Israel should have taken care of Hamas a long time ago. It did not, and it has suffered both the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust and a painfully costly war in Gaza.
One of the best experiences I had at Harvard of old was racing at the Henley Regatta. At the time, there was an arrangement by which the winner of the intramural crew competition got to go to England to race. Our Leverett House crew won in 1986 and through the gracious generosity of the father of one of the rowers (who had won for Leverett in 1955), we found ourselves on the Thames River. We raced one race and lost badly. By the time we crossed the finish line, the guys from the other boat had finished a pint or two of their favorite beer. Our loss was duly reported by the New York Times. They interviewed a Henley old-timer and asked him why the racing had started on Wednesday, a day earlier than in all previous years. “Throwing out Thursday’s trash on Wednesday,” was his short reply.
All of us have projects that should have been done yesterday—or a month or year ago. Paint the garage, throw out half of the junk in the basement, take the car for a tuneup. We push things off generally until we have no choice but to deal with an issue immediately. So it was with Israel and Gaza. The death toll of Israeli soldiers since the start of ground operations stands at 154. I would hope and pray that it will not go up, but the war continues. I hate the comparisons, but yes, for the US population, we would be looking at around 5,000 dead. And that is the reason Israel kept kicking the can down the road on Gaza. Rocket barrages, terror attacks and the like would never have let any Israeli government fight until 150 of its brave soldiers had been killed. Like in the US, Israelis are very sensitive to soldier casualties, and at some point, the protests and the polls would make it clear that the government had to cut and run. So the job was never done, and post-Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the terrorists brought in more and more weapons.
One might say something similar about Al-Qaeda. The first World Center bombing (1993), the embassy bombings in Africa (1998), and the Cole attack (2000) should have been enough to get the US to deal with Al-Qaeda with military force. But the US did little to nothing. And then came 9/11. The murder of nearly 3,000 Americans in such a brazen attack led to a twenty-year war in Afghanistan and the weakening of Al-Qaeda and the death of Bin Laden. And like the US, Israel—after the brutal and barbaric attack on its citizens in the south of the country with 1,200 dead—had no choice but to take on Hamas. Like with the mess in the basement or the paint peeling off the walls of the garage, putting things off rarely makes things better or easier later.
Hamas, in keeping with the Palestinian tradition of fighting the last war, no doubt calculated that Israelis would not have the stomach to fight much of a war in Gaza. After the first few casualties, protests would break out and TV commentators would demand that Israel pull out and that Netanyahu resign in disgrace. But as is usually the case, the real world did not go according to the Hamas script. Israelis were so incensed and disgusted by the mass rape/murder of women and the beheading of children and soldiers, that they are not thinking about quitting. Every day, there is an announcement of how many soldiers were killed the previous day, with their names and details. This weekend saw fourteen soldiers killed in Gazan combat. In the past, that would have signaled the end: enough in spilling the blood of brave, young warriors. But that was the past. Everybody, even those on the left, realize that there is no going back to the status quo. If you allow rockets, you allow terrorists to come over and kill your family. Thus, Israel keeps fighting with its ears mostly closed to Western kvetching about civilian casualties.
What is victory in Gaza? Will Israel kill every Hamas member, as it promised from the outset? Will they catch/kill Yaha Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza whom Israel saved from a brain tumor (and thus he spoke perfect Hebrew with captives in Gazan tunnels)? Can Israel create a set of conditions in which there can be no more missiles on Israeli cities and no chance of terrorists reaching Israeli territory? They are still firing rockets from the humanitarian sectors that the IDF has set up in the south of Gaza. Will they never learn that Palestinians want to kill Jews any way they can? In the past during a war, one side would destroy its enemy and then let the remaining citizens build a new future acceptable to the victors. But you need the first part about victory before you can proceed to the second part about the future. Will Israel flood the tunnels? Will it take control of the Rafah crossings with Egypt, where weapons move into Gaza? Gaza is a problem with many moving parts, but Israelis have been so revulsed at what happened on 10/7, that the army and the political echelon have been given a lot of leeway to act to make sure that both in the north and in the south, residents can get up and go to sleep without threat of harm. Those are tall orders, but after the brutal pogrom against innocent civilians, the Israelis are playing a different game than in the past, where a rocket here or a terrorist attack there was mostly ignored.
My wife spent much of the day listening to first-person accounts of people who survived the music festival massacre or the loved ones of those who were murdered. Released captives are telling in gruesome detail about their time in the Gazan dungeon. The raw feelings are not fading into memories; they are being kept front and center. And while every Israeli soldier is precious to his family, his people, and his country, the survival of Israel and the Jewish people now depends on completely destroying those threatening the same with destruction. The alternative to victory is the eventual destruction of Israel, and for that reason, Israel is playing this war for keeps.