What If?

I was following some of the Pro-Hamas protests.  There is a “hunger strike” going on at Princeton.  One of the goofy kids there was a scrawny girl who said she has been on the hunger strike for almost one hundred and five hours.  She hasn’t had any solid food in all that time.  So, I guess she’s living on Gatorade and orange juice.  And I thought, “Well, she’s gonna lose some of those extra pounds she’s been trying to lose for the beach season.  That’s a plus.  And then they started telling us of all the innocent people in Gaza; women and children that were starving and being killed by bullets and bombs.

And that’s true.  While the IDF and Hamas shoot it out, the human shields that Hamas has emplaced will be killed.  Now that’s a horrible thing.  But when Hamas went on a rampage back in October, they were killing men, women and children.  And they weren’t trying to shoot IDF soldiers hiding behind these people.  They searched them out in civilian towns and murdered them face to face.  They killed parents in front of their children.  The murdered infants and then cut their heads off.  They raped women and then killed them for good measure.  Then they took some of these victims back to Gaza to add to their stock of human shields.

So, if the Israelis want to prevent the next massacre how do they do that without capturing or killing Hamas?  And if Hamas, as a policy, hides in the mass of Gazans how do you fight them without killing those they hide behind?  When we burned down Dresden and Hiroshima, did we separate out the women and children?  No.  Shouldn’t the Hamas fighters confront the IDF face to face, man to man?  Are they cowards?  And shouldn’t the “innocent” Palestinians sneak away from Hamas and leave them to their fate?

Most of these questions have no good answers.  War is horrific even when it is only soldiers involved.  What can you say about women and children dying in war?  There are no words.  But what do you do with an enemy that murders your women and children as a policy.  That makes the need to destroy this enemy an existential imperative that overrides most of the moral sanctions against extreme actions.

I wish there were a magic strategy that could be used against Hamas without harming a single Palestinian civilian.  If there were one, I’ll bet the IDF would be using it right now.  But there isn’t.

You know, I wonder what answer I’d get if I asked one of the “starving” hunger strikers a hypothetical.  Now, under the strain of extreme starvation maybe she couldn’t muster the clarity of thought to answer me but I’d ask, “What if you lived in a neighborhood and you had a family living next door that really hated your family?  They were poor and dysfunctional and hated you because you were rich and happy.  And let’s say that several times the police were forced to come and arrest members of this family for attacking one of your siblings.  And let’s say that one day the worst members of this family went crazy and broke into your house and killed your parents and raped your sister and cut your baby brother’s head off and kidnapped you little sister and took her back with them to their house.  And you called the police and told them what had happened and they went to the house where the killers were but they came back later and said that they couldn’t do anything because there were small children in the other house including your sister so it was too dangerous to attack them.  So, they were just going to issue a warning to the killers not to do it again.”

How would that be?  Would that make everything all right?