Will Israel Seize the Day?

It was by glancing at a blog feed in the wee hours of Sunday morning that I first learned of the barbaric -- but utterly predictable -- terrorist onslaught going on in Israel.

By now, I have no need to catalog the sheer brutality. Perhaps, to aid the American imagination, it is worth noting that our population is thirty five times that of Israel: To get a numerical feel for the severity of the attack, multiply any figure by 100, then divide by three, for an approximation, as our population is about 35 times that of Israel.

I highly recommend Yaron Brook's comments on the breaking news, which I linked above and embed below.

Brook follows up with a lengthier podcast, which I plan to listen to today while on errands.

Daniel Pipes correctly calls the crisis "Israel's Opportunity to Destroy Hamas" in an editorial so titled in the Wall Street Journal in which he notes that many (if not most) Palestinians in Gaza might be receptive to renewed Israeli occupation:

[M]ost Gazans loathe Hamas, but they dare not rise up against their power-hungry oppressors, who enjoy support from Iran. What about Israel? It has the motive and the means to end Hamas rule, but its security establishment has preferred that Hamas, for all its horrors and threats, stay in power rather than have the Israel Defense Forces move back into Gaza (from which they withdrew in 2005) and run the territory again. For one sign of Israel's acquiescence to Hamas rule, note that it permits and even encourages the government of Qatar to send Hamas $30 million a month.

...

Once Gaza has been secured, Israel would find a great number of its inhabitants ready to start over and build productive lives rather than focus endlessly and hopelessly on the destruction of Israel. Gaza could aspire to become the "Singapore of the Middle East" of which optimists dreamed decades ago. None of this can happen as long as Iran's medieval-minded agents run the enclave.

Israel can and -- for reasons Brook lays out that I fully agree with -- should take over Gaza, root out the entire terrorist infrastructure, and in the same manner the United States did in Japan after World War II, pacify it.

The fact that Israel has not only tolerated Hamas being in power and receiving foreign aid, but also supplies electricity and water to Gaza (!) makes me pessimistic about the country taking this course of action. And listening to Brook -- who is from Israel and knows far more about the situation and the context leading up to it than I -- has unfortunately led me to become even more pessimistic about it doing so.

-- CAV