Frank's Musings

Israel and the world were outraged by the 7 October 2020 attack by Hamas operatives on non-threatening Israelis in areas surrounding Gaza. The raid killed 1200 Israelis and took over two hundred hostages.

The Israeli government justifiably resolved to retaliate by attempting to extirpate Hamas with violent force. However, it undertook a military campaign of bombing and other destruction of large areas of Gaza, resulting in the deaths of at least 20,000 residents of the Gaza Strip.

Owing to its professed mission of assassinating all Jews in Israel and eliminating the Israeli state, Hamas merits being forced out of power in Gaza. However, the utter destruction of civilian life in Gaza is not proportionate to the murderous 7 October attack. Moreover, by retaliating in such an indiscriminate manner the Israeli government adopted behavior as reprehensible as was Hamas’s.

A curiously damnable fault of Israel is their complicity in the continued existence of Hamas as the ruler of the Gaza Strip.  Israel not only accepted Hamas’s dominance in Gaza, presumably under the authority of the Palestinian Authority; it has subsidized Hamas’s budget in order to strengthen its ability to resist the insertion of Hezbollah into Gaza’s affairs, if not its replacement of Hamas as Gaza’s government.  That was another illustration of the misjudgment of Israeli intelligence, this time missing the genocidal inclination of Hamas’s leadership.e

Although it is clear that Hamas cannot lead the peaceful confinement of Arab Palestinians, the government of Israel has demonstrated through its blessing of aggressive Jewish settlements in the West Bank its inability to control elements of its own population who do not respect the1948 terms under which formation of the Israeli state was internationally sanctioned.  Regardless of ethnic definitions of justice, there will never be peace in the eastern Mediterranean region without the imposition of international force.  It cannot be denied that the U.S. must take the lead in establishing that force; however, the current alignment of American politics does not promise that such a policy will be adopted, at least following the 2024 Presidential election.  Both possible outcomes will produce blind acquiescence to policies determined by Israeli politics owing either to the strength of the Israeli lobby in the U.S. or to disregard for the relevance of world affairs to the well-being of individual Americans, in particular to that of their leader.

International ambivalence is not a rational attitude in the modern interconnected world.  Personal well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of just about anyone else on the planet and no nation or affinity group can pursue its own goals without considering their impact on other groups.  There are no absolutes; there are no isolated human experiences.   A broken toe will compromise one’s whole body.  Diplomacy constitutes responsible behavior in our interconnected world.  The responsible resolution of the Israel-Hamas War and of the conflict in the entire region from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea will mean sacrificing many abstract religious and ethnic principles.  It is necessary to posit a spiritual world where those principles can be honored absolutely.  But in the material world where I am writing they only cause strife for those of us whose afterlife is nothing more than the notion that those who outlast us will remember us.