At War With Hamas

In the wake of a military attack by “Hamas militants” against Israelis on an unprecedented scale, Israel has declared war on Hamas. James Joyner summarized the situation reasonably well:

I’ve disliked Netanyahu, thinking him a thug and a bully, going back to his first stint as prime minister in the 1990s. His illegal and immoral occupation policies have certainly contributed to this crisis.

That said, this attack by Palestinian militants was stupid. Attacking Israeli civilians was obviously going to result in a massively disproportional response. And, while there are no good guys here, I don’t see how the United States could have done other than side with an ally whose territory has been attacked.

The horror of the situation is not merely in the indiscriminate nature of the attacks, killing mostly civilians but in the considerable possibility that the conflict may expand. Israel only has a limited number of alternatives:

• Make a token response
• Create a larger buffer between Gaza and Israel. Since Gaza is only 25 miles long, that wouldn’t leave a lot. Israel might just eject (or destroy) the whole population. Unpopular as the Palestinians are, that could result in some level of involvement by other Arab countries or Iran.
• The weapons Hamas is using are coming through Egypt. Attempting to cut that off might involve Egypt.

While I agree with James that we have little choice but to side with Israel, I think that it should be observed that circumstances are considerably different now than they were in the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago. Then a substantial proportion of the Arabs in the United States were Maronite Christians; now they are predominantly Muslims. Then there was an order of magnitude more Jewish-Americans than Arab-Americans; now they’re roughly equal in number. Then nearly all Jewish Americans supported Israel; now Israel’s support among American Jews has decreased somewhat—many Reform Jews don’t support Israel at all. Israel’s government and the Israelis themselves have become much more conservative. Then support for the Palestinians among Americans was rare; among young Americans now support for Israel and the Palestinians is about the same.