Allied Agony
By Richard C. Gross
“The private wound is deepest. O, time most accursed, ‘mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst.”
William Shakespeare, “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Act V, Scene 4
Stubborn, intransigent Israel is courting the loss of American patience, support and possibly even a 76-year friendship unless it accedes to U.S. demands to abandon plans to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where a million displaced people have sought refuge, and move toward a two-state peace with the Palestinians.
Israel, caught between defending its hard-won nation of 9 million or losing the backing of a solid benefactor that has supplied it with advice, money, weapons and love through war and peace, is determined to wipe out the remaining stronghold of Hamas, the terrorists who mercilessly, brutally, inhumanly slaughtered 1,200 souls and seized about 250 hostages in a totally unexpected invasion on the bloodied Saturday of Oct.7.
Israelis know it as the Black Sabbath. None ever may be blacker.
It surpasses the Egyptian and Syrian surprise attack of Yom Kippur 1973 that killed 2,656 Israeli military in 18 days of war because it was more preventable, its initial weak military response far less efficient. This blitz at dawn was on another level, a civilian playing field -- innocents at home, unaware, unsuspecting, thrust into a cauldron.
Can you blame Israelis for wanting to wipe out an Iran-backed enemy that seized the Gaza Strip from the duly elected Palestinian Authority in a bloody overthrow in 2007, armed itself to the hilt with missiles and rockets and staged attack after attack against Israelis with the stated aim of wiping out Jews?
Israelis thought they were doing right in surrendering the desert strip in 2005, evacuating 21 Jewish settlements housing 9,00o people and military bases. A good move aimed at peace with the 1.3 million Gazans but a bad result. Israelis often point to the withdrawal as a mistake because it created a terrorist enclave next door to southern Israel, pockmarked with towns and kibbutzim.
Was it a mistake?
Israelis had enough with Hamas after Oct. 7. Its powerful U.S.-built air force, artillery, armor and army swept in, leveling apartment buildings, mosques, entire neighborhoods, creating wholesale destruction of the kind not seen since the 12-year Syrian war. Hamas said 30,000 Palestinians were killed, many of them children and women. Among them are a reported 13,000 terrorists.
Who knows what Hamas, which runs the health ministry, views as truth?
If true, the overwhelming scale of the casualties, far more than the 18,500 Egyptian and Syrian soldiers estimated to have been killed in the 1973 war, has led to such worldwide condemnation that U.S. leaders have been urging Israel for months to scale back its attacks against Hamas, warning it was creating a pariah nation.
Israel has argued the terrorists have dug up to 450 miles of sophisticated tunnels under hospitals, houses, mosques and shops, its justification for dropping bunker-busting 2,000-pound bombs. So how do you keep civilians from getting bombed and their properties destroyed if the goal is to root Hamas out of its tunnels or bury them there? Forsake bombs and send commandos into the tunnels at enormous risk? And the hostages? Collateral damage?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultranationalist cabinet have ignored American entreaties to restrict the military’s campaign tactics against Hamas, trying the patience of top American supporters like President Joe Biden. He recently criticized the offensive as “over the top.”
Netanyahu wants to finish the war, delete Hamas. But who is the real superpower here? Doesn’t overly generous U.S. military and diplomatic assistance to Israel give Washington the right to interfere?
Enter Sen. Chuck Schumer, the New York Democratic leader and the top-ranking Jewish politician in the country. He blasted Netanyahu as a major obstacle to peace and demanded new Israeli elections to return him to civilian life.
His courageous statement on the floor of the Senate flashed the biggest signal yet that America, Israel’s strongest ally, was fed up with how Israelis were waging the five-month war. He also said aloud what lots of Americans, Jews included, are thinking. He informed Biden of the speech beforehand.
“. . . Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel,” Schumer said. “He has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”
“At this critical juncture,” he said, “I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel, at a time when so many Israelis have lost their confidence in the vision and direction of their government,” he said.
Israelis want Netanyahu out because they blame him for Hamas’ ability to launch its surprise attack. But they seem to first want an end to the war before any elections, viewing them as a distraction.
Schumer’s speech marked a serious step in imperiling U.S.-Israeli relations. Other political leaders, most of them Democrats, have discussed harsher measures to get Israel to comply with American wishes. Halting weapons transfers is one example. Republicans favor the Israeli position, creating more polarization in America.
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, expressed concern to The New York Times at the slipping of Washington’s tolerance for Israel’s unrelenting war against Hamas. Netanyahu argues that most Israelis support his goal of eliminating Hamas to prevent future attacks against their country.
“For a Jewish senator from New York, the majority leader, a friend of Netanyahu who’s the most centrist possible Democrat and even leans hawkish on Israel, to voice criticism like this? If you’ve lost Chuck Schumer, you’ve lost America,” Pinkas said.
The reaction of ordinary Americans to Israel’s devastating attacks in Gaza has led to denunciations of Israel and the political philosophy of Zionism that led to its creation; demonstrations with chants, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free;” and a rise in anti-Semitism that initiated a troubling cover story about it in the April issue of The Atlantic, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.”
The headline for the lengthy article by staff writer Franklin Foer, a Jew, was a statement, not a question. Do you think this is happening?
“The surge of anti-Semitism is a symptom of the decay of democratic habits [in America], a leading indicator of rising authoritarianism,” he wrote. . . . “If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.”
Israelis have bristled at being told what to do by an ally, arguing that Israel is a sovereign nation and makes its own decisions. The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated in 1995, had similar problems with U.S. dictation of Israeli policy, especially when it came to making peace agreements.
It’s the worst rupture in Israeli-American relations since 1975, when an angry Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, also a Jew, got so upset at Israeli intransigence over a proposed post-’73 interim agreement with Egypt that it led President Gerald Ford to declare he would reassess the relationship with Israel.
“This marked an unprecedented shift in the U.S.-Israel relationship” from the stance toward the Jewish state taken by Ford’s predecessor, President Richard M. Nixon, wrote David Tal in a Middle Eastern Studies paper in October.
Nothing came of the reassessment, a typical result of disagreements between the two countries.
Israel obviously cannot afford to lose America’s backing, particularly now when much of the free world is against it. It should get more in line with U.S. efforts to end the war and find a path toward peace, if there’s a Hamas left with which to negotiate.
As for Netanyahu, the Democrats in power may want to get rid of him as much as they want to eliminate former President Donald Trump, but it may not be easy. There’s a huge Israeli right-wing, much of it composed of the near-700,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, Russian immigrants and the Orthodox in Jerusalem and in B’nai Brak near Tel Aviv. They voted Netanyahu in before the war, but with difficulty.
Israel should continue fighting; its cause is just and it has a right to defend itself, just as it would for any country. America did it after 9/11. But Israel should end the crippling bombing and change the tactics to try hard to keep Palestinian civilians out of it.
Richard C. Gross, who covered war and peace in Israel, the American military at the Pentagon, was foreign editor of United Press International and was the opinion page editor of The Baltimore Sun.