Hamas’s Global Test for Biden
Gaza is burning as Israeli forces methodically proceed to dismantle its structures of terror. The coming retribution will be terrible, but it is necessary and just. Hamas has lost the right to rule Gaza.
It must be dismantled and disarmed, and neither Israel nor its neighbors can permit the group to return to power. Despite the best efforts of the Israel Defense Forces, innocent civilians will suffer, and too many will die. Urban warfare against a brutal enemy that doesn’t scruple to use civilians as shields can have no other result, but what is coming to Gaza is not the fault of the IDF.
What will follow the fighting can’t be foreseen. The establishment of a new Palestinian governing authority for the territory, linked to Fatah, closely guarded by Israel and Egypt, and funded by the Gulf states would be perhaps the best outcome for all concerned, but the war must be won before peace can be built. At best, Gaza’s future seems bleak.
More than two million people are crowded into a barren wasteland with few natural resources and little hope. A rational Palestinian leadership would understand that, so situated, the only hope for the people of Gaza lies in close collaboration with Egypt and Israel. It would then settle down to the hard but necessary task of creating an economy that can support its people with dignity and security.
Hamas has had other ideas. The misery and poverty of the Palestinian people is the soil, the only soil, in which a movement this perverted can flourish. Hamas has done all it could to keep Gaza wretched while inculcating an ideology of genocidal rage.
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