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 do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
America’s greatest generation understood that war against ideological foes should end only with unconditional surrender and a dictation of terms, not compromise.
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.
Published originally on October 7, 2025.
