After Hamas’s horrific attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman offered some prescient advice to Israel: Don’t make the same mistake the U.S. made after Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11. (See author’s note below) Instead, react in a measured, proportional way. Striking back at Hamas with overwhelming military force, Friedman warned, might teach Hamas a lesson, but it also would guarantee the deaths of many innocent Gazan civilians and reduce to dust that sliver of real estate they share with Hamas terrorists.

 

Eighteen months later, Gaza is in ruins, with thousands of adults and children dead or maimed, or alive but homeless and starving. Thoughtful, moral people are appalled that Israel has  ignored calls for restraint. Increasingly they are speaking out about Israel’s  ruthlessness, focusing their ire on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. Unfortunately and unfairly, those who criticize Israel are being accused of antisemitism: If you oppose Israel’s attacks on Gaza, it must be because you despise Jews. 

 

Such thinking is simplistic. True, there are some antisemites among the millions of people worldwide who oppose the carnage in Gaza, but I believe the majority — including many Jews — oppose what Netanyahu’s government is doing for the right reason: because it is immoral and inhumane. 

 

The situation in Gaza has parallels to what happened in the U.S. after 9/11. Many Americans were gung-ho for a quick and decisive military response. Many others, me among them, opposed a hasty, let’s-get-even approach. Our government didn’t pay much attention to those of us who opposed invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Likewise, Netanyahu waves off Israelis’ who protest in the streets of Tel Aviv against his government’s war in Gaza. 

 

Are these protestors antisemitic? No, they are Jews taking action against the immorality of killing innocent people — more than 50,000 so far. That  number will rise if humanitarian agencies aren’t soon allowed into Gaza, whose people face imminent starvation. 

 

Who’s to blame for the deaths and suffering? Hamas for sure, along with other terrorist organizations in the Mideast that have aided and abetted Hamas violence for years. Also Netanyahu and his coalition government. They’ve been accused of committing war crimes because of the brutality of their attacks on Gaza. And don’t forget the U.S., which gave Netanyahu carte blanche to wage war against Gazans. President Biden’s ill-advised trip to Israel right after Oct. 7 sent a clear message to Bibi: We will back you to the hilt. Add to the blame list our defense contractors, who saw dollar signs when the bombs started falling on Gaza.

 

Our Republican politicians also exploited the opportunity to support yet another war. And Donald Trump leapt at the chance to demonize as antisemitic anyone who spoke out against Israel’s war policy. Trump vows to strip universities, most notably Harvard, of government grants because they didn’t quash student demonstrations against Israel’s war policy. Such demonstrations are evidence of antisemitism on campuses, Trump says. Quite a stretch even for a habitual liar. 

 

And in the Middle East, malign forces in some nations bankrolled Hamas despite its vow to wipe Israel off the map. Just as extremist elements in Saudi Arabia aided the 9/11 terrorists, jihadist Muslims from the region aided Hamas up to and after Oct. 7. Clearly parties on both sides of the Gaza war made the present horror more likely, cheering one side or the other toward violence.

 

 As Tom Friedman pointed out a year and a half ago, there was another way to proceed, one that had proven effective for Israel in the past. Instead of attacking the whole of Gaza — targeting Hamas and innocent civilians alike — Israel could have gone after Hamas murderers selectively. Surgically taking out Hamas operatives one at a time would have minimized collateral damage (a euphemism meaning killing innocent people and saying it’s OK). Sure, it would have taken longer to exact the punishment that Hamas and its leaders deserve, but the lives of 50,000 Gazans might have been saved. 

 

Israel did exactly that after the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich. The Mossad, the crack Israeli intelligence agency that also conducts covert operations, spent years tracking down and executing each of the killers. Their resolute hunt has become the stuff of legend. I realize that the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas was larger in scale than the Munich attack; perhaps a surgical approach didn’t make sense. But I have difficulty reconciling Israel’s calibrated response to Munich with the wholesale leveling of Gaza and the killing of 50,000 civilians. Surely there was some middle ground.

 

So now we’re faced with the horror of unrelenting violence that cannot possibly be characterized as a proportional response. We watch children killed by the thousands with no end in sight. Where is the outrage? Why are people who demand a halt to the carnage accused of antisemitism? College students should be protesting against Israel’s war policy —  wouldn’t it be distressing if they weren’t? It would signal that our youth had lost their souls; that outrage at the most horrific violence is no longer allowed. Wouldn’t that be worse for the future than the demonstrations we saw this past academic year? Can anyone who self-identifies as a religious person — Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, etc. — possibly look at what is happening in Gaza and say it is acceptable? In what moral code is mass killing and destruction OK?

 

Yet we see the wealthy nations of the Gulf  — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — falling all over themselves to welcome our buffoon of a president while their Arab kindred in Gaza are starving, dying and being blasted to kingdom come. Trump, for his part, was scouting out business deals aimed at enriching himself and his family. Don’t Arab leaders care that the U.S. is arming Israel with the bombs falling on Gazans? Have they no shame? We know Trump has none, but that’s old news. Shame on the leaders of those nations and on our own for sitting by and letting the Gaza war proceed unhindered. 

 

Blame Netanyahu if you will. He richly deserves it. But our own leaders — Biden, Trump, and every Republican who has not spoken out against this war — must shoulder their own culpability. We have done nothing to save even one little Gazan child. Of all the things our country should be ashamed of now, this may be number one.

 

Author’s note: It should not be forgotten that our response to 9/11 – the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan – caused the deaths of some 400,000 civilians between 2001 and 2019 according the The Cost of War project at Brown University.  So we have no right to claim that what Israel is doing in Gaza shocks our sensibilities. We did the same thing on a bigger scale.

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