The cost of ending the Israel-Hamas war is too high

Last week The Jewish Independent published an editorial calling on Israel to end the Gaza war. The editorial argues Israel’s six-month old war against Hamas is “fundamentally a failure”, as the Jewish state has failed to achieve its two stated aims of returning the hostages abducted on October 7 and eliminating the terror organisation, and in the process has turned Gaza into a human catastrophe and itself into a pariah state. 

To argue the war should continue would doubtlessly strike many decent people as monstrous. But as the weekend’s unprecedented Iranian attack on the Jewish state demonstrates, the Middle East is a volatile place where military and political calculus typically involves weighing the horrific against the unthinkable to arrive at a decision just shy of the apocalyptic. 

At the least, I consider it intellectually limp not to grapple, and the editorial does not, with the cost of Israel ending the war, whatever that means. In recent weeks the Israel Defence Force has withdrawn most of its soldiers from southern Gaza; it is unclear if this signals a shift to smaller, targeted incursions or if the troop pullback is temporary ahead of a large-scale assault on Rafah, where the last half a dozen or so Hamas battalions are reportedly holed up in the tunnels.

And the consensus among independent Israeli defence analysts and politicians, including staunchly anti-Netanyahu politicians, is that Israel must, at some point and in some fashion, confront the remaining Hamas formations both, to borrow a phrase from the editorial, for its own sake as well as for any hope of a peaceful future. 

I know this because last month I travelled to Israel on a media trip organised by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council — yes, one of those pro-Israel “junkets” that according to the journalists’ union and many of my colleagues transmutates previously sceptical journalists into lifelong agents of Zionist influence.