After the 9/11 attacks, the United States faced a momentous choice: should it engage in a narrowly targeted counterterrorism campaign, one designed to bring Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justice, or attempt to fight terrorism and remake the Middle East through much more expansive wars of regime change?
The US made the latter choice — and blundered into one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in the country’s 250-year history.
I fear that Israel is on the verge of making the same mistake. In the wake of the worst terrorist attack in its history — one that President Joe Biden described as being “like 15 9/11s,” given the scale of the death toll versus Israel’s smaller size — it is poised to launch a ground invasion with the stated objective of “toppling Hamas and destroying its military capabilities.”
But some of the means it has used to wage this war, including shutting off water and electricity to Gaza, are morally indefensible — much as elements of America’s 9/11 reaction were. Some of the rhetoric on the Israeli side has tended toward the extreme and the dehumanizing, as when Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”
Moreover, every report out of Israel suggests the government has zero answer to the “day after” problem: what does Israel do in Gaza once they’ve toppled Hamas’ government? This is the exact problem the United States faced in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the one that led it into a strategic and moral abyss — hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions dead, and trillions of dollars wasted on wars that made the world less secure.
But at…
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