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Tom Friedman, as usual, is insightful and convincing in this
editorial.--Manny<br>
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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/14/opinion/international-world/israel-hamas-war.html"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/14/opinion/international-world/israel-hamas-war.html</a>
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<div class="css-42igfv"><a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion"
data-testid="story-section" moz-do-not-send="true">
<div class="css-7ty29z e1vbbbt70">Opinion</div>
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<div class="css-1vkm6nb ehdk2mb0">
<h1 id="link-7afddd1a" class="css-xkf25q e1h9rw200"
data-testid="headline">Why Israel Is Acting This Way</h1>
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<div data-testid="lazyimage-container" style="height: auto;"><time
class="css-1g7pp1u e16638kd0"
datetime="2023-10-14T00:01:09-04:00">Oct. 14, 2023</time></div>
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<div class="css-t91cuf epjyd6m1"><br>
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<p class="css-1tx0lhj e1jsehar1"><span
class="byline-prefix">By </span><span
class="css-1baulvz last-byline" itemprop="name"><a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/thomas-l-friedman"
class="css-n8ff4n e1jsehar0"
moz-do-not-send="true">Thomas L. Friedman</a></span></p>
<div id="enhanced-byline" class="css-8atqhb">
<p class="css-1fovwrw e1wtpvyy0">Opinion Columnist</p>
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<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">With the Middle East on the
cusp of a full-blown ground war, I was thinking on
Friday morning about how Israel’s last two major wars
have two very important things in common: They were both
started by nonstate actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah
from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from Gaza now — <em
class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">after</em> Israel had
withdrawn from their territories.</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">And they both began with
bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah killing three
and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas
brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150
Israeli civilians, including older people, babies and
toddlers, in addition to soldiers.</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">That similarity is not a
coincidence. Both assaults were designed to challenge
emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s
existence in the region.</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">And most critically, the
result of these surprise, deadly attacks across
relatively stable borders was that they drove Israel
crazy.</p>
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<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">In 2006, Israel essentially
responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy
stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a
little border dispute. We may look Western, but the
modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the
jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime
minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push
comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local
rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not
outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">So the Israeli Air Force
relentlessly <a class="css-yywogo"
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/8/4/new-israeli-air-strikes-on-lebanon"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">pounded the homes and offices</a>
of Hezbollah’s leadership in the southern suburbs of
Beirut throughout the 34 days of the war, as well as key
bridges into and out of the city and Beirut
International Airport. Hezbollah’s leaders and their
families and neighbors paid a very personal price.</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The Israeli response was so
ferocious that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah,
said in a now famous <a class="css-yywogo"
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/8/27/nasrallah-says-he-did-not-want-war"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">interview</a> on Aug. 27, 2006,
with Lebanon’s New TV station, shortly after the war
ended: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the
capture [of two Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war at
this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had
known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such
a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Indeed, since 2006, the
Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively stable and
quiet, with few casualties on both sides. And while
Israel did take a hit in terms of its global image
because of the carnage it inflicted in Beirut, it was
not nearly as isolated in the world or the Middle East
over the short term or long run as Hezbollah had hoped.</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Hamas must have missed that
lesson when it decided to disrupt the status quo around
Gaza with an all-out attack on Israel last weekend. This
is in spite of the fact that over the past few years,
Israel and Hamas developed a form of coexistence around
Gaza that allowed thousands of Gazans to enter Israel
daily for work, filled Hamas coffers with cash aid from
Qatar and gave Gazans the ability to do business with
Israel, with Gazan goods being exported through Israeli
seaports and airports.</p>
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Hamas’s stated reasons for this war are that Benjamin
Netanyahu’s government has been provoking the Palestinians
by the morning strolls that Israel’s minister for national
security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was taking around Al Aqsa Mosque
in Jerusalem and by the steps that he was taking to make
imprisonment of Palestinians harsher. While these moves by
Israel were widely seen as provocations, they are hardly
issues that justify Hamas putting all its chips on the table
the way it did last Saturday.</div>
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<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The bigger reason it acted
now, which Hamas won’t admit, is that it saw how Israel
was being more accepted by the Arab world and soon
possibly by the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia. Iran
was being cornered by President Biden’s Middle East
diplomacy, and Palestinians feared being left behind.</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">So Hamas essentially said,
“OK, Jews, we will go where we have never gone before.
We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t
stop with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and
slaughter your babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are
willing to risk it to force you to outcrazy us, with the
hope that the fires will burn up all Arab-Israeli
normalization in the process.”</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Yes, if you think Israel is
now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face,
humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel
believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that
it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Israel will apply Hama
Rules — a term I <a class="css-yywogo"
href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1989/8/18/journey-through-a-troubled-region-pifrom/"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">coined years ago</a> to
describe the strategy deployed in 1982 by Syria’s
president, Hafez al-Assad, when Hamas’s political
forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, tried to
topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in
the city of Hama.</p>
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<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Assad pounded the
Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for
days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and
leveled it as flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000
of his own people in the process. I walked on that
rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told me
privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged
when he was asked about it: “People live. People die.”</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Welcome to the Middle East.
This is not like a border dispute between Norway and
Sweden or a heated debate in Harvard Yard. Lord, how I
wish that it were, but it’s not.</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">This Israel-Hamas war is
part of an evolving escalation of craziness that has
been underway in this neighborhood but getting more and
more dangerous every year as weapons get bigger, cheaper
and more lethal.</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Like Biden, I stand 100
percent with Israel against Hamas, because Israel is an
ally that shares many values with America, while Hamas
and Iran are opposed to what America stands for. That
math is quite simple for me.</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">But what makes this war
different for me from any war before is Israel’s
internal politics. In the past nine months, a group of
Israeli far-right and ultra-Orthodox politicians led by
Netanyahu tried to kidnap Israeli democracy in plain
sight. The religious-nationalist-settler right, led by
the prime minister, tried to take over Israel’s
judiciary and other key institutions by eliminating the
power of Israel’s Supreme Court to exercise judicial
review. That attempt opened multiple fractures across
Israeli society. Israel was recklessly being taken by
its leadership to the brink of a civil war for an
ideological flight of fancy. These fractures were seen
by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah and may have stirred their
boldness.</p>
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<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">If you want to get just a
little feel for those fractures — and the volcanic anger
at Netanyahu for the way he divided the country before
this war — watch the video that went viral in Israel two
days ago when Idit Silman, a minister in Netanyahu’s
ruling Likud party, was tossed out of the Assaf Harofeh
Hospital in Tzrifin when she went to visit some wounded.</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">“You’ve ruined this
country. Get out of here,” an Israeli doctor yelled at
her. “How are you not ashamed to wage another war?”
another person told her. “Now it’s our turn,” the doctor
can be heard screaming in a <a class="css-yywogo"
href="https://twitter.com/EylonALevy/status/1712121406262063571"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">video published on X</a>,
formerly known as Twitter, and reported by <a
class="css-yywogo"
href="https://forward.com/fast-forward/564354/israeli-cabinet-ministers-heckled-hospital-visits-wounded/"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">The Forward</a>. “We are in
charge. We will govern here — right, left, a nation
united — without you. You’ve ruined everything!”</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Israel has suffered a
staggering blow and is now forced into a morally
impossible war to outcrazy Hamas and deter Iran and
Hezbollah at the same time. I weep for the terrible
deaths that now await so many good Israelis and
Palestinians. And I also worry deeply about the Israeli
war plan. It is one thing to <em class="css-2fg4z9
e1gzwzxm0">deter</em> Hezbollah and deter Hamas. It is
quite another to <em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">replace</em>
Hamas and leave behind something more stable and decent.
But what to do?</p>
<p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Finally, though, just as I
stand today with Israel’s new unity government in its
fight against Hamas to save Israel’s body, I will stand
after this war with Israel’s democracy defenders against
those who tried to abduct Israel’s soul.</p>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
— Charlie Chaplin</pre>
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