The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof can’t allow Israel to win.
Ceasefires make sense when a war has lapsed into a stalemate. Getting a respite from the fighting can allow combatants to regroup, but they can also take stock of the disasters facing them and figure out a non-military solution. For example, there should be a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, but the Democrats, from Harris-Biden on down, aren’t interested.
However, things are different in the Middle East, where there’s no stalemate. Instead, through brilliant strategies and sheer doggedness, Israel is winning the Gaza war, destroying leaders, troops, and infrastructure, all while minimizing harm to Israel-hating civilians in the war’s path. If Hamas would release the hostages and lay down its arms, it would be over. Unlike Muslims, Israel does not go scorched earth.
So, what do the Democrats, from Harris-Biden on down, want? They want Israel to surrender. Sure, they call it a ceasefire, but when you tell the winning side to lay down its arms so that the losing side can regroup and live to fight another day, that means surrender.
Image by AI.
The latest example of this strategy comes from Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times. In his most recent opinion piece, Kristof insists that now is the time for Biden to make his mark on history by pushing for Israel to surrender to Hamas. Or, as Kristof phrases it, “Can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel be pressured to declare victory and end the war in Gaza?”
According to Kristof, victory isn’t destroying Hamas, which has as its entire purpose annihilating Israel and her population. Instead, victory consists entirely of having killed Sinwar.
Netanyahu now can take the best kind of offramp. He can savor the killing of Yahya Sinwar — a terrorist with so much Israeli and Palestinian blood on his hands — while triumphantly declaring that Israel’s war in Gaza has succeeded. Then he can try to negotiate a cease-fire that would include the release of hostages and eventual normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and a path to a two-state solution.
In the last sentence, you see the idée fixe that drives this kind of drivel: the “two-state solution.” Kristoff cannot seem to grasp that the leaders and people in Gaza and also the West Bank have turned down the two-state solution for almost as long as Kristof’s been at the Times.
Look at the West Bank’s history. In 2000, at the Camp David summit that President Clinton held with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and terrorist Yassir Arafat, Barak offered Arafat the world. Even the leftist Guardian published an essay that noted Barak’s generous deal:
The proposals included the establishment of a demilitarised Palestinian state on some 92% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip, with some territorial compensation for the Palestinians from pre-1967 Israeli territory; the dismantling of most of the settlements and the concentration of the bulk of the settlers inside the 8% of the West Bank to be annexed by Israel; the establishment of the Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem, in which some Arab neighborhoods would become sovereign Palestinian territory and others would enjoy “functional autonomy”; Palestinian sovereignty over half the Old City of Jerusalem (the Muslim and Christian quarters) and “custodianship,” though not sovereignty, over the Temple Mount; a return of refugees to the prospective Palestinian state though with no “right of return” to Israel proper; and the organization by the international community of a massive aid programme to facilitate the refugees’ rehabilitation.
That’s some deal. So, what did Arafat do? The article continues:
Arafat said no. Enraged, Clinton banged on the table and said: “You are leading your people and the region to a catastrophe.”
Meanwhile, in 2005, without the benefit of any reciprocal promises from the people in Gaza, Israel simply pulled out. Contrary to the antisemitic geniuses on America’s college campuses, there is no Israeli occupation in Gaza. Gazans responded by destroying the priceless greenhouses Israeli settlers left behind and electing Hamas, which has as its charter’s centerpiece Israel’s destruction.
There is no two-state solution. There never was a two-state solution. There were only the West’s useful idiots and the Arabs’ and Iran’s determination to destroy Israel. Kristof is, pardon me for saying so, a moron to believe differently.
It also seems that Clinton may have been prophetic. Had Arafat accepted the deal in 2000 or if the Gazans had chosen a functional government over a terrorist government in 2005, people in that region could have had one of the highest standards of living in the Muslim world. Many of those who are now dead (under the Eff Around and Find Out principle) would still be alive. For Gazans, it’s a catastrophe.
But Kristof still thinks that if Israel just walks away—helped, if need be, by massive American pressure—all will be well. He carefully explains that “Israel keeps racking up very significant tactical victories, like Sinwar’s elimination, but they don’t add up to a strategy.” Well, yes, they do if you’re not a Vietnam-era leftist. The strategy is a total victory, after which you can slowly rebuild your enemy in a civilized way, as America did in Germany and Japan after WWII. Or, as General Curtis Lemay said during WWII, “If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”
Showing the moral abyss to which leftists have sunk, Kristof says that Israel, by defending herself, threatens America, and then explains that it’s Israel, rather than Islam’s built-in jihad system, that explains Gazan fervor:
We still don’t see from Netanyahu a day-after plan for either Gaza or the West Bank. Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence in the United States, has warned that the Gaza war may stoke a “generational” threat from terrorism. On past visits to Gaza before the war, I would sometimes have heartbreaking interviews with children who had suffered so much that when I asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, they would reply: martyrs. Palestinian and Israeli extremism feed each other.
This is always the left’s plan: Yield to bullies to keep yourself safe. In fact, the way you deal with bullies is to destroy them, not allow them to control you.
Fortunately, for Kristof’s plan, there’s a savior languishing in Israel’s prisons: Marwan Barghouti. Kristoff says, as an aside, that Barghouti is serving a life sentence for murder. So anodyne. It’s a little more complicated than that. Barghouti was a major leader in the Second Intifada, launched after Arafat rejected Barak’s offer. Admittedly, Google makes it hard to find his crimes. Instead, we get led to articles telling us he’s “the world’s most important prisoner,” that there’s been “Israeli abuse” of him, explaining that he’s “Palestine’s prisoner of hope,” or telling us that he’s the next “Mandela.”
The reality is that Barghouti was tried and convicted for his active role in three terrorist attacks that killed five Israelis and injured many others. This is the man that Kristof thinks should be Israel’s negotiating partner when Biden forces it to surrender in a war that it’s winning.
Leftists are sometimes too dumb to live. The world’s tragedy is that they have enough power that are often too dumb for anyone else to live either.