VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What might have saved Gaza?

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Could the destruction of Gaza after Oct. 7 have been avoided? The answer is yes — had Hamas so wished.

First, if the Hamas leadership had simply complied with Israeli demands to (a) return the 251 hostages and (b) surrender the architects and perpetrators of the massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, the Israelis would not have had to fight Hamas in the streets and tunnels of Gaza.

Note how critics of Israel consistently fail to offer any viable alternative to the Israeli ground effort to destroy the Hamas mass murderers.

Nor do Israel’s enemies ever bother to explain why Hamas did not return its hostages and give up the perpetrators of October 7. Why did nobody expect the International Criminal Court or the UN to have the slightest effect when they ineffectually interceded to demand the return of the hostages and issued arrest warrants for the “war criminals” of Hamas?

The answer, of course, is that there was no more likelihood of them getting Hamas to cooperate than there was of the defunct League of Nations convincing Hitler to stop the killing of Jews or the UN persuading Pol Pot to stop murdering Cambodians. And it is likely that many anti-Israeli UN members silently approved of the murders.

Moreover, there is no evidence that most Gazans objected to the terrorism. Indeed, large numbers joined in when possible. More than 2,000 civilians tagged along in hopes of killing, raping, torturing, and looting with impunity. And when corpses and hostages appeared in the trucks of the returning Hamas murderers, the killers had to protect their prizes from their own even more bloodthirsty people back home, who sought to beat and spit on already dead and wounded Jews. Imagine: the killers had to protect their hostages from an even more bloodthirsty “civilian” mob.

Second, Hamas didn’t just refuse to stand down and hand over the hostages and culpable terrorists to the Israelis. Far from seeking peace, Hamas and Hezbollah spent the 20 days between the slaughter of Oct. 7 and the Israeli ground forces’ entry into Gaza launching thousands of missiles, rockets, and drones at civilians in Israel (barrages that would exceed, within a year, 25,000 launches).

Third, the death toll in Gaza would have been far lower had the killers of Oct. 7 helped their own civilians keep clear of combat zones. Far fewer Gazans would have died had Hamas not deliberately situated its tunnel exits and entrances beneath private homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools.

The IDF gave warnings to civilians and even texted thousands of Gazans with instructions to evacuate northern Gaza and keep clear of the Hamas terrorists who were using their own citizens as human shields. And why did Hamas do this, if not in the correct belief that the Israelis would avoid those human shields in a way that Hamas itself would never have avoided Israeli human shields had the situation been reversed?

Worse, Hamas had even less respect for its own citizens than did the supposedly genocidal Israeli enemy. It used noncombatants, hospitals, and mosques as shields because it was certain that Israel would show them more deference by not bombing them than Hamas itself showed by putting them in harm’s way.

What would have happened had Hamas (after jubilantly returning home with hostages, trophy corpses, and loot) immediately insisted that Gazan citizens descend into its 310 miles of subterranean sanctuaries to use them as air-raid shelters — while Hamas fighters battled the enemy above ground?

Could anyone imagine British soldiers during the Blitz sneaking into subway tunnels and hiding, Hamas-style, while British civilians fought above and braved the bombing?

Most fundamentally of all, if Hamas and the people of Gaza had opted out of the “ring of fire” — the Iranian-sponsored plan to use Arab proxies to destroy the Jewish state by both aerial assault and ground invasion — there would be no Gaza moonscape today.

But that scenario, too, was impossible, because Hamas was a prime architect of the multinational, multi-cabal effort to launch a surprise attack.

Hamas’s ultimate plan was always for its invasion force of 4,000 terrorists and 2,000 civilians to kill thousands of Jews and drive much farther into Israel than the 17 miles the killers eventually reached. Hamas expected that Hezbollah would at the same time unleash its huge arsenal of missiles and drones along Israel’s northern border, while the Houthis launched swarms of drones and missiles at key Israeli civilian infrastructure.

Iran was the bank and brain behind the complex invasion of Israel. Had Iran simply cut off funding to these three Arab entities, they would not have had the wherewithal to conduct such a costly operation. Meanwhile, the Iranian maestros of death would (at least for a while) safely sit back 1,000 miles away, under their supposedly state-of-the-art Russian and Chinese air defenses, pulling the strings, always denying any culpability.

Hamas, however, like Iran’s other fully funded proxies, Hezbollah and the Houthis, was foolish enough to be left openly holding the bag.

Before Oct. 7, 2023

But to truly understand how the destruction of Gaza could have been avoided, it’s necessary to go back long before the recent Iranian death scheme.

The last Jewish settlement was forcibly removed from Gaza — by the Israeli authorities themselves — on Sept. 12, 2005, some 18 years before the October 2023 massacre.

Hamas won a legislative majority on January 25, 2006 — its first and last election. After that, Hamas quickly silenced the population, killed off any lingering opposition, and never held another vote.

Instead, Hamas thugs set up an Iranian-style theocratic autocracy, with the express aim of destroying Israel and killing its Jewish population.

Much of the valuable Israeli infrastructure left behind for Gazans and paid for by Western philanthropists was quickly destroyed by civilian mobs. But even afterward, a great deal of Gaza’s fuel, power, and water was supplied by the Israelis. About the only way to stop that subsidy was to murder 1,200 Israelis during a time of peace.

Gaza’s Mediterranean beaches should have been more valuable than the distant Gulf coasts. So it is surreal to see vapid Western youth chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — given that an autonomous Gaza, without a single Jew inside its borders, was already in possession of an invaluable coastal corridor of some 24 miles on the Mediterranean Sea!Over the next 18 years, all Hamas had to do was to hold regular elections, cease efforts to kill Israeli Jews, invite Gulf investors to develop a tourist mecca, and use some of the $40 billion in aggregate UN, European, U.S., and Gulf state aid — not to build a pathological 310-mile military labyrinth from which to launch attacks on Israel, but to provide state-of-the-art housing, roads, bridges, infrastructure, and health care for its own people.

But that was impossible. Hamas was neither a political party nor a government. It was and remains a murderous cohort dedicated to directing all international aid and resources to its one unhinged goal–the complete destruction of Israel and the murder of every Jew within its reach.

All the world’s lies

Granted that Israel’s actions in Gaza were unavoidable, were they perhaps worthy of opprobrium on other grounds?

Let us consider the ex post facto appeal of Israel’s critics to “proportionality.”

Can anyone cite an example from history in which “proportionality” stopped an aggressor?

Did America limit Japanese casualties to the number of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor? And had we done so, would that restraint have stopped the Japanese killing machine that would eventually slaughter some 20 million Chinese and Asian civilians, as well as Allied soldiers?

After 1939, did the Allies decide to limit their killing of Germans to roughly the number of Allied citizens that Hitler’s forces had killed? And had they done so, would that have stopped the Nazi reign of destruction that was finally responsible for over 30 million civilian and military deaths?

In sum, disproportionality is a fact of war. Usually, the more disproportionate the use of force, the more likely one is to bring about a quick end to the war.

And this brutal, eternal truth of disproportionality especially applies to aggressors who start hostilities and are deemed unlikely to desist until they have suffered disproportionate losses. It serves as a warning to cease their aggression and so avoid even greater lethal asymmetries in the future.

Let us also consider whether Hamas’s actions were a justifiable response to Israeli provocation — variously defined as genocide, apartheid, or occupation.

First, the now-debased charge of “genocide.”

In 2005, when the Israelis left Gaza, there were roughly 1.4 million Gazans. When Hamas attacked Israel in 2023, that population had soared in less than two decades to 2.2 million.

A genocidal regime does not remove all its soldiers and civilians from a neighboring belligerent — and then see the population grow by nearly 60 percent in only 18 years.

Nor does a genocidal regime, supposedly bent on wiping out Arabs, allow the Arab population inside its own borders to grow to nearly 14 times its original size — from 158,000 and 18% of the population in 1948 to 2.17 million and 21% of the population in 2026.

Nor does a genocidal regime, on the eve of a murderous attack by Hamas, issue some 18,000 work permits to Gazan civilians to work side by side with its own citizens inside Israel — at an average wage equivalent to some $10-$12 an hour, four to six times higher than wages inside Gaza.

Before Oct. 7, could Jews visit Gaza and work there in safety in the manner of Gazans inside Israel?

Nearly one million Jews have been ethnically cleansed since 1948 from their ancestral homes all over the Muslim Middle East to ensure that those societies would be Judenrein, in the spirit of Hitler’s National Socialism. Do campus rioters ever ask whether Arab citizens are safer inside Israel than Jews would be today in any Arab country, or for that matter in most European nations?

Nor is it only Jews expelled long ago who fail to attract sympathy. Did Columbia erupt in protests against Azerbaijan when, just a month before the invasion of Gaza, it ethnically cleansed more than 100,000 Armenian Christians — the entire native population — from the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave?

Next, the now-debased word “apartheid.”

An apartheid state would not allow its supposedly victimized minority to enjoy full voting rights, the ability to form political parties, and the freedom to hold office. Unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa, Arabs can become full Israeli citizens, enjoying complete legal equality. And Israeli Arabs enjoy higher incomes, better education, and longer life expectancies than any of their Arab counterparts elsewhere, save only for the wealthiest Gulf oil sheikdoms.

It is also striking that a supposedly Jewish-supremacist Israeli apartheid state is one of a tiny handful of nations in the Middle East where it is both legal and safe for a citizen to convert from the majority religion to a minority faith.

Finally, the nearly meaningless term “occupation.”

Here, note that Israel would still have its UN-approved 1947 borders had its Arab neighbors not tried to destroy it in 1948, 1967, and 1973 — and lost all those wars.

How many nations that win wars return the land they conquered? Does Ukraine today intend to return to Poland the majority of western Ukraine, stolen from Poland by Stalin in 1939? Are Ukrainians then “occupiers” or “settler-colonialists”?

Is Germany still demanding that the Poles and Russians give up Danzig and East Prussia — lost after the Secord World War, when Germany’s aggression was defeated? Have the Poles, according to the logic of Hamas, been occupiers since the 1940s?

Note also that, despite all these precedents, Israel in 1982 returned all 23,000 square miles of Sinai to Egypt after the latter’s failed attempt to use it as a launching pad to destroy Israel in 1967. Why did Israel return 6% of Egypt’s land area? The answer is simple: the Egyptian government had finally ceased trying to destroy Israel and stopped allowing terrorists to do so from its territory.

Even when we turn to more recent conflicts, Israel’s “occupations” seem to be the only ones of concern. Whenever we hear talk about “occupation,” the speakers rarely refer to Turkey, which occupies 37% of Cyprus through a puppet proxy.

Nor did NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani threaten to arrest the Chinese delegation to the UN upon its arrival in New York, despite the fact that the Chinese still “occupy” Tibet–and, even more relevantly, Muslim Xinjiang — as “settler-colonialists.” (Nor, for that matter, has China’s mass incarceration, de facto enslavement, and genocidal forced sterilization of Uyghur Muslims attracted much, if any, condemnation from other Muslim nations.)

The world knows the reasons for all these double standards, even if it keeps silent.

As far as the Middle East is concerned, most of its 640 million Muslims despise tiny Israel because even without oil wealth it has still achieved a level of prosperity, security, and freedom unthinkable elsewhere in the region. And the more their racially and religiously driven envy incited Middle Easterners to try to destroy Israel, the stronger it emerged and the weaker its enemies became.

As far as the rest of the anti-Israeli world is concerned, it shares the pathologies of the Muslim Middle East, with Jews as a whole taking the place of Israelis. The more that Jews preserve their culture and religion —  and the more that they thrive intellectually, economically, and politically — the more jealousy and hatred fuel the venom.

In 2026, these two pernicious forces have united in the new Democratic Party: the antisemitic socialism of the Western Left has now merged with the anti-Israeli Islamism of the growing Muslim and Arab population within the West.

And the result is that the once-somnolent, age-old bane of hating and killing Jews has reemerged, replete with the same old lies and violence — and with the same old silence from cowardly and terrified onlookers.

– Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

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