The Dilemma of the Human Shield

It finally happened.  After months of reasoning, cajoling, and threatening, President Biden took a concrete step to try to deter Benjamin Netanyahu from perpetrating another humanitarian disaster by invading Rafah, the last stronghold of Hamas, the last piece of Gaza not bulldozed by the Israeli military, and home—if you can call it that—to more than one million civilian refugees.

Biden’s action, withholding advanced munitions, prompted immediate outrage both in Israel and among some segments of American Jewry.  They are not without a point.  If Hamas, fanatics with no respect for human lives, including those of their own people, can survive by embedding themselves among the civilian population, they will have found an effective means to sow terror and destruction indefinitely, confident that world opinion, including among many Jews, will ultimately protect them. 

Critics of Biden’s action go on to assert that refusing to resupply Israel’s stock of smart weaponry will both prolong the war and lead to even more civilian deaths, assuming of course that Netanyahu ignores the gesture and continues pummeling Rafah with ordnance that causes indiscriminate casualties.  Nor will it speed the release of Israeli hostages, they insist, which presupposes that most will not be killed as Hamas fights to the death in the rubble and tunnels of Rafah.

Those who support Biden’s move, most of whom have for months been urging him to do something similar, insist that Netanyahu has other alternatives, although it is vague as to what they are, and is perpetuating human disaster for personal motives, at least in part, since if he is removed from power after a ceasefire or truce, he might end up in jail for corruption.  Some point out that if Biden can contribute to the avoidance of all-out war, it might help engage other Arab states to join both a peacekeeping force and a rebuilding effort. America’s participation and support, all agree, is vital to bring this about. 

Whatever position one takes, there is little question that Netanyahu’s single-minded destruction of much of Gaza to root out every last Hamas fighter and leader has turned world opinion and media coverage against his country. 

(Those who claim that criticism of Israel is motivated solely by antisemitism need to be reminded that for decades Israel was a media darling, garnering favorable coverage, even in the wake of Ariel Sharon’s brutal invasion of Lebanon in 1982.  Sharon was removed as defense minister, which did not prevent him from becoming prime minister in 2001, after which few voices were raised against the man Arabs called the Butcher of Beirut.  It was not until Netanyahu began his own river-to-the-sea settlement campaign that both media condemnation and the current round of antisemitism began.)

None of this, however, points to the resolution of a dilemma agonized over for more than a millennium.  The use of human shields or hostages to prevent attack has been around since human beings went to war with one another.  The Mongols employed them, as did the Romans and virtually every other attacker or defender either threatened with defeat or death or seeking to forestall their enemies. 

Still, Hamas has upped the ante by orders of magnitude and given the problem a new dimension.  No group previously has ever used two million people, almost exclusively their own, to gain its ends, which in the case of Hamas is the destruction of Israel.  It cannot be forgotten that Hamas dared Israel to strike back with unprecedented ferocity after Hamas similarly attacked Israel.  They had given interviews in which they were confident that a ruthless Israeli response would spark regional war and push Israel into the sea.  It didn’t happen.  Now Hamas is trying to salvage some of its power and resources by offering up Gazans in Rafah as cannon fodder.

As such, the only question that matters is, does Israel take the bait?  Is there a right answer?

Many nations, including the United States, pretend there is.  In order to deter the taking of hostages and their use to thwart attack or response, these countries have a stated policy of never negotiating with terrorists.  Practicalities, however, often intrude and make that resolution moot, as they have currently with Israel, which only emphasizes the intractability of the problem.

What is clear, then, is that if there is no objective right answer, the problem becomes subjective, a question of risk against reward. 

The first factor in such an analysis is, will attacking despite the risk to the human shields result in victory…in other words, eliminate the threat, or at least reduce it to a manageable level?  Of equal importance, will sacrificing noncombatants prevent the threat from being renewed in the future?  If killing innocents will not achieve both, or at the very least the first, it is clearly a terrible idea. 

Then the calculation shifts to whether eliminating the threat while killing the hostages or causing enormous damage will isolate the responder, resulting in weakness that can be exploited by enemies?

In this current case, a successful all-out invasion of Rafah might eliminate much of Hamas’s fighting force, materiel, tunnel complexes, and even its leaders up to and including Yahya Sinwar.  But much of this has already been achieved.  Hamas has been degraded by as much as 80% and restoring its ability to effectively attack Israel will likely take years.  Add to that the fury that many Gazans feel toward Hamas for bringing this wrath down upon them, and the possibility that Israel can rely on intelligence and technology to locate and eliminate its enemies becomes more likely. 

Failure to curtail the Rafah incursion will weaken Israel not only in world opinion, but strategically as well.  The longer this war goes on, the greater chance that a new, even more ruthless generation of terrorists will emerge, leaving Israel right back where they started.  (That might already be a fait accompli.)  If Israel really wants to neuter Hamas, not just in the short term, it will need the support of and intelligence from other Arab nations, as well as the United States and other western powers.  Does Israel really want to risk further isolation by trying to eliminate the last remnants of Hamas, a likely unattainable goal?

This is among the questions the Netanyahu government should be asking.  That they do not seem to be doing so is an indication that they are not interested in the answers.