The images from Israel have been horrific. Almost exactly 50 years after the Yom Kippur War, Israeli forces again appear to have been taken by surprise by their enemies. Attacks by Hamas terrorists left at least 1,300 Israelis dead and thousands wounded, many of them civilians. Dozens more are missing or have been taken hostage. Fighting and rocket attacks rage across the country. Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, is at war.
This murderous Palestinian assault deserves only one response from the world: outrage, and unwavering support for Israel’s right to defend itself. U.S. President Joe Biden has rightly pledged to stand with Israel “full stop,” as has the European Union. Even as Israel takes the necessary military actions to protect its citizens, all parties in the region need to work to restore some semblance of stability and avoid a broader conflict.
An Israeli invasion of Gaza to rescue Israeli captives and reassert control over the territory could last months, if not years. For that reason alone, Israel’s old, new and prospective partners in the Arab world do themselves no favors by not condemning the Hamas attack more forcefully. They understandably fear public opinion, which has never embraced the normalization of ties with Israel. Still, there can be no excusing the slaughter of civilians.
Pretending otherwise will only bolster the extremists and their backers in Iran. Countries with influence over Hamas, including Turkey, Qatar and Egypt, must pressure the terrorists to pull back and release their hostages before the violence escalates dangerously.
Palestinian Authority leaders are being equally shortsighted by blaming Israel for inviting the attack. While dramatic, the cross-border incursion will not lead to the defeat of Israel nor change its policies in the occupied territories. Ordinary Palestinians will pay a heavy price for Hamas’ wanton and unprovoked massacres of innocent Israelis.
Meanwhile, the chances of substantive territorial concessions in the West Bank as part of a prospective peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel have shrunk further.
Eventually, Israeli leaders will need to confront their own mistakes: The fact that Hamas could have planned such an assault — involving dozens of fighters, boats, paragliders and drones — over months without Israel’s vaunted intelligence services catching wind represents a massive failure. There is plenty of blame to go around.
But all that’s for another time. For now, Israel’s priority must be to destroy the ability of Hamas and its ilk to further threaten the country’s security. Pursuing peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors will be much harder in the near term, which no doubt was one of the terrorists’ aims.
Yet all parties should recognize that, once the fighting is over, such efforts will also be more important than ever — and something all sides in this conflict should still aspire to and pursue. The alternative is only more bloodshed, death and terror.
Bloomberg Opinion/Tribune News Service
