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Is Israel actually being proportionate in its response to Hamas? #israel
The question a lot of people have is whether Israel's response is proportionate, given that there have been too many civilians killed. So the first thing is, and this should go without saying, but we have to keep saying it and reminding ourselves that it is true: every single civilian loss of life is a real tragedy. I think you have to be conscious of that no matter what side of the conflict we're on. By the way, military losses are also quite tragic. Yes, hopefully most normal people want Hamas to be completely wiped out, and if they don't surrender, then that might have to happen. There's no other way to save the world and save millions of people. But at the same time, there are still families that suffer as a result, and there are still children who grow up as orphans. War is horrible, and it should always be a last resort.
Now that said, let's go back to this conflict. So what is a proportional response? What's proportional? Someone says Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis, so a proportional response would be something like that. That's a ludicrous argument. It's a natural mistake, and it's a natural but ludicrous argument. Why is it natural? Why is it ludicrous? Natural is, is "proportion" a word for equal? But that's not actually what it means in legal terms. If you think about it for two minutes, that would be a ridiculous response. Let's take September 11th. Al-Qaeda flew planes into the Twin Towers, and 3,000 Americans were killed. The proportionate response was not for America to go and kill 3,000 Al-Qaeda fighters. What is it supposed to be proportionate to? When you set a response, what's the threat they pose? What could happen if you do nothing? The answer in America's case is that they could do more and more and more, and hundreds of thousands of people could eventually be killed, and maybe millions of people could be killed, or maybe all countries could get taken over. You're looking at people who are committed, in the case of Al-Qaeda, to really overthrowing Arab governments, Muslim governments, and Western governments, and to causing as many civilian losses as possible. The way proportionate is to destroy the capability of Al-Qaeda. How many fighters does Al-Qaeda have at the time around the world? I don't know, 100,000. You've got to destroy the lot. Now, you'd have to kill all 100,000 if you can't get rid of the leadership, or get people to say, "Okay, we don't want to be part of this anymore." You've got to cripple the entire ability of that movement, of hundreds of thousands of people. You've got to be able to destroy their ability to cause harm. That's the proportionate response.
So the proportionate response in Gaza is the destruction of Hamas. Hamas did not pose a threat to 1,400 Israelis. Their attempt that day was to go in and kill 10,000 Israelis, and if they remain intact at the end of this war, they're going to do this again on bigger scales, and they're going to recruit jihadi groups all around Israel that have similar ideology to go and do more and worse. They are a direct threat to 8 million Israelis, right? That's who they're a threat to. The only proportionate response, and the only one I've heard from anybody who doesn't just want Israel to be destroyed, the only proportionate response anyone can think of who cares about the maintenance and survival of Israel, is the destruction of Hamas.
Now, destruction of Hamas means this type of fighting is going to be different from any other fighting that's happened in rounds between Gaza, Hamas, and Israel in the past. In the past, Hamas has been firing rockets trying to kill thousands of Israelis. They had the Iron Dome to protect them, and they've had different protection mechanisms, and the goal each time was to deter Hamas, hit Hamas, and make sure they'd stop for a few more years, or whatever it is. That's the goal. This time, the goal is the destruction of Hamas. It's a war Israel has not wanted to fight. It's held back from fighting for 20 years while Hamas has been digging in since at least when it took over the Strip, early 2000s, mid-2000s. By the time it was there in 2007, it was entrenched. They've spent the last 14, 15, 16 years preparing for this war, and Israel has not wanted to fight it because it knows how many people will have to die in a war like this. But at the end of the day, the destruction of how many Hamas fighters? I don't think anybody knows. Between 40,000 and 80,000. There are a lot of these fighters in there, and most of them are willing to die. They want to go to their death, and if they can survive, they want to go and kill as many Israelis as they can.
So the proportional response is the destruction of tens of thousands of Hamas fighters. Hamas fighters aren't just sitting there in the open saying hello. They're sitting underground in hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of bunkers, networks, and tunnels they've been building for nearly 20 years, in the middle of the densest civilian populations in Gaza, certainly, which are amongst the densest around the planet. There are open areas of Gaza, but that's not where Hamas is going to be. Lightly populated areas are not where they're going to position themselves. They have, in the most densely populated areas, under hospitals. That's where the central commanders and so on are.
Now think about this war. This is a war that no country has yet had to try to fight: a war where you care about civilian lives, where you've got to defend your entire population. They have rockets all over Israel as they speak, and they're ready to come up from the surface, if they can, and slaughter Israeli civilians if Israel doesn't defeat them. And Israel has to go in there fighting in alleyways and tunnels and under buildings, all over, in a place full of explosives and snipers, with tens of thousands of soldiers. The West has never had to face this. By the way, when the West was chasing Al-Qaeda through Afghanistan, they quickly fled into mountain ranges, and they were no longer in densely populated cities. When they had to chase ISIS, their last stronghold in Raqqa, there were maybe two or three thousand ISIS fighters there, and 2,000 got out. 1,000 of them were killed, and even then, with the most precise bombing, the West killed nearly twice as many civilians as ISIS fighters. Right? So think about that. If America had to go right now, or France, or Britain, or Germany, or any of these countries, in the most moral army you think there is in the world, and if you don't think Israel is in that category... I think Israel is in that category. You might disagree. Think about the most moral army in the world fighting this war right now, if it was on their border, and they'd come across the border.
Let's scale up to be proportionate to different countries, because Britain's population is 10 times the size of Israel's. Imagine some group literally sitting on Britain's border, who had come across and killed 14,000 British people, tried to kill 140,000, and wanted to kill every British person there is. And Britain is now trying to destroy them in these densely populated areas. There'll be 40,000 dead Hamas fighters, to 880,000 dead by the end. Based on the way Britain and America successfully fought these wars before, in the best-case scenarios, there might be close to that number of civilian casualties too. That's a proportionate response. Israel doesn't want that civilian casualty total, nor would Britain or America. When you're sending tanks and infantry into tens of thousands of fighters, you're looking at a scenario the West has never really faced, maybe not even in World War II, where on its border is a lethal force of tens of thousands of fighters who spent nearly 20 years building these underground bunkers and human shielding.
So what can you do? What can Israel do? What's the better option? They have weapons that can hit the Hamas guy and keep the civilians as safe as possible. They do, and that's what Israel is doing. I'll prove it to you. Israel has fired into the Strip, so far into Gaza, more than 12,000 bombs, most of them bunker-busting bombs. They go 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50 meters underground to blow up a bunker. Those bombs are immensely powerful. If Israel were just being callous with civilians, if Israel didn't care whether it kills civilians or not, then on the surface an apartment building would collapse every single time they fired them, and those apartment buildings could easily have 50 to 100 people in them. So just do the math: 12,000 bombs, and on average each would kill 50 people, let's say conservatively. What's 12,000 times 50? Six hundred thousand people. That's how many dead there would be if Israel didn't care about civilian casualties. Now, the 10,000 that have died, probably half of them are Hamas fighters. Another thousand or 2,000 have probably died from the 800 Hamas rockets that have landed in the Strip. But somewhere in there, there are still a few thousand casualties that have happened. That's tragic, but it's not 600,000. How come the figure is so relatively low?
Let's remember one more very important thing: it's in Hamas's interest to maximize the number of deaths in this conflict. They want as many deaths as there can be. I'll tell you why it's in Israel's interest to make sure there are as few as possible. Let me tell you the values on each side. Hamas needs civilian casualties because it's their best chance of survival. That's why they built themselves into such densely populated human shield populations. That's why, when Gazans have tried to flee, Hamas has shot them, planted bombs, or blocked the roads to keep as many as they possibly can. They've used every system they can: educational, social media, even religious instruction, to try to tell people they have to stay. They've announced that, and they've said to the West why they're doing it. Right? Their spokespeople have said it: "Because we're proud to die as martyrs. This is a part of our cause, dying as martyrs." They want martyrs. They want Palestinian civilians to be martyrs, because Palestinian civilians dying protects them. The more Palestinian civilians who die, and the more the West obsessively covers it, as they will, the more rage there can be, the more pressure on governments to pressure Israel, and the more pressure comes on Israel to stop the war and let Hamas live to come up the next day, ten years, three years, two years, one year, ten years time, and slaughter more and more civilians again, and more and more Israelis again. So they will have their own civilians die to give them the chance to kill civilians in Israel. That's why they're doing everything they can to ensure the maximum amount of civilian deaths. They're literally endangering millions of Palestinian civilians, putting as many as they can in the firing line, in order to ensure the choice is this: Israel, you've got to either kill our civilians, or we'll kill your civilians. It's death either way, and we win either way. You almost can't think of a sicker ideology on planet Earth. For all those people protesting, they should be screaming at Hamas for this. Screaming at Hamas: how dare you put millions of Palestinians on the line, how dare you endanger and kill so many of them so that you can then go and kill Israelis? What a murder cult.
And what's Israel's side? Israel wants as few civilians killed as possible, first of all because it actually has... I know some of you who hate Israel don't believe this, but anybody who knows Israel knows it has the same sort of moral values that most Western countries have, which is: don't want civilian deaths. If you could fight the war with zero civilian deaths, every Israeli would jump up and down and say yes, yes, yes, no civilian deaths. Even if you think they're not like that, then just from a cynical self-preservation perspective, every civilian death works against Israel's own self-interest as well. So for moral reasons, and even self-interest reasons, they need as few civilian deaths as possible. But to destroy Hamas, if Hamas is holding civilians there, it's not possible that there won't be civilian deaths. As you're sending tanks and troops deep in, if they ambush you from somewhere, you've got to hit them. If they've left civilians in that building, civilians will die. So what has Israel done? Its primary strategy has been to get as many civilians out of northern Gaza as possible. It's true the civilians can't get out of Gaza. Egypt won't let them into Egypt, and they're not going to come into Israel. So what Israel has done is divide the Strip into two, which militarily is not a good move. Militarily, it's a huge risk, because what you have basically said is, go south, Hamas, and they probably put tons of their fighters into the south, moved weapons and equipment into the south. Israel is not going to make its main attacks there, obviously. The firing of rockets is all hitting back there, but generally speaking, it's not going to make its main attack there for now. It's now going to the north, saying move the civilians as many as you can. Hamas has said to all the civilians they're not allowed to move. They've tried to block the roads, they've tried to shoot them. Israel is actually now on the Salah al-Din Road, fighting to gain control over both sides so that civilians can come through. It's hugely risky, because some of those civilians could be disguised Hamas fighters, and some of them can try to attack Israeli troops. But they're doing it to get the maximum amount of civilians out. This is something everybody watching this conflict should appreciate. Israel has managed to get 800,000 out of the 1.1 million civilians who have effectively been held hostage in Gaza City. Israel has managed to get 800,000 of them out. Now imagine you're doing a hostage rescue operation, and you have 1,100 hostages, let's say, being held by 40 to 80 terrorists, and you manage to get out those 1,100. Right? 800 of them out. You would say that's amazing. That's what has been done. They've rescued 800,000 Palestinians from the grip of Hamas. They're working every day to get more and more out, while Hamas is working to keep more and more of them in. Some of them might want to stay voluntarily, and some of them may share Hamas's ideology, but a lot of them would like to get out if they can, and Israel is trying to open up more and more safe corridors to get them out. That's the best thing you could do.
But in the meantime, even with the rockets it is firing, it's very clear that Israel is trying to miss civilians. Otherwise, there's no way to have dropped 12,000 bombs of that power in there and instead of killing 600,000, there are only a few thousand deaths. And a few thousand is a few thousand too many. It is a tragedy. I'm not belittling those deaths, and we should cry over every single one of them. But let's understand that in this conflict, one side wants to put hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to death. Basically, it's: here you go, you stand and shield us. If Israel doesn't hit you, we'll go and kill them. If they do, kill us, they'll kill you. They want hundreds of thousands of deaths in the most horrific death cult known to human civilization. I think you can put in the comments if you know another death cult as wild, crackers, and horrific as Hamas. And on the other side are the people fighting for life, of both sides, who have managed to evacuate as many civilians as possible, who, instead of 600,000 deaths in their bombing campaign, have made only a few thousand, a few thousand too many, but as close to zero as they can. That's the proportionality we need to think about when we think about this conflict. I'm not saying it's good. War is gruesome, war is horrific, and we must pray for the civilians of all sides. We must pray for the safety of the heroic soldiers of Israel going in there. They should be successful in not killing civilians and in killing and destroying as much of Hamas as possible. Maybe even pray that all the Hamas wake up one day and just say, "Hey, let us change our ways." They don't need to die in this conflict either. We pray for peace, and we pray for an end to all war.