The late Abba Eban, the erudite Israeli politician and diplomat who served as foreign minister from 1966 to 1974, said it best decades ago: “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
Eban died at age 87 in 2002. Were he still with us, he would be stunned to learn that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has pushed Israel to the edge of the moral abyss, backed by the nation’s religious extremists, is not yet done with the killing and starvation of Palestinians.
His latest gambit, made public in an interview last week with Fox News, is a plan for the beleaguered Israel Defense Forces to take control of all of Gaza. The estimated 2.1 million surviving Gazans would be moved to three previously disclosed planned resettlement camps along the Mediterranean coast in Gaza that would be protected and supplied by the over-deployed IDF, whose troops also would temporarily take control of all of Gaza.
The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Army Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, who took office in March, immediately objected to the proposed new assignment. He cited the exhaustion and fitness of the Army’s regular and reserve forces, many of whom have been on and off active duty on tours lasting forty weeks or more. The general also made it clear that putting the over-stretched army in charge of the surviving population of Gaza would not be possible.
Netanyahu backed down, in part, perhaps, because one faction of the religious fanatics who are keeping him in office believe that prayers, and not the IDF, will keep Israel safe. I’ve been told that the Israeli intelligence community has shared with Washington the location of the remaining hostages who are still alive: they are being held in tunnel complexes that have yet to be targeted. One complex in Rafah, in the south of Gaza, is believed to hold at least ten hostages whose health is known to be parlous. There is a similar hostage complex in the tunnels under Gaza City. It is believed that as many as twenty-two, many of them IDF members, are still alive, though starved and in need of immediate medical attention. An all-out rescue attempt at either hideaway could lead to a successful recovery or to instant death for the hostages and their Hamas captors.
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Author: Seymour Hersh
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