Tag Archives: gaza

You can’t defeat Hamas while it’s hiding in the crowd

Until Gaza’s civilians are physically separated from its fighters, every “victory” will just be the prelude to the next war.

It’s the same movie we’ve all seen before—Netanyahu in front of a camera, talking tough about taking control of Gaza to defeat Hamas, and then… the walk-back. Now the talk is about a methodical advance into Gaza City, telling civilians to leave before the IDF moves in.

Sounds reasonable on paper. In reality? Hamas knows this script better than anyone. They melt into the crowd of fleeing civilians, keep some fighters behind to ambush advancing troops, and live to fight another day. Israel racks up a few tactical wins, destroys a few more tunnels, and two years later we’re right back where we started.

And those tunnels—don’t think they’re gone. Even the rosiest military estimates say much of that underground web is still there, ready to be used again.

Here’s the core problem: Hamas isn’t going to change. The group’s endgame hasn’t shifted an inch, no matter how much destruction Israel deals out. As long as they can hide among civilians, they’ll rebuild, regroup, and retake control. That’s why the “win a battle, go home, call it a day” approach is just buying time.

But almost nobody—outside of Israel’s hard-right political fringe—wants Israel to rule Gaza outright. Netanyahu has said so himself. His preferred “day after” scenario is some kind of technocratic leadership, likely backed and bankrolled by Arab monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the UAE. The problem? You can’t hand over a functioning, peaceful Gaza to anyone if Hamas is still embedded in the population.

So what’s the missing piece? Physical separation. Pull the civilians out of the combat zone entirely. Not shuffle them from one part of Gaza to another. Move them out, full stop. Only then can the IDF clear the territory properly—no civilians in the crossfire, no cover for Hamas fighters, no half-finished jobs.

It’s not a pretty idea, and it’s not simple. Nobody’s lining up to take in Gazan refugees. Egypt, for one, has no appetite for importing a population seen as sympathetic to Hamas—their own Muslim Brotherhood cousins. Other Arab states, while happy to denounce Israel from afar, aren’t opening refugee camps or building housing. Europe bashes Israel and makes grand gestures about recognizing an illusory Palestinian state to pacify its own restive Muslim populations — but it’s all words and no plan.

And let’s be honest—many Gazans themselves are wary of leaving. They’ve seen what happened in 1948, when Palestinians who fled ended up stranded in camps for generations. But here’s the thing: they don’t have the freedom to choose right now anyway. Hamas controls their movements, their speech, their lives.

That’s why commentator Haviv Gur’s “crazy” idea might be the most logical one on the table: create a secure refugee zone inside Israel itself. I know—it sounds backwards. But think about it. Israel could ensure the civilians are safe, fed, and cared for, while keeping them completely apart from Hamas. The IDF could then operate in Gaza without the nightmare of urban warfare among noncombatants. And the international chorus accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” would have a much harder case to make if the displaced civilians were literally inside Israel, under Israeli protection.

No solution here is clean. None of them are pretty. Dealing with a terrorist group that actively uses its own people as human shields is going to look ugly no matter what. But the one thing that’s absolutely certain is this: if Hamas and Gaza’s civilians aren’t physically separated, nothing changes. Every ceasefire will just be an intermission. Every rebuilding effort will just be a prelude to the next war.

It’s easy for outside observers to call for “restraint” or talk about “addressing root causes.” The reality is that the root cause in this case has an army, a tunnel network, and a death wish—for Israel and, tragically, for many of the people it claims to represent.

Separate Hamas from the civilians, or resign yourself to watching this same bloody cycle repeat. Over and over. Forever.

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Filed under Foreign Policy, hamas, Middle East

Worry about the real men who really want to kill us

In the overheated arena of Middle East discourse, where passions flare and reason often falters, the rhetoric swirling around Israel reveals a stark divide. On one side, defenders of the Jewish state like me grapple with the complexities of a nation under siege, striving to uphold its right to exist while navigating the fog of war. On the other, detractors—animated by bias, ignorance, or something darker—seize every opportunity to vilify Israel. They obsess over civilian casualties in Gaza, wringing their hands with selective outrage while ignoring the extraordinary measures taken by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to minimize collateral damage in their fight against terrorists. Context, it seems, is their enemy. The comparative restraint of Israel’s military, facing threats no other nation would tolerate, goes unmentioned. So does the larger picture: a global Jihadist movement, fueled by an ideology that prizes domination over life itself, and its troubling defenders in the West.

From this cauldron of distortion emerges Zohran Mamdani, the media-savvy leftist vying for New York’s mayoralty, whose anti-Zionist rhetoric has electrified the progressive fringe. Establishment Democrats, caught flat-footed, fumble to respond, fixating on decoding phrases like “Globalize the Intifada” or “From the River to the Sea.” They debate semantics as if words alone were the threat, sidestepping the harder task of confronting what Mamdani and his ilk truly stand for. Parsing slogans is a distraction. Leadership demands clarity about the intentions behind them—not just what is said, but what is meant.

Let’s dispense with the charade. The useful idiots chanting in Western streets, clueless about the Arab-Israeli conflict’s history or the geography of the Levant, are not the real danger. The Islamist political leaders in Turkey, the Gulf, and Iran, along with their fellow travelers in the West, know exactly what they’re saying. Their code is unmistakable: an anti-Western, barbaric ideology that exalts Islamist supremacy above all else—above liberty, truth, or human life. The Ayatollahs in Iran and their proxies, from Hamas to Hezbollah, are blunt about their aim: a world Judenrein, cleansed of Jews.

Their Western apologists, like Columbia University protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, are cagier. Pressed for specifics, they dodge. When CNN asked Khalil if he supports Hamas, he pivoted, proclaiming opposition to all civilian deaths. It’s a sleight of hand, equating the IDF’s painstaking efforts to spare non-combatants with the deliberate savagery of Iran-backed terrorists who embed themselves in schools, hospitals, and mosques, who disrupt aid to starve their own people, who target civilians as a matter of policy.

This moral blurring is no accident. It’s a tactic to obscure the truth: anti-Zionists like Mamdani and Khalil aren’t fighting for Palestinian rights or equality. Their aim is singular—to strip safety and rights from one group: Jews. They cloak their agenda in the language of justice, but their selective fury betrays them. Why else hijack the term “genocide,” a word seared into Jewish consciousness by the Nazi extermination machine? No other people in modern history have faced such a systematic program of annihilation. Yet, in the hands of these amoral moralizers, “genocide” becomes a weapon to libel Israel and the West while absolving the true heirs of Nazism: the Islamists of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran.

So while I cringe at the antisemitic rhetoric filling the news cycles and social media threads, it is the relentless commitment to violence that keeps me awake at night. Hamas and Islamic Jihad could end the war in Gaza tomorrow by laying down their arms and releasing their hostages. Instead, they choose to prolong suffering, sacrificing their own people to glorify a genocidal ideology. Their defenders in the West, whether through ignorance or malice, amplify this madness. They scream about Israel’s “disproportionate” response while ignoring the rockets raining on Tel Aviv, the tunnels built to slaughter, the captives languishing in Gaza’s depths. They demand ceasefires but never call for Hamas to surrender. Why? Because their goal isn’t peace—it’s Israel’s erasure – and by extension, our own.

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Filed under Foreign Policy, Terrorism, Uncategorized