According to Pulitzer-prize winning American journalist and political commentator Nicholas Kristof: “We Must Not Kill Gazan Children to Try to Protect Israel’s Children.” But suppose that is the only way to protect Israeli children.
Suppose some bad guys had previously, God forbid, killed one of Kristof’s two children, and the only way to stop those terrorists from killing his other child was for this New York Times writer to kill a few children of the bad guys.
Would Kristof be justified in killing their children? Of course he would be. Remember, it was the bad guys who started it with this wanton murder of children. If Kristoff acted in this manner, he would be acting in defense, not offense. This is a distinction that seems to be beyond the ken of this Gray Lady editorialist.
If we extrapolate from this “insight” of Kristof’s, the holdup man and his victim, when the latter retaliates, are moral equals. Ditto for the rapist and his victim. She is no more entitled to use violence in her self-defense than he was justified in violently victimizing her in the first place. This is the moral clarity that this author extols?
We are now in a war. The motto “From the river to the sea” is only a part of the demands of Hamas. Not only should the Israelis be kicked out of their country, but they should all, ideally, be murdered. What is the other part? Jews anywhere in the world must also be exterminated. Why? We are infidels! We are vermin! We are disgusting! We are putrid! Muslim religious books require this treatment. If you want to get into heaven and avail yourself of 72 virgins, you must annihilate Jews. (Of course, not every follower of Islam believes this bilge and acts upon it, but all too many of them do.) And, in order to accomplish the first part of this task, Hamas uses its own children as shields, and Kristof blathers on about how neither set of children are more precious than the other. He avers: “The acceptance of large-scale bombing of Gaza and of a ground invasion likely to begin soon suggests that Palestinian children are lesser victims, devalued by their association with Hamas and its history of terrorism.”
He is trying to be even-handed, one can read in between the lines. But when the devil and an angel are fighting each other, a balanced assessment is not the moral one.
If Israel disarmed tomorrow morning, by the end of the day there would be no more Israel. Each and every Jew in that country will have been slaughtered. If Hamas and its brethren put down their weapons, there would be peace. And Kristof sees both sides as morally equivalent.
Here is another gem from this wordsmith:
“Here in Israel, because the Hamas attacks were so brutal and fit into a history of pogroms and Holocaust, they led to a resolve to wipe out Hamas even if this means a large human toll. ‘Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,’ declared Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israeli National Security Council. ‘There is no other option for ensuring the security of the State of Israel.’
“I think that view reflects a practical and moral miscalculation. While I would love to see the end of Hamas, it’s not feasible to eliminate radicalism in Gaza, and a ground invasion is more likely to feed extremism than to squelch it – at an unbearable cost in civilian lives.”
Does a New York Times writer think Israel should just not respond to Hamas?
What policy is then justified from these considerations in Kristof’s view? Why, pretty much the IDF should do nothing at all. Bombing will kill innocents. An invasion, with house-to-house fighting, should also be off the table. Sorry, this is not even-handed. To follow this pacifistic policy is to encourage more Hamas incursions, with additional carnage. It is simply “not feasible” to not fight back.
In the past, Israel has been tempted to turn the other cheek. But this invasion was so brutal, so despicable, that, hopefully, the only civilized country in the Middle East will now engage in a very different path. Ignore the UN and the Arab League (none of whose members are willing to take any Gazan refugees into their countries on a permanent basis). Continue to disregard all those who counsel do-nothingism.
It is particularly problematic that Israel has now agreed to “pauses” in its fighting and other such humanitarian policies. The specter of babies dying in Gazan hospitals does indeed tug at the heartstrings of all decent people. But have we forgotten that Hamas still holds over 200 Israeli hostages? True, none of them are as young as the newborns in incubators. But still, there are youngsters in this group, along with helpless women and old people. Have we forgotten that Hamas has used these hospitals as staging grounds for its attacks on the only country that now exists between the river and the sea? The danger is that world opinion and its own benevolent impulses (does any other country drop leaflets on targets?) will lead Israel in the direction of too many concessions. On all too many US college campuses, the pictures of Israeli children now held in captivity by Hamas are being torn down. Israeli lives matter! ■
Walter E. Block and Alan G. Futerman are co-authors of The Classical Liberal Case for Israel (Springer, 2021, with commentary by Benjamin Netanyahu).