By. Dr. Richard L. Benkin
On April 9, 2024, Hamas rejected yet another Israeli ceasefire proposal. After many days of over the top anti-Israel rhetoric by US President Joe Biden and his administration, Israel yet again modified its proposal. US CIA Director William Burns presented it to Qatari and Egyptian negotiators, who represent Hamas, which will not talk directly with Israel. As has been the case in the past, in exchange for 40 hostages, Israel has offered to release hundreds of prisoners from Hamas and other terrorist organizations currently in Israeli prisons for terrorist acts. For the first time, Israel has agreed that some of those prisoners would be released despite their convictions for murdering Israelis. In addition to the prisoner swap, Israel unilaterally offered a six week ceasefire, the longest offered in any negotiations. They did so, even though it would allow Hamas to rearm and regroup, which would cause the deaths of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.
Yet, while US President Biden and others claim that their concern is the safety of millions of Palestinians, they are not acting in any way to help them. Prior to Biden’s anti-Israel rhetoric, Israel already had undertaken unprecedented steps to minimize civilian casualties. And they have worked. Contrary to the false information spread by anti-Israel and antisemitic partisans, more humanitarian aid is and has been getting to the Gaza Strip than ever before. Israelis drop leaflets in population centers warning civilians—and not incidentally, Hamas as well—that they will attack certain areas, giving civilians the opportunity to flee, often with the help of Israeli forces. And again not incidentally, it enables Hamas operatives and leaders in disguise to escape with them. Even the UN, certainly NOT an organization that likes Israel, has calculated that likely civilian to military deaths in urban warfare should be about 9.5 to 1. In the Soviet Union’s war against Afghanistan, in which most fighting was not in urban areas, the ratio of Afghan civilians to military killed was almost ten to one. In World War II, it was about two and two thirds to one. While in Gaza, using unverified Hamas numbers of total dead, the ratio is about two Palestinian civilian deaths to one military.
Moreover, not all those civilians are innocent. There is extensive video proof of large swaths of the Palestinian population in Gaza, swarming the streets to celebrate the October 7 atrocities against Israel. And we need to be clear that they were atrocities, and contrary to all the rules of law their supporters claim Israel is not following. October 7 involved directed attacks against peaceful civilians, both ground attacks against families in their homes and young people at a concert, as well as missile attacks on Israeli civilians, including schools; and unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel does not locate its military assets among civilians. There was atrocious rape and sexual assault that continued even in captivity; mutilation; the abduction of babies — babies that Hamas now uses as bargaining chips while their families are not being told if they are alive or dead. Israel requested that information, and Hamas turned them down flat to prolong the psychological torture. Some hostages since released have testified that Palestinian civilians — not Hamas terrorists — abducted them on October 7, 2023, and sold them to Hamas. Yes, that’s right sold them because their own official, written material and their media do not consider Jews equally human.
But even if we accept that many Palestinian civilians are free of blame, protecting them has little or nothing to do with the demands of Biden and the Israel hating crowd. There really is nothing else that Israel can do, no further concessions other than a complete surrender that leaves Hamas in charge. And for anyone who knows the Middle East, that will be hyped as a Hamas victory and insure more atrocities like October 7, 2023. Can Israel or any other nation be expected to agree to that? If Biden and the Israel-haters really gave a rat’s behind about Palestinian civilians, they would be pressuring Hamas to accept a deal that Burns said was a “good one” that they should accept. This is something the US can do since it holds a lot of leverage with Hamas’s representative in the talks, Qatar. Why aren’t any of them demanding that Egypt dismantle the wall it built on the border with Gaza, explicitly to prevent Palestinians from leaving Gaza for safety and temporary, refugee status? They complain that Palestinian civilians have no place to go, but they do. Or they would if Egypt did not block them from seeking safety from an active war zone.
Unfortunately, none of this is anything new. For instance, a range of people running the gamut from outright antisemites to Islamists to leftists to those who simply know little and like it that way; say that the poor Palestinians just want their own state in what is now called the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But they conveniently forget that at any time between 1948 when the British left and the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel had nothing to do with those areas. They were under complete Arab control. Jordan occupied the West Bank; Egypt occupied Gaza. Yet, Palestinians never even asked for it and nowhere in their charters and other documents even mentioned it as their desire. Did they send terrorists into those territories? No. Did they send terrorists into the occupying powers, Jordan and Egypt? No again. But they did launch regular terrorist, Mujahedeen, attacks against Israel. Yes. Their desire is the elimination of Israel and Jews, not a state on the West Bank and Gaza. This is why I have for years referred to Kashmir as India’s West Bank. Even today, the same terrorists make a big deal out of India nullifying Article 370 but make no mention of how almost the entire Kashmiri Pandit population was killed or expelled. And they can count on the same fact adverse people to join in their reflexive anti-India and anti-Modi propaganda, just like they can count on reflexive anti-Israel and anti-Netanyahu propaganda.
Sadly, even if we take Joe Biden at his word and believe that he really is doing this because he cares about Palestinian civilians, and not because he has to placate his political left to have any chance of electoral victory; his actions actually hurt those civilians. I was in Bharat on October 7, 2023, and a few days later, a top Israeli official warned, “that it’s easy to be with Israel when we’re the victims….you need to be with us when we’re the victors.” In other words, just as Hamas did, he knew that the weak-kneed West would waver as soon as Hamas and its allies started sending out pictures of the dead civilians. It did not matter that those who died did so only because Hamas deliberately put them in jeopardy by locating their forces in civilian areas. As a result, Hamas has been unwilling to compromise, especially after watching Biden — President of Israel’s closest ally — go out of his way to criticize Israel and threaten “consequences” if Israel does not, in effect, surrender. We saw this with Israel’s greatest friend, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Under his UPA predecessors, as long as India took their orders from Europe, Pakistan and the terrorists it shelters attacked India with impunity. Modi, on the other hand, made it clear first with words then action that those days were over. And the terrorism stopped almost completely. In fact, when I was in India, people told me that Israel is fighting the same enemy as India is. And as if to prove their point, a few days after October 7, Indian security broke up an ISIS sleeper cell inside India.
The terrorist calculation changed once India did what it needed to do on Kashmir, without interference from allies. Now, for the good of all people in and out of the region, let Israel finish its job.
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