![]() ![]() But to confer license upon an agenda of vengeance will not end well. Will it make Israel more secure? And what will a large-scale ground war do for Israel’s relations with Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and other relatively moderate Arab states, much less for a potential normalization with Saudi Arabia? The Palestinian Authority’s leadership-aging, corrupt, and, thanks to the Israeli government’s perverse undermining, weak-will only lose more standing in the West Bank and Gaza.īiden will doubtlessly show support to Israeli leaders, to the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, and to the survivors of the massacre. But what will come from answering cruelty with accelerating cruelty, from an endless bombing campaign, from reoccupying part or all of Gaza? One thing is certain: it will intensify the suffering and resentments of ordinary Palestinians. ![]() Israel, like any other country, has a right to safeguard its existence and its citizens, and it would be folly to say that there is some easy way to combat Hamas without cost. Israeli security officials denied responsibility for the bombing, blaming instead a misfired rocket by Islamic Jihad. According to the A.P., if those reports are confirmed, this would be the deadliest Israeli air strike in Gaza since 2008. On Tuesday evening, there were reports of an air strike on a hospital in Gaza City killing hundreds of people, according to the local health ministry. The body count is already rising quickly. ![]() The ramifications of a large-scale ground invasion of Gaza are unknowable, though it could easily lead to the loss of many thousands more lives. They recognized the weaknesses in Israel’s defenses and its vaunted Start-Up Nation technologies they also saw a divided nation and a profoundly reactionary and incompetent leadership. When the leaders of Hamas decided to carry out their horrific plot last week, timing was essential to its success. He has consistently put his own political interests before the country’s. His support is plummeting, and he may eventually face the prospect of resignation. No one seems prepared to count on Netanyahu. Yet, in a world of widespread disorder, there is no possibility of taking matters one thing at a time. For twenty months, the Biden Administration has managed to consolidate NATO support for Ukraine, an enormously complex feat of high-stakes diplomacy and political skill. In addition to speaking to the Israelis, he will also, according to the White House, confer in Amman with leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. President Biden arrives in the Middle East on Wednesday. But politics, or, better, statecraft is precisely what is needed now to avoid even greater catastrophe-and even greater catastrophe is sure to follow heedless decisions born of rage. It is hardly an exercise in rhetorical “equivalence” to observe that in Gaza, too, there are constant funerals, shattered families, civilians living in dread.Īmid such suffering, it seems almost obscene to turn to politics, especially in an era when politics are so often an arena of debasement. Estimates of the number of Palestinians killed since the massacre have climbed above three thousand. Israeli air strikes on Gaza have been going on for days. In the hours preceding the service, the radio had broadcast alerts about rockets from Gaza. The site of the funeral, the New Cemetery, in the town of Gan Yavne, is no more than a half hour’s drive from the Gaza Strip. “If this is possible, how do you live?” The mourners spoke of the Kutz family’s kindness, their generosity, the schools they shared, the basketball they played together. “It is inconceivable,” one of them told me as we made our way toward the white tent that hovered over the graves. They were sleepwalking through their days, up all night. They said the only things that people in the depths of grief can manage. All over the country, in recent days, it has been like this, funeral after funeral, with more to come.īefore the service began, I spoke to friends of the family. One of the children’s grandfathers chanted the mourner’s Kaddish as hundreds of people shook with grief. ![]() It took a very long time for five graves to be filled with earth. Their names were read out one after another, the coffins lowered slowly by thick rope into the ground. The Kutz family was buried together in a tight row of graves. When rescue teams finally came upon their bodies, clustered on a bed, they saw that Aviv Kutz had draped his arms around his wife and kids, a final embrace. They are five among the fourteen hundred Israelis slaughtered on October 7th when Hamas fighters swept through the towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip. Earlier today, I left a funeral for a family of five: Livnat and Aviv Kutz and their teen-age children, Rotem, Yonatan, and Yiftach. ![]()
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