Two years ago today, Hamas perpetrated the single greatest massacre of Jews since the end of the Nazi Holocaust in 1945.
In a barbaric assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, 1,195 people, including citizens of the United States and many other nations, were murdered. In addition to mass murder, Hamas fighters raped and brutalized dozens of women, men, and children. They took 251 hostages, dragged them bloodied and terrified into Gaza to be humiliated by throngs of delighted Palestinians, and then kept them in appalling conditions, often tortured, and many more were either murdered or left to die lingering deaths. As of today, 148 hostages have been released in various deals with Israel. Dozens of others have perished. Just 20 are believed to remain alive.
The scale of the trauma on Israel and its people is hard to encapsulate and can hardly be overstated. But to offer some perspective, consider that Israel’s population is only 9.8 million. A proportional terrorist attack against the U.S. would have seen 43,000 dead, and the attack 14 times as lethal as the horror inflicted on this country on Sept. 11, 2001.
REPUBLICANS ARE PUSHING THESE FIVE DEMOCRATS TO FLIP ON FUNDING BILL
But Israel now has a chance to get its remaining citizens out of Hamas’s dungeons and the possibility of genuine peace. President Donald Trump‘s new plan would finally disarm Hamas, secure Israel’s territory around Gaza, and provide a better future for the people of Gaza. If Hamas refuses Trump’s proposal, or otherwise prevaricates in supporting its implementation, it must face military annihilation, as both Israel has warned and Trump has endorsed.
The president’s strategy, supported by Arab and other leaders of Muslim nations in the region, and by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, centers on removing Hamas from the equation and introducing a provisional international panel to govern Gaza. This panel would focus on bolstering Gaza’s political and economic development until a reformed Palestinian Authority could assume responsibility for the territory. Reform would include an end to the indoctrination of children into murderous Jew hatred. Israeli forces would withdraw to a buffer zone at the edge of the Gaza Strip.
This agenda deserves bipartisan support from Congress. The resolution of this conflict is important both for America’s standing with its Arab allies and for the benefit it would provide to consolidating Israel’s diplomatic position abroad.
No one can credibly claim that the deal is unfair to the Palestinians. It provides for the future possibility of a Palestinian state. Trump backed this up recently by publicly rejecting any effort by Israel to annex the contested territory of Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. Trump is trying to cut the knot that no previous leader has been able to untangle. His plan provides for the elimination of Hamas as a viable political and military entity while also laying the foundations of a new Palestinian political culture that pursues credible aspirations for peace and prosperity over perpetual war.
This is a colossal challenge.
Even as it has offered tentative support for Trump’s proposal, Hamas must not be allowed to play tricky, prevaricating games with the process. If it refuses to disarm, Israel must be allowed and indeed supported in the renewal of military operations against the group. No people can reasonably be expected to live with a dedicated existential threat as their neighbor.
Any renewed military action would have to run alongside bolstered aid flows to safe zones. But as we stand on Oct. 7 and look back at the atrocity of two years ago, no decent person or government can blame Israel for insisting that Hamas be eliminated as a military power in Gaza.
Hamas must choose between its military and political dismemberment or death. No Israeli government could survive anything less. It would also be morally unconscionable. Western supporters of the terrorist group delude themselves that Hamas is a resistance force fighting for Palestinian security and statehood. They ignore Hamas’s use of its own people as a shield and its genocidal terrorism against Israeli civilians.
Just as the Holocaust can be explained only by the Nazi ideology that falsely blamed Jews for a conspiracy to create a historic suffering of Germans, only Hamas’s warped ideology explains what was wrought on the Jewish people two years ago. And just as the Nazis were forced to choose between annihilation and surrender, so must Hamas also be forced to make that choice.
TRUMP’S DC TAKEOVER LED CRIME INCIDENTS TO DROP AND ARRESTS TO INCREASE
Time is short for the terrorists. They can finally put the interests of the Palestinian people first, although they have never shown that that is an issue about which they care. They are fortunate that they still have the choice. They must make the right one or face annihilation.
