When not showing video and photographs taken by journalists embedded with Hamas forces, news outlets are showing an endless stream of images of the devastation in Gaza, which in turn are used as fodder for those arguing that Israel has “done enough” and must work for a ceasefire. One of the more reasonable versions of this argument has been made by the journalist Shadi Hamid, first on the website formerly known as Twitter and then in the Washington Post. Robert Satloff refutes it, beginning with Hamid’s reliance on faulty comparisons with the U.S. campaign against Islamic State:
Comparisons between Gaza and the U.S. experience in Syria and Iraq are false and misleading. Distance and time matter. The U.S. was under no time pressure to complete the mission in a huge, faraway place and did not have CNN embedded with the enemy, so it could operate a certain way.
By contrast, Israel is securing its own border after a horrific next-door attack, with the global clock ticking, under the glare of international media. No one ever threatened the U.S. with demands for a ceasefire; thousands of Islamic State-sympathizers did not march in world capitals. So if Israel uses more bombs per day than U.S., that’s a function of time and space; if you told Israelis the world would let them finish the job without interference, that there was no race to achieve success before global patience ran out, their tactics may be different.
Then you make the straw-man argument that Israel is “likely to further radicalize more Palestinians.” Israel doesn’t say its goal is to eliminate radicalism; it’s to deny Hamas territorial control, political rule, and military capacity. For that, nothing succeeds like success. . . . If you truly care for the future of Palestinians in Gaza and potential for Israel-Palestinian peace, let alone Israeli national-security interests, then the only thing worse than the current fighting is fighting that ends with Hamas still in power.
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