Is Israel Responsible for Gaza?

The Biden Administration insists that Israel must have a plan for the “day after” it completes its victory over Hamas. A reasonable question is: why? Gaza started this war on October 7, and Israel responded as it had to, as any nation would, by fighting and, now, winning the war. Why should it be Israel’s burden to try to make something constructive out of the sickest culture in the world?

Daniel Greenfield argues that it isn’t Israel’s responsibility, and reviews the troubled history of nation-building. Please do read the whole thing; here are some excerpts:

Rafah isn’t just the last stand for Hamas, but for an entire foreign policy establishment.
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By the time that Hamas had captured Gaza after winning democratic elections, it had long been clear to everyone outside of D.C. that rather than ending terrorism, statehood had incarnated it.

Any ‘Palestinian’ state was doomed to be a terrorist state. The only question is who would run it. And the answer was that the biggest and deadliest terrorists would command popular support.

When Iraq and Afghanistan went bad, America could just leave, Israelis did not have that luxury. Sharon forcibly expelled the Jews living in Gaza to the other side of a border wall, but despite all the sob stories that the terrorists were living in an “open air concentration camp” with five-star hotels and mansions, walls weren’t that hard to get through even before Oct 7.

Israel has been stuck living next door to a failed thirty year nation-building experiment gone bad. And everyone in the international community is worried that the Oct 7 war will see it taken apart.

The international foreign policy establishment includes a lot of slow learners.

The Biden administration has never stopped insisting that Israel needs a “day after” plan for rebuilding Gaza under a PLO government and some “moderate” terrorists from Hamas. Three generations after it became the norm, fighting a war without nation building as an endgame is so impossible that warfare experts can’t even understand what they’re seeing in Israel.

But among all the other problems with nation building is that it doesn’t work. And the Israelis who have been living next to the original chernobyl of nation building know it better than anyone.

Nation building has failed in every single Muslim country it’s been tried, not just by the United States after 9/11, but by the British between WWI and WWII. The entire Middle East is one long great nation building disaster shaped by primeval nation building experiments such as the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Hashemite monarchies and finally the recession of colonialism.

But it’s not just Muslim countries where nation building has backfired in familiar patterns.

D.C. elites can look to Haiti where decades of interference led to one disaster after another. The armed gangs overrunning the island nation started life as police forces. Democracy initiatives just worsened tensions and led to murderous outbreaks of political violence.

The same situation abounds across much of Africa, and parts of Latin America and Asia, where no amount of nation building could overcome tribalism, gang violence and political extremists.

That is a depressing recitation with which it is hard to argue. Some would say that our efforts to implant or restore democracy in Germany and Japan after World War II constituted successful nation-building. But Germany and Japan were actual nations with histories and cultures that didn’t need to be constructed by the victors.

Americans have gotten sick of sending their sons to die for nation building. The term has become so toxic that no one wants to use it anymore. Biden loudly claimed that the withdrawal from Afghanistan marked the end of nation building. And now he’s back to nation building again.

Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and every one of the nearly 80,000 State Department employees are very upset (some have already resigned) that Israel isn’t following the nation building playbook. Some accuse Israel of harboring dire plots to expel all the Muslims from Gaza or to impose their own authority on them, but they’re too blind to see the actual reality.

The Israelis have had friends and family members brutally butchered, burned to death, raped and kidnapped on Oct 7 and they don’t care what exists in Gaza so long as it isn’t the terrorists. They’re being forced to supply food and medical aid to the perpetrators by D.C., which no army was forced to do in the past, but they have no interest beyond that in the enemy population.

Much more at the link. It seems to me that the only obligation of Israel’s government is to win the war; to reduce Hamas to relative impotence by killing its fighters; and to destroy Gaza’s ability to make war in the future. That’s it.