Israel responds to the abject evil of Hamas

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 17th of October, 2023. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. Up first, Israel’s ground war with Hamas. Israel’s response to the brutal attack by Hamas is underway. The goal? Annihilate the terrorist group’s presence in the Gaza Strip.

REICHARD: It will likely take months to sort out how Hamas was able to launch such a devastating attack without warning, and how Israel’s response will resolve or deepen the conflict. But in the meantime, what’s it like in Israel right now?

BUTLER: Joining us to talk about what’s happening on the ground is Daniel Gordis. He is a Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem and author of thirteen books, many of them about the history of Israel.

REICHARD: Daniel, good morning to you.

GORDIS: Good morning, Thank you for having me.

REICHARD: So glad you're here. Well, you are there in Israel, witness to what's going on in the country that's about the size of New Jersey. Do you have firsthand experience of the conflict as far as air raid sirens, rocket impact and so on?

GORDIS: Oh, absolutely. When the war started last Saturday morning, we were in synagogue and services. And it's it was actually not only the Sabbath, but it was a Jewish holiday called Simchat Torah, which is a very joyous day of dancing with the Torahs and so forth. And we're out there doing our thing. And all of a sudden, out of the blue, the siren went off, we all had 100 and something of us had to go in the shelter. We were really kind of surprised because nobody was expecting anything right now. And then we came after about a half an hour the shelf, the siren went off again, we went into the shelter in this time we finished the service in the shelter. So that was that. And then we had a few more sirens on Saturday afternoon. And we had one about, I don't know, three hours ago here in Jerusalem, which it's now evening time in Jerusalem, and is about three hours since we had to go into the shelter.

REICHARD: The last major ground conflict with Hamas for Israel was back in 2014. How is this ground offensive likely to be different?

GORDIS: There has been an entire change in approach among Israel's leadership as to how to deal with Hamas. Until a week ago, Saturday, the assumption was, it's a terrorist organization, but we're an army. And we have a huge advantage here, they will be very annoying and occasionally lethal from the Gaza Strip. And then we will pound them and we'll buy ourselves X or Y numbers of years of quiet. But the premise was, we're gonna let Hamas continue to exist, because we can work with them, because they're rational, because we can provide all sorts of things in return for quiet and so forth, that conception, completely died last Saturday, because it became clear to us we had no idea what Hamas was doing. And it was not possible to control Hamas. So now the agenda is to destroy Hamas. Israel has President Biden's blessing to destroy Hamas in those exact words. So this is going to be a much much, much more intensive ground invasion.

REICHARD: Let's talk about Prime Minister Netanyahu now. How has his leadership been seen both before and now after the attack of October 7?

GORDIS: Before they had the attack of October 7, obviously, the main issue was the very, very, very highly combustible issue of judicial reform. The polls yesterday and today in Israel are showing an unbelievably precipitous drop, there is almost wall to wall condemnation of how Netanyahu has handled this. He took nine days to get to the front, nine days to get to families who had people in the hospital or family even worse, who have people who have been kidnapped. In Israel, the tradition is you get up you go to the hospitals. You get up, you go to the front, and Menachem Begin, who was a relatively old man when he was Prime Minister when the war with Lebanon started, hopped in a helicopter, went to the front, was there with the soldiers, just part of how it's done here. Now why did that Netanyahu not do it? Because for 10 months, he's been hiding from the Israeli public. Because everywhere he went there were protesters everywhere he went, he was booed. So we're in a period in which the Israeli homefront is showing unbelievable resilience, and helping people in ways that would just shock anybody outside Israel. But the public's assessment of the government, military, and all of that, is that perhaps an all-time low.

REICHARD: Here in the West, public support is mixed. We have demonstrations in support of Israel and in support of the Palestinians filling the news. For example, Black Lives Matter Grassroots issued a statement of support for Palestinians they say have been, quoting here, “subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence,” and therefore justifying violence as (quote) “a desperate act of self-defense.” Daniel, how do you see this?

GORDIS: Well, those kinds of claims, it seems to me are morally objectionable in the worst possible way. Even if one wanted to argue that this was about freeing Palestine, which it is not, but even if you wanted to argue that, that justifies raping mothers in front of their daughters, slaughtering entire families, capturing Holocaust survivors and taking them into the Gaza Strip tunnels, that's what liberation looks like? No liberation never looks like that. African American liberation in the United States didn't look like that. That is genocide, or at least sort of rampant mass murder. It's got nothing to do with liberation. If anybody holds on to an ideology or a worldview that makes that legitimate, is to my mind, morally abject and sinful.

REICHARD: Something I’m seeing in my social media feed are explainers that Palestine was never a state. It’s like Staten Island is to New York. An area, but not a formal state. True or not?

GORDIS: No, that is definitely true. In other words, Palestine first belonged to the the Ottomans. It was the Turkish Empire. Then it was captured by the British and the French, the Middle East was captured by the British and the French in the First World War. And the British and the French kind of divided it up rather haphazardly. So Syria was French, Palestine was British, they drew lines here and there. And then of course, after 1947-48, a part of it went to Israel, part of it went to Jordan, part of it went to Egypt, part of it went to Syria. Then in 1967, Israel captured parts from Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and what we call now Palestine belong the West Bank to Jordan and Gaza Strip to Egypt. But Egypt made peace with Israel, not wanting the Gaza strip back. And Jordan made peace with Israel not wanting the West Bank back. So Israel is basically some Israelis want it some Israelis feel saddled by it. But it was never an entity. People who talk about the history here actually have often very little idea of what happened here. But Palestine, as you say, was completely correctly. Palestine was never a state. It was never a country. It was always a conglomeration of things. And it still is.

REICHARD: Is there anything else the Western media is missing about the conflict?

GORDIS: Well, I think what everybody needs to understand is that Israelis, by and large, do not see themselves at all at war with the Palestinian people. Israelis see themselves as being at war with Hamas. If Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority said "We actually accept your being here, we accept you being part of the Middle East, and we want to make a deal," the overwhelming majority of Israelis, at least until Saturday morning, would have said yes. And that's the part that doesn't get told. We would like to be done with this. And perhaps something about the outcome of this war will be better for the Palestinians too.

REICHARD: Daniel Gordis is an Israeli historian and distinguished fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem. He’s also the author of the recent book, Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams?

Daniel, Thanks for joining us today!

GORDIS: An honor and a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.