The good news is that Israel has announced that it intends to clear Hamas out of Gaza once and for all. The bad news is that it seemingly wants to hand Gaza right back to the same people who created the conditions for the October 7, 2023, massacre.  

I have on my coffee table a 1967 Life Magazine commemorating Israel’s stunning triumph in the Six-Day War.  I wrote at length about the coverage here and here, noting especially how Israel was admired back then.

What I’d like to focus on now, though, is a prescient editorial from Life’s June 23, 1967, edition, discussing the inevitable problem Israel will face from the hostile Arabs who had refused to live in a Jewish Nation after 1947, yet who now found themselves living within Israel’s newly defined borders:

The 20th Century’s excellence — and its horrid defects — find some of their most vivid monuments in the hate-filled camps of Arab refugees. The refugees have been supported by the voluntary U.N. contributions of some 75 governments, not to mention the Inner Wheel Club of Hobart, Australia, the Boy Scout Union of Finland, the Women’s Club of Nes, Iceland, the Girls High School of Burton-on-Trend, England, and (for some reason) a number of automobile companies including Chrysler, Ford, G.M. and Volkswagen.

The philanthropy, governmental and private, that has aided these displaced Arabs is genuine — and admirable. The stupidity and political selfishness that have perpetuated the problem are appalling.

Down the ages, there have been thousands of episodes in which whole peoples fled their homes. Most were assimilated in the lands to which they fled. Brutally or beneficently, previous refugee groups were liquidated. Not until our time have there been the money, the philanthropy, the administrative skill, the hygienic know-how and the peculiar kind of nationalism which, in combination, could take a wave of refugees and freeze it into a permanent and festering institution.

In the wake of Israeli victories, the refugee camps received thousands of new recruits, and there may be more if, as seems likely, Israel successfully insists on some enlargement of its boundaries. Thus the refugee problem, one of the main causes of Middle East instability, is about to be magnified.  (Emphasis mine.)

In 2005, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon thought he could solve the problem by having Israeli forces withdraw entirely from Gaza. If the troops weren’t there, he reasoned, the Arabs wouldn’t hate Israel. In response to this act of magnanimity, Life’s “hate-filled” refugees handed their government to Hamas, an explicitly genocidal Iranian proxy.

Since then, independent Gaza became a mini-nation with a non-existent economy (residents destroyed the valuable greenhouses the Jews left behind). This strip of land, which operated free from Jewish control, was flooded with funds from foreign nations and NGOs that hate the Jews (and, sadly, also from America).

The unearned money Gaza received did a few things: It provided food for Gaza residents, turned terrorist leaders into billionaires, and transformed the entire region into a military weapon, with every house, hospital, and school serving as an armory and training camp.

Additionally, Hamas turned the earth beneath Gaza into a network of tunnels from which to attack Israel, and in which to hold weapons, fighters, and terribly abused Jewish kidnapping victims.

It was from this military base that Hamas, aided by thousands of Gazan “civilians,” with the remainder cheering on the slaughter in rapturous ways, launched the bloodiest, most sadistic, and deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, 75% of Gaza’s residents supported what happened. It also emerged that Gaza’s residents were complicit in holding (and abusing) the kidnapped Israelis after the attack.

X screen grab.

It’s in this context—that Gazans en masse have been a festering, hate-filled sore on Israel’s western edge, and happily participated in slaughter and abusing Israelis—that we learn about Israel’s plans for the region:

Israel called up its military reserves Sunday to prepare for a massive new operation, “Gideon’s Chariots,” in which it plans to reconquer Gaza and eliminate Hamas, neighborhood by neighborhood, over several months.

The Israeli government says that it will carry out the operation if Hamas does not agree to a hostage deal by the end of the forthcoming visit of President Donald Trump to the region, which will be from May 13 to 16.

Military analysts describe “Gideon’s Chariots” as a classic “clear, hold, build” strategy to root out Hamas and create new, credible, demilitarized civilian authorities to govern the Palestinian communities in Gaza.

[snip]

Israel plans to keep the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza indefinitely. U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested taking control of Gaza, once the Israeli military has removed Hamas, without U.S. troops involved.

I applaud Israel’s understanding that it needs to root out Hamas, which is an army and an obvious target. After all, Hamas fighters don’t quit. Driven by their sick sexual fantasies of those 72 “virgins” (or, more likely, “raisins”) in Paradise, and by their sadistic urges, they will always regroup to kill Jews. So, yes, destroy Hamas if it means flattening every square foot of Gaza.

But about that idea of handing the region over to Arab “civilian authorities” while maintaining an indefinite IDF presence? That’s a terrible idea.

Why do I know that? Because that’s exactly what Israel started doing in 1967. The problem is that, as Life Magazine’s editors immediately noted, the region is filled with pure hatred that would surely fester. That same hatred has had almost 60 years since those wise words to become even more concentrated and toxic. Add to that the fact that Muslims’ generalized animus to Jews has been festering for 1,500 years, ever since Mohamed announced that, the Jews having hurt his feelings, it was every Muslim’s duty to kill them.

The 1967 situation ended with the October 7, 2023, massacre. Now, Israel seems determined to repeat the cycle.

George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The Israelis are going one better: “Those who can remember but still cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.” Until the festering sore of genocidal anti-Jewish animus is physically removed from within Israel’s borders, this will not end.