This is what it looks like when you accept Hamas’s desires as unalterable laws of nature but Israelis’ commitment to remove the enemy who vows permanent war as some facile, negotiable preference. What if we are just as committed as they are? What then? What if this is the only thing Netanyahu is doing right? When does Hamas’s responsibility kick in? Are Hamas children? Animals? Why are they less responsible for their decisions than we are? I’ve got a lot of complaints about Netanyahu, fundamental ones. Unlike many of his true believers on the Israeli political right, I still haven’t forgiven him for October 7, and I don’t intend to. Or for caving to Biden. Or for 14 years of hawkish bluster while he pursued the opposite in actual policy. Or for still, still avoiding meeting so many of the victims of his mistakes. But the one thing he occasionally gets right, between bouts of forgetfully getting it wrong, is his understanding that this is a war to redefine the nature of the religious struggle to destroy us. It is as much about Iran as Hamas, about the Muslim Brothers of Turkey and Syria as the Muslim Brothers of Gaza. That Hamas would resist to the last living Gazan is not a reason to leave it standing; it is a reason to destroy it — and to do so without the mass Yemen-scale death of Gazans that is Hamas’s fundamental strategy. It’s both a moral requirement and a strategic one, because Hamas sees such death as its fundamental victory and path to survival, much as the Houthis did. The idea that Hamas will walk away quietly as long as it doesn’t have to do it first — oof. Some people think of the world as a Hollywood-scripted bar fight between testosterone-soaked young men too proud to back down. A Karate Kid movie. But this is an idea only ever seriously advanced by those great Hamas experts who all, to the last one, were convinced Hamas was on the opposite trajectory of what we saw on October 7. Sorry, Gershon. Hamas must go. It must be seen to go. And Israel must be what makes it go. That’s the path to safety, to a Palestinian political and religious world that doesn’t just double down on this religious insanity for another round. Hamas can decide the price of this outcome, but not the outcome itself. The pan-Arabist campaign for our destruction died when we defeated its armies in the field. This Islamist version of the same, the deep idea driving Hamas to its astonishing cruelty — I mean cruelty to Gazans, not just to Israelis — will die the same way. Any other outcome, if Netanyahu now caves as you demand, will mean Hamas and its idea survive to fight another war before long. No more containment. No more deterrence. You’re not as clever as you think, and clever, glib answers in which there are no qualms, no dilemmas, no self-critique, just don’t cut the mustard anymore. We no longer postpone threats. We remove them. This is the new Israel. You can love it, you can hate it. But our enemies made it. And it will be their undoing.
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