On the menu today: The recent history of the Middle East is littered with short-lived cease-fires between Israel and its enemies, and it will probably not shock you to learn that Hamas, the force that finds it morally acceptable to butcher babies, toddlers, elementary-school kids, parents, and senior citizens, does not find it morally wrong to break a cease-fire. This is one of the many reasons why calling for a cease-fire now might feel good but amounts to calling upon Israel to either lose the ongoing battle or pay a much higher cost in blood to win it. The IDF are penetrating further into the Gaza Strip, and stopping now — and counting on all of the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters around them to honor the cease-fire and not ambush them — is betting the lives of those soldiers on the honor, goodwill, and honesty of Hamas and PIJ. Only someone who didn’t know any of the history would think a cease-fire would work right now. Of course, President Biden said yesterday that he wanted “a pause.” But wars don’t have pause buttons.
Calling for a Cease-Fire Is a Sign You Don’t Understand the Situation
Let us begin with a stroll through recent history in the Gaza Strip.
Israel blamed the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is linked to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, for the first blast in a Rosh Ha’ayin shopping centre. Hamas acknowledged carrying out the second attack at a bus stop in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. This was the radical Islamist group’s first open breach of the ceasefire it declared on 29 June.
Hamas’s armed wing declared an end to a five-month-old Gaza ceasefire on Tuesday by firing rockets into Israel, but the Palestinian government led by the Islamist group called for the truce to be restored.
Three Qassam rockets fired from Gaza on Tuesday struck the Israeli border town of Sderot and its environs, causing no serious injuries but constituting the first serious breach of a five-day-old truce between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza.
Islamic Jihad, a small extremist group, claimed responsibility for the attack and said it had been a response to an Israeli military raid in the West Bank city of Nablus at dawn on Tuesday, in which a senior Islamic Jihad operative and another Palestinian man were killed.
In July 2014, six days after the Israeli Army began bombarding Gaza, Egypt proposed a cease-fire that Israel agreed to. But Hamas said that it addressed none of its demands, and the cycle of rocket attacks and Israeli airstrikes resumed after less than 24 hours.
Egypt announced another cease-fire two days later, but Israel then sent in tanks and ground troops and began firing into Gaza from the sea, saying that its aim was to destroy tunnels that Hamas uses to carry out attacks. Over the next several weeks, Israeli forces periodically paused their attacks to allow humanitarian aid, but the fighting continued.
In all, nine truces came and went before the 2014 conflict ended, after 51 days, with more than 2,000 Palestinians and more than 70 Israelis killed.
Nine is the New York Times’ count; by the Israeli government’s account, Hamas rejected or violated eleven cease-fires during the 2014 conflict. A detail from one of them:
It was the start of a three-day truce, the best hope yet to end a 25-day-old war that has taken an enormous toll on both Palestinians and Israelis.
On Friday morning, Israeli troops were in the southern Gaza Strip preparing to destroy a Hamas tunnel, said Israeli military officials. Suddenly, Palestinian militants emerged from a shaft. They included a suicide bomber, who detonated his explosive device. In the chaos, two Israeli soldiers were killed. The militants grabbed 2nd Lt. Hadar Goldin, 23, and pushed him back through the tunnel, according to the Israeli account.
You notice the pattern here? Israel agrees to a cease-fire with one or more of its enemies, often Hamas, and then at some point later, but usually not that much later, Hamas or one of those enemy groups attacks Israel and breaks the cease-fire. Then, when Israel fires back, forces on the Palestinian side contend that Israel broke the cease-fire.
How many times is Israel obligated to fall for this trick to placate the opinions of leaders in other countries who aren’t in the line of fire?
As Phil Klein notes, yesterday, Hamas pledged that it intended to commit similar October 7 massacres, over and over again, until Israel is destroyed:
In an interview on Lebanese television that was captured and translated by MEMRI TV, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad declared, “We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight.”
After he said “the occupation must come to an end,” the interviewer asked him if he was referring to the Gaza Strip (which Israel unilaterally withdrew from in 2005). “No, I am talking about all the Palestinian lands,” he said. When asked to clarify, “Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?” he responded, “Yes, of course.”
“The Al-Aqsa Flood” is what Hamas is calling its October 7 surprise attack into Israel, what most of us over here are calling “the Hamas massacre.”
Why is Israel obligated to stop firing at enemies who have pledged to annihilate it?
Israel is attempting to keep a lot of the details of its ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip secret, but we know a few details. The Israelis have effectively drawn a line across the middle of the Gaza Strip, marking an evacuation zone, and telling civilians to go to the southern half of the strip. Gaza City is in the middle of that top half, and the IDF stated it intends to target the vast network of tunnels underneath Gaza City.
We know IDF military vehicles have entered the Gaza Strip from at least three points — the northwest corner near the shore to the Mediterranean Sea, further inland near the northeastern corner, and a bit north of the evacuation-zone boundary bisecting the Strip. That third thrust, focused on Gaza’s main coastal north-south Salahudeen Road, is apparently to prevent Hamas fighters from escaping to the southern half of the strip to fight another day. CNN has a pretty good map of the fighting here, and CNN’s portrayal of the battle so far lines up with what Reuters is depicting on its map here.
In addition to tanks, Israeli forces are using the Israeli-manufactured AMIR MRAP, a 14-ton “4×4 mine protected armored vehicle carrying up to 12 people.”
The Jerusalem Post said that it is honoring the censorship of the IDF about its ongoing military tactics, but the IDF allowed the Post to report certain details:
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Artillery and tanks are using a variety of smoke-style diversions to make it difficult for Hamas forces to get clear shots at IDF forces when they enter new areas.
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D9 bulldozers are being used to clear out boobytraps, mines, and other ambush items before IDF soldiers enter various areas.
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Air power, especially drones, is still being used extensively in conjunction with land forces to strike Hamas forces, which come out to engage land forces. This is an advantage over mere strikes from the air without land forces, which do not force Hamas forces out of their hideouts as much.
Those IDF tanks and troops and armored vehicles are still fighting as of this writing, and they will likely still be fighting when you read this. If the Israeli government were to declare a cease-fire, those forces would be stopped, deep in Gaza, with likely all kinds of Hamas forces in front of them and attempting to outflank them. A cease-fire would leave all these troops dangerously exposed to an ambush or counterassault in the not-too-distant future. And as we see from recent history, Hamas has no moral qualms about breaking a cease-fire if the group believes it is in its military interest.
It’s overstating it to say that an Israeli declaration of a cease-fire would be suicidal, but it would, at minimum, put all these IDF forces at risk of serious casualties. While we don’t know exactly how the battles are proceeding, it seems reasonable to conclude that the IDF is bringing a lot of firepower and advanced tactics to this fight. A cease-fire is what Hamas needs to get up off the mat.
In other words, calling for a cease-fire now is asking Israel to squander whatever battlefield advantages and momentum that it has, and to allow Hamas to recover and reposition itself to repel the IDF and inflict greater casualties upon the Israeli forces. “Israel must agree to a cease-fire,” is amounting to arguing, “Israel must agree to lose the battle, or at minimum to lose a lot more soldiers in order to win the battle.”
Once you know the history and the facts on the ground, you realize that only a fool or a foe of Israel would argue for a cease-fire.
In other news, President Biden was at campaign reception in Minneapolis yesterday, and apparently a pro-cease-fire rabbi was in attendance, and started heckling Biden. From the White House pool reporter, Agence France-Presse White House correspondent Danny Kemp:
POTUS addressed the campaign event in a converted brick warehouse-type building to an audience of around 200 people. He entered to whoops and cheers.
As Biden was speaking, an audience member shouted out, saying: “As a rabbi I need you to call for a ceasefire right now.”
Biden replied: “I think we need a pause. A pause means give time to get the prisoners out.”
He went on: “I’m the guy that convinced Bibi to call for a ceasefire to let the prisoners out. I’m the guy that talked to Sisi to convince him to open the door” (Rafah)
The heckler was escorted out by security singing “ceasefire now”. Heckler gave name as Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg to pool. Audience chanted four more years.
Biden went on re Gaza: “I understand the emotion. . . .
“This is incredibly complicated for the Israelis. It’s incredibly complicated for the Muslim world as well. . . . I supported a two-state solution, I have from the very beginning.”
“The fact is the matter is that Hamas is a terrorist organization. A flat-out terrorist organization.”
Lord knows what Biden actually meant when he said, “We need a pause.” I suppose if Biden had meant a cease-fire, he would have used that word. Nonetheless, his comment is being interpreted by various news organizations as a half-endorsement of a cease-fire. There are consequences to having a president who turns 81 this month, who was never the most disciplined speaker, and who blurts out whatever pops into his head.
ADDENDUM: Say, do you think Biden appeared in Minneapolis yesterday as a subtle signal to the local congressman, Dean Phillips, who’s running in the Democratic presidential primary?
If Phillips wants to get anywhere, he should release the results of his physical and note that Biden’s last physical, in February, said that the president “remains fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations.” Phillips should release his physical results at, say, 7 a.m. and ask when the last time was that Biden attended an event early in the morning.