This piece by Fareed Zakaria is called “On Gaza, Biden is right and Netanyahu is wrong.” It criticizes Israel for adopting a “strategy, which has been first and foremost to go after Hamas, guns blazing, with very little regard for winning the hearts and minds of Gaza’s civilian population.” (Emphasis added)
You read that right. Zakaria thinks Israel should be trying to win hearts and minds in Gaza.
I’ve never been a fan of Zakaria. I think he’s overrated. But I’m astounded that he favors an Israel strategy focused on winning the hearts and minds of Gaza’s civilian population. That’s mission is impossible.
The only idea Israel should try to impress on the minds of Gazans is that destruction and devastation will follow any future attack on Israel. Gazans can make what they will of that reality. But there is zero chance that the hearts and minds of this population can be won over by Israel.
General Sherman had no regard for winning the hearts and minds of rebellious Southerners during his Civil War campaigns, nor should he have had. Israel should have no regard for the hearts and minds of Gazans who, unlike American Southerners, have no prior “bonds of affection” with their enemy and will not be part of the same nation when the fighting ends.
Zakaria’s view that Joe Biden and his team have the correct prescription for how Israel should proceed in Gaza isn’t intelligent, either. First of all, why should Israel have any regard for the strategic and tactical thinking of an administration responsible for the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan (the botching of which is the subject of a scathing article in today’s Washington Post)? Why should Israel find credible the advice of the man who, in effect, invited Russia into Ukraine? Or the man who, as vice president, helped formulate policies that enabled the rise of ISIS?
On the merits, too, there is little to recommend Biden’s line on the war in Gaza. Zakaria makes two main points, supposedly in Biden’s favor.
First, he observes that some in Netanyahu’s war cabinet are criticizing the prime minister. That’s to be expected as the war drags on. But this criticism is not to be confused with endorsement of Team Biden’s “red line” against moving into Rafah (which has become inoperative, as all Obama-Biden red lines do) or his end-game vision of a Palestinian state.
Second, Zakaria notes that the IDF has had to return to some areas in the north of Gaza because Hamas fighters have reappeared there. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The more Hamas fighters the IDF kills, the better.
But the real fallacy in Zakaria’s argument is his assumption that Biden’s advice/demands for the creation of a police force led by the Palestinian Authority to patrol Gaza, if accepted by Israel, would eliminate the need for the IDF to return to these areas. Clearly, no such force can be installed while the war is ongoing. Thus, the IDF would have had to return to parts of the North in any scenario.
Nor is there any reason to believe that the Palestinian Authority will be willing or able to suppress Hamas after the war. Even the Washington Post has described this idea as a “non-starter.” Indeed, it is almost as much of a fantasy as Zakaria’s vision of Israel winning hearts and minds in Gaza.
Israel will have to maintain a presence in Gaza after the war whether Biden likes it or not. This doesn’t mean running Gaza. It means being able to nip Hamas in the bud if it reemerges as a force.
Israel’s post-war strategy should be to correct the correctable mistake that led to the October 7 massacre. That mistake — mainly Netanyahu’s — was not taking Hamas seriously. Had the government taken Hamas seriously, it would not have dismissed reports that trouble was brewing. And it would not have relied so heavily on technology to secure the border.
Correcting these mistakes means relying primarily on human intelligence and boots on the ground, not technology. It means responding with overwhelming force to stirrings by Hamas or a successor.
It means not farming out Israeli security to Jew-haters, including the Palestinian Authority, as Biden proposes. It means not creating a Palestinian state from which future deadly attacks can be launched, as Biden proposes.
In short, it means not taking advice from Team Biden seriously. Israel has to listen politely to Biden, at least for the next eight months. But Israel can’t be guided by him.
Not entirely surprisingly, Zakaria put up more convincing stuff when he was plagiarizing it, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/08/fareed-zakaria-plagiarism-copying-and-pasting-in-the-post-american-world-2-0.html. The idea in May 2024 that Israel ought to try to win the "hearts and minds" of people who hate Jews as a profession is roughly equivalent to the idea that in April 1945 the US should have been trying to win the "hearts and minds" of the Nazis in Germany or the shogun militarists in Japan. Fortunately, back then, we knew what Israel needs to know now: What's needed is not winning hearts and minds but winning the war and obliterating the institutions that lay behind it.
Can he possibly believe this insanity? Can any sane person genuinely believe that the correct strategy is to win the hearts and minds of a people indoctrinated with a murderous hatred for Jews? I am genuinely curious how the likes of Thomas Friedman can genuinely believe what they write.