‘Hamas has left us no other choice but to react in an unprecedented way’ | Opinion

At 6:30 in the morning on Saturday, I was awakened by a siren. I immediately I had a déjà vu: It’s the Yom Kippur War all over again. Three similarities struck me immediately: the failure of Israeli intelligence, which allowed Hamas to launch this unprovoked attack; the timing, then on Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays, and now on Simchat Tora (Rejoicing with/of the Torah — Bible in Hebrew, when Jews celebrate the completion of the annual cycle of reading the entire Torah in synagogue; and the initial tactical success of Hamas, which had managed to inflict such a blow on Israel.

For Americans, perhaps, a proper analogy between the murderous attack on Israel on Oct. 7, is the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which the Japanese launched on Dec. 7, 1941, a date that President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that “will live in infamy.” In both cases, Israelis and Americans were taken by total surprise and suffered heavy casualties. It took them time to recuperate.

There is a major difference, however. The Japanese attacked a purely military target, the main base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, while Hamas started with barrages of rockets on Israeli cities, aiming to intentionally killing civilians, and then proceeded to invade villages in southern Israel, again murdering defenseless civilians.

Apologists for the Japanese might explain that by freezing Japanese assets in the United States in the summer of 1941 and embargoing oil exports to Japan, Roosevelt actually left the Japanese no choice than to break the siege by force. The same kind of reasoning is applied to the Israel-Hamas case, usually by Israel’s bashers, who claim that being surrounded by Israel and seeing no hope, Hamas was forced to use violence to “free” Gaza.

The truth, however, is quite different. In 2005 Israel pulled out of Gaza, and it was up to the people there to embark on a new path. In a column I wrote then, I betrayed my naiveté when I fantasized a ceremony in which then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would give Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas a symbolic key of the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. Both leaders would announce a new chapter in Israeli-Palestinian relations, when the people of Gaza would live peacefully next to Israel, for the sake of a better future for the children of both peoples.

In reality, however, in 2007 Gazans elected Hamas as their government and, ever since, this organization has invested its energies not in nation-building but in harassing Israel, thus invoking Israeli retaliations. Using the civilians of Gaza as its human shield, Hamas intentionally made them the victims of its own violence.

Furthermore, unlike the Japanese in 1941, whose strategic goal was to reach some kind of an equilibrium with the United States in the Pacific, the goal of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad is written in black and white in their founding charter: It is the destruction of the state of Israel.

Bearing in mind the American-Japanese case, how should Israel react to this vicious attack? For the Americans, it took three and a half years to bring war back to the Japanese homeland and, once defeating them, didn’t stop there> Under Gen. Douglas McArthur, the United States didn’t leave Japan alone until being satisfied that its former enemy had turned from a militaristic autocracy into a peace-loving democracy.

Israel is not a world power like the United States and it is rarely given the grace period to carry military operations to their conclusion. This time, however, Hamas has left us no other choice but to react in an unprecedented way. Whether or not we will be able to topple the Hamas regime and hopefully open a new chapter in the relations with our Gaza neighbors, only time will tell. At this moment, though, Israelis are united: This aggression has to stop and, unfortunately, the way to accomplish that will be dramatic and painful.

Uri Dromi was the spokesman of the Rabin and Peres governments, 1992-1996.

This story was originally published October 7, 2023 at 4:25 PM.