflict. 

As part of the fight against the Nazis, the Americans and the British executed a 24-hour-a day bombing campaign against German cities and towns, including the infamous firebomb raid against the city of Dresden. While the announced targets were munitions factories, etc., the round-the-clock bombing campaign failed to crush the Nazi industrial system. But it did kill an estimated 600,000 civilians before Nazi Germany surrendered (after killing 6,000,000 Jews, homosexuals, and other “non-Aryans.”) 

Germany, for its part, had killed thousands of British civilians with its V2 rockets. 

On the Pacific front, the United States was island-hopping westward leading up to a planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. The estimate for that invasion was one million US casualties, but the Allied command saw no choice but to pursue that course of action to end the war against a determined enemy.

In early 1945, the United States discovered that a mixture of gasoline and certain chemicals would produce a jellied substance that they called napalm. When brought to bear, a relatively brief United States firebombing campaign killed an estimated 100,000 Japanese home-island noncombatants, This was just months before we dropped the two atomic bombs that killed an additional 100,000 civilians. (The napalm bombing was so effective that Air Force brass suggested atom bombs were unnecessary. It is likely they were correct). Whatever the negative consequences of the napalm and atom bomb attacks, the 200,000 civilian deaths led directly to the Japanese surrender and the saving of the one million American lives that would have been lost in a ground invasion of Japan.

Last week, Hamas launched a barbarous attack on virtually undefended towns in the southern part of Israel. The latest reports indicate hey inflicted 3,000 casualties on civilian men, women, and children and took 100-150 hostages, most but not all Israeli. (Media reports that the Hamas attack in Israel was the equivalent of 9/11 in the United States are way off the mark. There are 9 million residents of Israel. A proportionate attack on lower Manhattan would produce 100,000 casualties.) In any event, it is the largest Jewish death toll since the Holocaust.

In the barbaric Hamas attack, there are added factors in the equation: Hamas uses civilian structures to hide its rockets and rocket launchers — basements of apartment houses, mosques, and even schools and hospitals. Israel says its bombing and artillery targets thus far are aimed at those targets. 

And no one (in Israel) knows where the hostages are. Media reports indicate that it is likely they are in several different locations and it may well be that Israel's bombing and artillery campaign against Hamas is endangering them, either directly or indirectly inasmuch as Hamas has threatened to kill a hostage for each unannannounced bomb Israeli bomb drops.

Bottom line: Can Israel respond to the Hamas attack without endangering the civilian population of Gaza, and without possibly endangering the hostages?

Let's be a little cold-blooded about this: Israel is between a rock and a hard place. Were it to reject military action in order to avoid injury to civilians and possibly even to hostages, a noncombatant course of action would leave the country in a javelin-catcher role — sit back and do nothing more than attempt to shoot down a percentage of Hamas rockets aimed at its civilian population. Worse, it would convey a message to Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria that, despite all of its military technology, Israel is a paper tiger-- an open invitation to all is surrounding enemies. really.

I don't propose, but I do ask:

Suppose there were not 3,000 Israeli casualties and 150 hostages, but 3,150 casualties and no hostages. Would Israel’s options be different? 

If sacrificing 150 lives today would save 1,000 lives tomorrow, wouldn’t you be willing to make that decision? Doesn't the United States make that kind of decision every time it sends troops into battle? Doesn't every warrior nation do that — take action that sacrifices lives today in order to save a greater number of llives tomorrow?

 I am no military tactician, but when you put all the factors together, it is inconceivable that Israel can or will fail promptly to militarily respond to the Hamas atrocity, and no degree of pre-warnings can avoid injury to non-combatant Gaza civilians, and possibly hostages as well, (the latter either directly or at the hands of the Hamas terrorists.)

I don’t know what Israel’s short-term or long-term plans are to solve the Hamas crisis, but in this case, like in so many other situations, citizens suffer at the hands of their leaders’ misdeeds. It has been true of every war in history and it will be true in this one too.

So be it. 

A bientot.

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