Israel and the War in Gaza: Battle Rages On
As Israel marks the second anniversary of the surprise Hamas assault that killed more Jews in a single day than any attack since the Holocaust, Gaza is in ruins, and tens of thousands of Hamas fighters and civilians are dead.
Western European states treat Israel as a pariah, theatrically storming out of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s United Nations General Assembly, an action that even Syria did not.
College campuses and human rights activists continue the calumny that Israel has conducted genocide against the Palestinians.
Against this backdrop, President Donald Trump seeks to impose a permanent ceasefire, offering a path to Palestinian statehood, reconstruction, the release of all hostages, and the end of Hamas rule.
Already, Hamas has responded with “yes, but…” seeking to delay and tie negotiators down in minutiae while they regroup, rearm, and continue to hold hostages.
Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, continue to suffer as they are stuck between the Israel Defense Forces on one hand and a terrorist group seeking to use them as human shields on the other.
What Should Trump Do?
Trump should resist the temptation to negotiate. Countering terrorism is not like negotiating a real estate deal, nor does diplomacy offer the path forward.
Indeed, a generation of American and European diplomats, human rights activists, self-described humanitarian law specialists, and academics has blood on their hands for their decades-long approach to Palestinian terrorism and Arab rejectionism of Israel more generally.
What Reality Suggests: A Look to History
First, some reality. There is no genocide in Gaza. Indeed, even if the West takes Hamas casualty figures at face value, and they should not be, they reflect one of the most cautious instances of urban combat.
The Israel Defense Forces have been far more precise in Gaza than the United States was in Mosul or Raqqa when they liberated both cities from the Islamic State.
During World War II, the Allies destroyed Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne, and Pforzheim, and leveled one-third of Berlin.
Even without nuclear weapons, U.S. bombardment turned many Japanese cities to ash; half of Tokyo was burnt to the ground.
In hindsight, such destruction was the right move. Both Germans and Japanese came to realize that they could not achieve their military goals. No allied power, let alone a human rights group, sought ceasefires to enable the German Reich or Imperial Japan to regroup and rearm.
The same held with the Khmer Rouge and Uganda’s Idi Amin, who together were responsible for the deaths of perhaps 1.5 million civilians. Both regimes ended with complete defeat: the Khmer Rouge due to the Vietnamese invasion, and Idi Amin when Tanzania had had enough and ended his terror.
Only later did the culture of compromise and negotiation come to dominate strategic thinking. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell counseled negotiation and diplomacy; Kuwait would be part of Iraq today had President George H.W. Bush listened to him rather than British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Getting Diplomacy Right
This does not mean that there is no place for diplomacy.
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat won the Nobel Peace Prize for accepting Israel’s right to exist and flying to the Jewish state to address the Knesset. He deserved the prize, but scholars overlook the fact that he chose peace only when, on his own, he realized he could not achieve his goals militarily.
The difference today is that diplomats counsel ceasefires before belligerents disqualify war, and then punish those with whom they disagree. What results is the perpetuation of conflict. Had Europeans, the Dennis Ross-era peace team, and human rights activists taken a no-nonsense attitude toward terrorism rather than ignore it to keep the peace process alive, then Palestinians might have reached the realization decades earlier that “resistance” was a formula for disaster, not victory.
Had Europeans, journalists, and human rights activists not rationalized Hamas’ ideology, tens of thousands of Gazans lost today may never have been caught in the current conflict that Hamas initiated during a ceasefire.
If Hamas survives to fight another day, hundreds of thousands more may die in the coming decades.
It is time to go back to the future. America’s greatest generation understood that war against ideological foes should end only with unconditional surrender and a dictation of terms, not compromise. That is the lesson high school history classes should teach, and it is reason to return diplomatic and military history to the forefront of university history classes.
What happened in Gaza has been a tragedy, but its perpetuation is the result of Western diplomatic culture and myopic humanitarian lawyers divorced from reality. Trump should not let these forces once again impose failed theories and groupthink on a problem where history provides a clear lesson.
The war will only end when Hamas surrenders unconditionally. Anything else only condemns future generations to even greater conflict.
About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. The opinions and views expressed are his own. A former Pentagon official, Dr. Rubin has lived in post-revolution Iran, Yemen, and both pre- and postwar Iraq. He also spent time with the Taliban before 9/11. For more than a decade, he taught classes at sea about the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts, culture, and terrorism, to deployed US Navy and Marine units. The views expressed are the author’s own.
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Jim
October 7, 2025 at 3:24 pm
I agree. If Hamas actually cares about the people in Gaza who they claim to represent then their top priority should be to stop the war and save the people’s lives.
Reports out of Israel suggest phase one of the Gaza operation was the physical destruction of Gaza, with expulsion & removal as a secondary objective, along the way, by any means necessary.
Phase two of Israel’s operation is expulsion & removal by any means necessary as the primary objective.
Does anybody doubt the sincerity of Netanyahu and his coalition government to carry out such a plan?
Hamas played right into Netanyahu’s hands by not surrendering once it was apparent Israel’s government was determined to physically destroy Gaza and expel its people. I take a dim view of entities who claim to represent a people, then by their own actions, subject those same people to mass suffering, death and destruction.
Hamas is a terrorist organization, they put their ideology and power before the best interest of the People of Gaza.
But it must also be said Netanyahu has used ruthless tactics to achieve his objectives. A hammer and an anvil. (The IDF is the hammer and Hamas is the anvil and the Palestinian People are caught in between, not of their own making, but because of the actions Hamas has taken and the actions of Israel’s current government in conjunction.)
In a sense, I say, “Pox on both your houses, it takes two to tango.”
A lot of people give cover to Hamas and excuse their actions in this whole, sorry, and sad affair. I cannot do that.
If the Palestinian People are going to survive as a people in Gaza, Hamas must surrender and give up their weapons and leave Gaza.
Hamas failed to look after the best interests of the people they claimed to represent (a fatal & unforgivable mistake… in my opinion).
Hamas must be removed from power, preferably by the Palestinian People, themselves. Hamas led them over the cliff and played right into Netanyahu’s scheme.
Be gone Hamas… you have destroyed Gaza with the willing help of Netanyahu. Don’t continue to be the willing anvil to Netanyahu’s hammer. That action betrayed the best interests of Palestinians.
Hamas has forfeited any legitimacy it might of had.
To Hamas I say, accept the Trump Peace Plan… and save the Palestinian People from the terrible fate which you brought on by your ill-advised actions, not the Palestinian People, as a whole. They were innocent in this whole affair and still are and should not have to pay the price.