Oct 11, 2023·edited Oct 11, 2023Liked by Arnold Kling
“... we would in all likelihood not have resisted. We would have been supporters, either actively or passively.” We don’t need to go back to 30s Germany, 2020/21 saw the widespread abuse of children, supported by politicians, teachers and parents, and their sexuel abuse under the transgender banner now is supported, how easily ‘ordinary’ people supported even demanded the loss of Human rights and civil liberties, how quickly they turned on those who wouldn’t mask up, or get jabbed. Chamberlain: he was an officer in the trenches of WWI and saw first hand the horrors and wanted to do anything not to see it repeated. Also worth noting, it was Chamberlain who declared Britain and Germany at war, even though Germany had carried out no hostile attack or threat against Britain.
Interestingly, Chamberlain -didn't- also declare war against the USSR, though it was allied with Germany, and also invaded Poland. Not even three months later when it invaded Finland and killed tens of thousands, for which it was only kicked out of the League of Nations. No one would declare war against the Soviets for anything they did until Germany did it nearly two years later with Barbarossa.
USSR and Germany were not allies. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a non-agression pact between the two parties. Germany invaded Poland on 01 September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany on 03 September in order to return Poland as an independent Country. Britain’s treaty obligations to Poland were met.
Russia did not move into Poland until 17 September and this was not part of the German military campaign, so since Britain was already committed to freeing Poland, what would the point of declaring against USSR - Britain had enough on its plate with Germany?
As for Finland, Britain had no treaty obligation there.
Without Russian raw materials the German war effort would have stalled. Russia's Plan A was clearly to supply Germany with the raw materials to fight the Entente for a few years until everyone was worn down and they could swoop in. The Entente nearly bombed Baku to cut off Soviet oil exports to Germany.
I generally think of "The Allies" as USA + UK + France and the "Entente" as UK + France. So its the Entente vs Germany until 1941 and the Allies after that.
Plus the war before 1941 has more of a Great Power politics (WW1) feel and 1941 onward it's much more ideological.
Britain did little to help Poland during the phony war. Had the Entente won the Battle of France and the Soviets and Germans never come to blows, it seems unlikely that Britain would have gone to war with the Soviets over liberating the Soviet half of Poland (and one would be surprised if the Soviets hadn't taken the other half when Germany was losing). Certainly they didn't do Operation Unthinkable in our own timeline.
"Britain had enough on its plate with Germany?"
That's what it comes down to. If "the rules based international order" was the be all end all then the allies should have gone to war with the Soviet Union over their many transgressions before, during, and after WWII. But there is no rules based international order, there is pragmatic self interest. And thank God for that.
Germany and Russia were indeed allies, and carved up Eastern Europe between them. The Russian invasion of Poland was according to those terms. Britain could not safeguard Poland as an independent country if Russia seized it.
Oct 11, 2023·edited Oct 11, 2023Liked by Arnold Kling
People who do evil deeds usually do not believe that what they are doing is evil. They spend a considerable amount of time, as AK notes, circling what they desire with words to cushion the actions, to justify them, to make them appear both noble and necessary. One can only imagine the sort of propaganda and indoctrination the Hamas terrorists who committed these acts of utter barbarity were subjected to, but you can bet that all of it amounted to "The Jews are invaders, occupiers, and animals and must be culled, while WE are following the path of Allah and righteousness for our people and for posterity." And at that point, they shoot the unarmed and innocent, rape and brutalize women and children, and behead babies. So what WE must do is strip the words from their actions and stare at what they have done and are still doing, in the same manner that Eisenhower brought in locals to the death camps in Germany to see for themselves what the Nazis and their own passive support wrought. And then we must support Israel in their Pearl Harbor hour of need...and help them annihilate Hamas.
Got to love the misandry of war, God forbid we think of the dead men. Also Hamas isn't killing civilians, Israel has a conscript system, literally every person killed is a trained reserve member of the military or will be. God forbid they behead a baby rather than just drop an IDF bomb on them, plenty of dead babies all around.
Murdering 250 unarmed revelers at a music festival for peace strikes me as civilian killing. And trying to make the argument that ALL Israelis are "trained reserve members of the military" and so, ipso facto, this was not an attack against civilians is utter garbage. A civilian is someone who is NOT in the military, whether they once were or never were. And whether they were trained or not, they did not have weapons with them, as Israel's policy of not allowing most civilians to have weapons effectively disarmed them, regardless of any training. Let's be clear as well: call it misandrist if you like, but very few Israeli females in the military are trained for any sort of combat role. 95% of all females in the IDF occupy military support roles, those being overwhelmingly non-combat related. Also, there is a profound difference between a civilian infant killed incidental to a bombing, particularly in Gaza, where Hamas routinely uses its citizens as human shields to deter Israeli action, and the beheading death of an infant, one on one, by a Hamas terrorist with a knife. And finally, this: the US annihilated Japanese military forces based on the Pearl Harbor sneak attacks, and did it without shame or any sense of regret. Israel should do the same thing now, for even if Hamas had attacked military targets ONLY (which they absolutely did not), attacking another country's military in the absence of a declared conflict is guaranteed to produce an implacable thirst for vengeance. And Hamas pointedly did NOT attack military targets, but rather sought to inflict civilian casualties because they knew there would be little to no initial resistance. Their tactics and their ideological-religious excuses for these attacks were and are appalling. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Thank you for that... I was longing for such a reply to that comment. It can be hard to keep the heart rate down when I read such things, I have the heart of a mother.
1) I don't see the need to make excuses or come up with tortured WWII analogies to do whatever you want in Gaza. It is in your power. Just do it. If people complain, who cares.
2) The most likely explanation for what Hamas thought is they are a society of low IQ cousin fuckers that can't build anything. They don't think ahead all that much, because they can't. They aren't capable of building a first world civilization. There isn't anything constructive for them to do.
3) I really really really want to call out this Munich bullshit.
Munich has been used to justify every single war in my entire life. Every single escalation or intervention has been (if you don't do this, it's Munich all over again).
Chamberlin did not trust Hitler. Nor was he convinced Munich would avoid war. There is just so much material available to know the truth of what happened.
Chamberlin:
1) Could look at a map and see that there was no way to get to the Czechs.
2) Recognized that the only player that could get there was the Soviet Union, which would have to go through Poland, who would never allow it, and if they did allow it you get the Soviets in Central Europe like the Iron Curtain. (Note: Poland was a belligerent revanchist power like Germany too).
3) Recognized that by juicing military spending to unsustainable levels from 1936-1938, had "stolen a march" on the entente.
Specifically, Germany had a way better Air Force in 1938. While air power was very important in the war, military intelligence overestimated the impact of the bomber force (the bomber will always get through). If you generals are telling you that London will be burned to the ground on the opening day of war and you have no way to defend against it, that is a problem.
Chamberlin was already ramping up his Air Force when Munich was going on. The planes that won the Battle of Britain were there because of the time Munich bought. While the Germans did improve their ground forces from 1938-1940, their advantage in the air actually diminished. Hitler himself was disappointed at not being able to fight in 1938 and thought it might have cost them the war.
4) Entente public opinion was against going to war over Munich. Had Chamberlin done so he would not have had the public behind him.
"A British poll taken in the Munich conference’s immediate aftermath had 57% satisfied with Chamberlain, 33% dissatisfied and 10% undecided."
When Hitler continued his aggression it got the entire country behind the idea that he had to be confronted regardless of the sacrifices.
5) The freak outcome of the Battle of France is the only reason we think of Munich as a failure. If the Ardennes strike doesn't work (and it shouldn't have) Chamberlin is remembered as the man that tried to avoid war, built up a winning army, and then ground the Germans down.
The point isn't to prove that Munich was absolutely the correct call. The point is that it was a perfectly reasonable foreign policy response to a difficult problem given the evidence available at the time. It wasn't a morality play about a naive pacifist. It was a complex problem with few good solutions.
"Palestinians" are not low IQ. "Palestinians" have the misfortune to be born into a territory where the government won't permit you to develop the ability to feed yourselves, because their only use for you is as a pawn. Whenever the state feels it's not being paid enough tribute, it commits a terrorist attack (which I define as acts of war targeting non-combatants), launching their weapons from the middle of "Palestinian" residential areas thus forcing Israel to create apparent martyrs when it defends itself. I refuse to hold Israel responsible for this practice.
If I were Israel's defense minister, then, I wouldn't go to all-out war against Gaza. I'd go to all-out war against the sponsor countries, Qatar and Iran. The Gazans really are martyrs and hapless pawns, but they're being used that way by the sponsor countries, not by Israel.
Yes, Arab IQs are somewhere in the 70s or 80s. Pretty terrible.
"I refuse to hold Israel responsible for this practice."
As do I.
"I'd go to all-out war against the sponsor countries, Qatar and Iran."
I'd say "just as long as my country doesn't get pulled into that mess", but I doubt that if Israel gets in a big quagmire that the US will be able to keep itself out.
I think the biggest similarity to WWII is that this is a true war between nations and the modern world hardly believes that exists. A nation is a collection of people, and until their will to fight is extinguished, they will continue to resist.
Nobody doubts that Israel can occupy land and kill every member of Hamas they find. The question is how they might, short of simply killing everyone, convince the Palestinians not to fight. After World War II, the allies forced the German populace to look at the concentration camps and bodies. They changed the German national character from one of militance to pacifism.
Obviously one doesn't know if that's possible, but it's certainly a more humane approach to try than wiping them all out. Which, I think, one might have reasonably said was the only way to get rid of the Germans after fighting two world wars.
Were the axis powers convinced to give up the fight by being forced to look at their atrocious crimes? It seems they actually got to that point by having suffered a truly devastating defeat.
Agreed. I wasn't saying, "do only this". If I were Israel, my "victory conditions" would probably be something like:
1. Destroy Hamas (and all formally or informally associated Palestinian groups) in Gaza.
2. Whatever successor governance is eventually established, such governmements must have constitutional statements that recognize the right of Israel to exist and the right of Jews in general to exist, to adopt specifically pacifist military posture, etc.
3. All educational and religious gatherings are subject to approval and censorship. There will be no more teaching that Jews are inhuman.
4. Further, I'd adopt the Salvadoran approach to mass incarceration. IIRC, in El Salvador, it's approxiamately 80,000, and I'd plan to double or triple that capacity. Effectively, plan to hold most Gazan males 16-64 for the rest of their lives. Over the following years, efforts should be made to deprogram and release all who can be. The rest should be kept impotently imprisoned for life.
5. On top of that, plenty of efforts to shame and deprogram the populace. Force everyone you can force to bear witness to what's been done in their name.
With Germany and Japan you had the genetic raw material to build successful first world states. You just had to reboot their successful societies with the militaristic parts cut out.
The Middle East and especially places like Gaza don't have good raw material. There is no successful society to reboot. Part of the reason they can't move on to some kind of constructive path forward is they lack the capacity to do anything constructive.
Other then paying us to figure out how to harvest their oil and then selling them things they couldn't make on their own to buy that oil, what has the Middle East produced?
Sorry, I just don't buy into this kind of genetic determinism. Disregarding all the other Arab societies that are somewhat functional, it's rhetorically too close to the sort of "the Jews don't have the genetic raw material to be anything but subversive destroyers of society".
Even if it's true, it's irrelevant from a moral perspective that should guide the Israeli response. Because the alternative to trying these approaches would be what? Genocidal extermination? Mass deportation that would have to be repeated every few years?
"Mass deportation that would have to be repeated every few years?"
Its not clear why this would need to be repeated more then once.
Anyway, I'm not going to make the call as to whether Israel should engage in a permanent solution or simply accept periodic attacks of this nature. That's their own moral call, and I wouldn't judge them either way. I'm just not optimistic that any third option really exists.
We are lucky that our country isn't in the middle east so we have a "not have anything to do with them" option.
We do not, I think, have a great deal of trouble from - or awareness of - the Palestinians during the Ottoman period when the great majority of them lived in villages?
I cannot help but feel that the urban environment is the through line that means Israel will never be rid of this problem while Gaza exists.
This of course flies in the face of confident predictions that the future must be cities, we must all live in cities forever; it is the best life - it is "green".
Someone mentioned the Sioux. The Indians of the Northern Plains to the Rockies needed freedom of movement, and buffalo. They lost both, the latter through deliberate slaughter, and they never recovered. Everyone can't be made into successful urbanites. Can this be uttered?
I lived in a town in Norwest Minnesota that had a fair number of Native Americans. Might not have been 1/3 but the town worked. The Native Americans all lived in the exact same type of house in a part of town and worked. They didn't interact much unless they came from a mixed family in which case they didn't live in the same area. Israel has a fair number of Arab citizens too; sometimes they cause some problems but for the most part I think relations are o.k. but I don't know that.
They made the Germans look at the bodies in concentration camps, (many of who died from typhus and starvation due to allied bombing of supply routes) but then the US committed the same crime with 1 million purposefully starved to death in Eisenhowers death camps.
Bingo. Whenever I hear today's citizens of the then Allied powers condemn the morality of the Axis I generally tell them to go read Savage Continent by Keith Lowe. As Canadian's recently figured out with their heroic Ukrainians.
War is evil. Everything it takes to win a war is worthy of moral condemnation because totally evil, because short of evil, people won't give up. The trouble is that it is sometimes the lesser evil.
I think this makes more sense to argue that pacification happened after German unification. Before that, East Germany was highly militarized and West Germany was considerably more militarized than it is now. The Germanies accepted their status as a quasi-protectorate (not the first time Germans have had to do that this millennium), but the post-History Germany is really more recent. Peace as compared to pacification in part happened the way that it did because the alternative to peace with the west was a far worse deal with the Soviets.
I find your optimism regarding Biden touching. I suspect it's misplaced though because Biden is surrounded by the same people that Obama had around him that enabled the Iran deal and thus funded HamAss
Last week, before the Hamas attacks, I received an email from Substack with a sample of Substack Notes (which I don't follow), including yours referencing "Canada's accidental honoring of a former Nazi ...". This was no accident. It was a deliberate attempt at revisionist history that backfired. The purpose was to whitewash the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalist groups with the Nazis in WWII, and the participation of these groups in carrying out the Holocaust. Although this was Canada, the Biden administration has similarly whitewashed the Nazi history and ideology of some of the Ukrainian nationalist groups it is supporting in the conflict with Russia. It has also, in collaboration with the media, fanned the flames of russophobia to gin up public support for Ukraine, and has overlooked, and perhaps tacitly supported, the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians by the Ukrainian government (eg. the assassination of Darya Dugina). To be fair, organized Jewish groups on the left (ADL) and the right (RJC) have supported Biden's policy on Ukraine, and in so doing have tacitly gone along with the whitewashing of history. Of course, the Biden administration could have no way of knowing that Hamas would attack Israel (at least, so we hope), but in light of this background, I think you are being (characteristically) too charitable in your opinion of Biden's policy response to the attacks. I have to acknowledge, based on comment threads I have been following, that critics of Biden's policy response to the Hamas attacks on both the left and the right include people that I would regard as rabid jew-haters, and that would be the case regardless of Biden's Ukraine policy. Nevertheless, I think the support given to extremist Ukrainian nationalist groups and the whitewashing of their history has had the unfortunate unintended consequence of undermining Israel's cause. I have seen reports that the Biden administration is considering linking aid to Israel to continued financial support to Ukraine in a single package to be voted up or down by Congress. To me that would be deeply cynical and sinister. My understanding is that, unlike with Ukraine, the Administration can provide the necessary aid to Israel based on existing arrangements, without having to go to Congress. Regardless, I would object to such a linkage, think it would be damaging to Israel, and would not support the passage of such a package.
Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were no different in the kinds of patriotic fervor stirred up. And the cooler heads after 9/11 *were* correct (e.g., Barbara Lee and others). Of course you can always expect fervor to oppose reason, but that doesn't make it right. If killing civilians is wrong, it's wrong. If civilization over barbarity resides at least partly in upholding principle, then you stick with principle and don't capitulate to fervor.
Pearl Harbor may be a little better analogy than 9/11, but it's not very satisfactory either. Hamas is not a peer nation with a military capabilities comparable to the IJAF. If we have to stick to US history, a better analogy might be something like the 1862 Sioux massacre of 800 Americans in Minnesota. As a non-American, it makes me think of the Ulster Massacres of 1641. But if people aren't familiar with the analogy, it's not very useful either!
The analogies matter because the story we tell matters. Israel is, or should be, engaged in a security operation, to prevent Hamas perpetrating further massacres. I assume that means locating and destroying Hamas and their confederates, both organisationally and as cells/individuals. That will look much more like US operations in Afghanistan post-9/11 (or the pacification actions during and after the Dakota War of 1862) than the Pacific Theatre of WW2.
Like you, I am not particularly worried about a purported Israeli "overreaction," but that is because I have faith in Israel's institutions and good sense. It is certainly possible to overreact, and deciding first that you have to fight WW2, then casting around for an opponent, would be a good way to do so.
I assume you mean they didn't overreact to Pearl Harbor.
I find this a stunning statement. The internment of tens of thousands of American citizens who happened to have Japanese ancestry is near-universally agreed to be a shameful overreaction. The USG later apologised and paid compensation, and this is now generally seen as a canonical example of war hysteria and overreach.
It would have been impolite and insensitive to go around in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor saying "Careful you don't overreact now." But it's precisely for that reason that there was insufficient contemporary pushback against the overreaction.
Salemicus, of course there are differences. But distinguishing it based on the occupation and the fact that it was perpetrated by German panzer units is, to me, a distinction without a difference. And it is a tad misleading (if you will excuse my saying so) to say that Oradour was "in the midst of a hot war." France was, but Oradour was a small village (population less than 700, I believe) and there was no battle there. and it was most definitely a surprise attack. But in response to Germans being kidnaped (and perhaps killed) by the resistance, troops from the Das Reich SS Panzer division surrounded the town and killed virtually every inhabitant. Estimates I ha have seen give varying numbers, but all agree it was around 650 or so. The SS herded the women and children into the small church, machine-gunned them and then burned the church to kill the survivors.
As you correctly point out, there are other valid comparisons as well. One was on the Western Front in WW II when the Germans herded a large number of people into a barn and then burned them to death. And, of course, on the Eastern front, that kind of thing was just another day's work.
My larger point was that these were considered among the worst atrocities in WW II (excluding the camps from this) and Hamas is not doing the same type thing and should be equally condemned as were the original Nazis.
If you are saying this massacre is comparable in terms of evil and moral responsibility to Ouradur-Sur-Glane I agree. In fact I think it is worse. Hamas should indeed be condemned in similar terms to the Waffen SS and other vile criminals.
But frankly this should go without saying.
My analogies (and I believe Dr. Kling's) were in terms of the appropriate response. The differences are critical because the way to stop more Ouradur-sur-Glanes was (1) end the German occupation of France and (2) prosecute the perpetrators for war crimes as punishment and deterrent. This would be a completely inadequate response to Hamas's attack, because Hamas wasn't occupying Israel to begin with. Instead, this was a kind of cross-border raid. Moreover, there was a German army in the field that could be defeated (needed to be defeated!) that is not present in the current case.
To achieve safety for its citizens, Israel is going to need to do some combination of border security, pacification, and outright destruction, that is very unlike the Allied response to WW2. It is as if unrepentant Nazis in Allied-occupied Germany were launching cross-border raids to massacre French civilians. As a result I find the analogy to the Ulster Massacres much more on-point.
My point was the one you make in your first sentence. You may (or may not) appreciate this. Appeasement in Real Time - by John A. Lucas - Bravo Blue (substack.com)
Interesting point on Chamberlain. I honestly don't know much about him.
I'm not sure how sympathetic I am with your point comparing Churchill and Netanyahu. Churchill became PM in May 1940, well after the start of the war. He was brought in specifically with the mandate to form coalition government after the German invasion of Norway weakened support for Chamberlain. Netanyahu isn't in the same position as Churchill. If anything, he is more in the same position as Chamberlain in that he is PM at the start of the war.
Netanyahu also has had since Saturday to come to terms of the invasion. For Churchill, the war was well underway when he took over. He had more time to digest what was happening.
That's not to say that a coalition government may not be beneficial or whatever or whether Netanyahu has done a good job or not. Just not sure it's fair to contrast Netanyahu with Churchill.
Unconditional Surrender is the missing phrase in this fine note. Israel won’t have peace with Gaza until after their leaders surrender, lose, and the occupied territory is freed from Hamas oppression. That may not be sufficient, but is now clearly necessary. Tho maybe anti-Bibi elite disagree, which might lead Bibi to hesitate in giving Israeli appeasers more influence (I certainly don’t know).
"More than one pundit has remarked that within a year both Hamas and Netanyahu will have been tossed from the political stage"
It will be one or the other.
Netanyahu has said every member of Hamas is a dead man. That's the political equivalent of throwing out the steering wheel in a game of chicken. He can't stay boss without getting it done. But if he gets it done, he'll be boss a long time, because compared to that no one will even remember disappointments in the first days.
He is an extraordinary political survivor in an infamously treacherous political culture. He has always known exactly what he needs to do to stay or get back in power, and he has always done it.
So there will be one tombstone, and we shall see what name is written on the epitaph, but I doubt it will be his.
Most reporting out of Israel about politics there comes from rabid, long-time Bibi-haters. But I have been in contact with Israelis who are more center-Right, and they have turned against Bibi. No matter how effectively the war is prosecuted from now on, his reputation cannot be salvaged.
Bibi might not be “allowed “ by the USA/Biden admin to do the minimum to achieve Peace, especially when so many international elites envy and hate the Jews, and prefer never ending war over victory by Israel.
Bibi seems quite aware of expected constraints by Allie’s and PR.
Glick is correct. There is only one moral path for Israel which, unfortunately, it has neglected for far too long. When an enemy makes clear that its goal is your destruction, your duty is to rise and kill him first. The government of Israel, whose primary obligation is assuring the safety of its citizens, has allowed genocidal organizations dedicated to the destruction of Jews to gain territorial footholds to its west (Gaza), north (Lebanon) and east (Judea and Samaria). These groups are in an ongoing war with Israel, whether or not at any given moment that war is hot or cold. The Israeli government needs to come to grips with the fact that wars need to be won, finally and decisively.
I actually agree with a lot of this, but there are a couple important differences.
First, Japan was an adversary that the US could defeat militarily without resorting to ethnic cleansing. I don't believe there is a way to end the threat to Israel from Gaza with force unless the Israelis go so far as to get rid of the Palestinians. Since that is completely unconscionable, a non-military solution will need to be found.
Second, Pearl Harbor badly degraded the US navy's combat strength, putting Japan in the position of (temporary) superiority where they could take the offensive and potentially win on the battlefield. This attack has not come anywhere near achieving anything similar and there is still no feasible way for the Gaza Palestinians to defeat the Israelis militarily. (On a related point, going on the offense immediately after Pearl Harbor meant relatively "clean" naval battles where the best force and the best strategy would win, and without encountering many Japanese civilians. An offensive war for Israel in this situation is going to be a nasty block-by-block ground operation in unfriendly urban territory.)
I am not someone who thinks the Palestinians are pure and righteous revolutionaries, although I do believe if Israel had made wiser decisions in the past they would probably not have radicalized to this point. But whatever one thinks of the Palestinians, they are not going away and suppressing them with unilateral force is not a long-term solution.
> although I do believe if Israel had made wiser decisions in the past they would probably not have radicalized to this point
It would have taken the wisdom of God and his angels, I'm afraid. It is well worth re-reading Ze'ev Jabotinsky's pair of Iron Wall essays, published exactly 100 years ago this year: https://www.infocenters.co.il/jabo/jabo_multimedia/a%201/114767.pdf His point is that if Jews are to have a national home (i.e. a country where they are a majority) anywhere, they have no choice but to displace pre-existing population (there being no habitable but uninhabited land left) or, if not displace, at any rate put it into the position of a minority ruled by Jews, and no pre-existing population will accede to that peaceably if it has the slightest hope of successful resistance. My small addition to this point is that, just as European wars became much longer and costlier after they became coalition wars, nationalist struggles became much longer and costlier after the development of rapid transport, mass media, and so on, making the situation even more hopeless, unless one either ditches democracy (the Ottomans were foreign rulers with no particular liking for either Jews or Arabs) or the national principle (which the Jews don't want to do for understandable reasons). Similar problems have been resolved in the Middle East via large scale population exchanges, such as Greece-Turkey in 1923, the one which coincided with the creation of Israel in 1948. Post-WWII Europe has kept a lid on them by mostly ditching the national principle (EU).
“... we would in all likelihood not have resisted. We would have been supporters, either actively or passively.” We don’t need to go back to 30s Germany, 2020/21 saw the widespread abuse of children, supported by politicians, teachers and parents, and their sexuel abuse under the transgender banner now is supported, how easily ‘ordinary’ people supported even demanded the loss of Human rights and civil liberties, how quickly they turned on those who wouldn’t mask up, or get jabbed. Chamberlain: he was an officer in the trenches of WWI and saw first hand the horrors and wanted to do anything not to see it repeated. Also worth noting, it was Chamberlain who declared Britain and Germany at war, even though Germany had carried out no hostile attack or threat against Britain.
Interestingly, Chamberlain -didn't- also declare war against the USSR, though it was allied with Germany, and also invaded Poland. Not even three months later when it invaded Finland and killed tens of thousands, for which it was only kicked out of the League of Nations. No one would declare war against the Soviets for anything they did until Germany did it nearly two years later with Barbarossa.
USSR and Germany were not allies. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a non-agression pact between the two parties. Germany invaded Poland on 01 September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany on 03 September in order to return Poland as an independent Country. Britain’s treaty obligations to Poland were met.
Russia did not move into Poland until 17 September and this was not part of the German military campaign, so since Britain was already committed to freeing Poland, what would the point of declaring against USSR - Britain had enough on its plate with Germany?
As for Finland, Britain had no treaty obligation there.
> Russia did not move into Poland until 17 September and this was not part of the German military campaign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_military_parade_in_Brest-Litovsk
Without Russian raw materials the German war effort would have stalled. Russia's Plan A was clearly to supply Germany with the raw materials to fight the Entente for a few years until everyone was worn down and they could swoop in. The Entente nearly bombed Baku to cut off Soviet oil exports to Germany.
The only Entente I know about in this context was in WW1, not WW2.
I generally think of "The Allies" as USA + UK + France and the "Entente" as UK + France. So its the Entente vs Germany until 1941 and the Allies after that.
Plus the war before 1941 has more of a Great Power politics (WW1) feel and 1941 onward it's much more ideological.
Poland did not become free until 1991.
Britain did little to help Poland during the phony war. Had the Entente won the Battle of France and the Soviets and Germans never come to blows, it seems unlikely that Britain would have gone to war with the Soviets over liberating the Soviet half of Poland (and one would be surprised if the Soviets hadn't taken the other half when Germany was losing). Certainly they didn't do Operation Unthinkable in our own timeline.
"Britain had enough on its plate with Germany?"
That's what it comes down to. If "the rules based international order" was the be all end all then the allies should have gone to war with the Soviet Union over their many transgressions before, during, and after WWII. But there is no rules based international order, there is pragmatic self interest. And thank God for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#Secret_protocol
Germany and Russia were indeed allies, and carved up Eastern Europe between them. The Russian invasion of Poland was according to those terms. Britain could not safeguard Poland as an independent country if Russia seized it.
But you knew this already.
I deleted the first comment for the safety of the person who left it. Be careful here.
People who do evil deeds usually do not believe that what they are doing is evil. They spend a considerable amount of time, as AK notes, circling what they desire with words to cushion the actions, to justify them, to make them appear both noble and necessary. One can only imagine the sort of propaganda and indoctrination the Hamas terrorists who committed these acts of utter barbarity were subjected to, but you can bet that all of it amounted to "The Jews are invaders, occupiers, and animals and must be culled, while WE are following the path of Allah and righteousness for our people and for posterity." And at that point, they shoot the unarmed and innocent, rape and brutalize women and children, and behead babies. So what WE must do is strip the words from their actions and stare at what they have done and are still doing, in the same manner that Eisenhower brought in locals to the death camps in Germany to see for themselves what the Nazis and their own passive support wrought. And then we must support Israel in their Pearl Harbor hour of need...and help them annihilate Hamas.
Got to love the misandry of war, God forbid we think of the dead men. Also Hamas isn't killing civilians, Israel has a conscript system, literally every person killed is a trained reserve member of the military or will be. God forbid they behead a baby rather than just drop an IDF bomb on them, plenty of dead babies all around.
Murdering 250 unarmed revelers at a music festival for peace strikes me as civilian killing. And trying to make the argument that ALL Israelis are "trained reserve members of the military" and so, ipso facto, this was not an attack against civilians is utter garbage. A civilian is someone who is NOT in the military, whether they once were or never were. And whether they were trained or not, they did not have weapons with them, as Israel's policy of not allowing most civilians to have weapons effectively disarmed them, regardless of any training. Let's be clear as well: call it misandrist if you like, but very few Israeli females in the military are trained for any sort of combat role. 95% of all females in the IDF occupy military support roles, those being overwhelmingly non-combat related. Also, there is a profound difference between a civilian infant killed incidental to a bombing, particularly in Gaza, where Hamas routinely uses its citizens as human shields to deter Israeli action, and the beheading death of an infant, one on one, by a Hamas terrorist with a knife. And finally, this: the US annihilated Japanese military forces based on the Pearl Harbor sneak attacks, and did it without shame or any sense of regret. Israel should do the same thing now, for even if Hamas had attacked military targets ONLY (which they absolutely did not), attacking another country's military in the absence of a declared conflict is guaranteed to produce an implacable thirst for vengeance. And Hamas pointedly did NOT attack military targets, but rather sought to inflict civilian casualties because they knew there would be little to no initial resistance. Their tactics and their ideological-religious excuses for these attacks were and are appalling. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Thank you for that... I was longing for such a reply to that comment. It can be hard to keep the heart rate down when I read such things, I have the heart of a mother.
1) I don't see the need to make excuses or come up with tortured WWII analogies to do whatever you want in Gaza. It is in your power. Just do it. If people complain, who cares.
2) The most likely explanation for what Hamas thought is they are a society of low IQ cousin fuckers that can't build anything. They don't think ahead all that much, because they can't. They aren't capable of building a first world civilization. There isn't anything constructive for them to do.
3) I really really really want to call out this Munich bullshit.
Munich has been used to justify every single war in my entire life. Every single escalation or intervention has been (if you don't do this, it's Munich all over again).
Chamberlin did not trust Hitler. Nor was he convinced Munich would avoid war. There is just so much material available to know the truth of what happened.
Chamberlin:
1) Could look at a map and see that there was no way to get to the Czechs.
2) Recognized that the only player that could get there was the Soviet Union, which would have to go through Poland, who would never allow it, and if they did allow it you get the Soviets in Central Europe like the Iron Curtain. (Note: Poland was a belligerent revanchist power like Germany too).
3) Recognized that by juicing military spending to unsustainable levels from 1936-1938, had "stolen a march" on the entente.
Specifically, Germany had a way better Air Force in 1938. While air power was very important in the war, military intelligence overestimated the impact of the bomber force (the bomber will always get through). If you generals are telling you that London will be burned to the ground on the opening day of war and you have no way to defend against it, that is a problem.
Chamberlin was already ramping up his Air Force when Munich was going on. The planes that won the Battle of Britain were there because of the time Munich bought. While the Germans did improve their ground forces from 1938-1940, their advantage in the air actually diminished. Hitler himself was disappointed at not being able to fight in 1938 and thought it might have cost them the war.
4) Entente public opinion was against going to war over Munich. Had Chamberlin done so he would not have had the public behind him.
"A British poll taken in the Munich conference’s immediate aftermath had 57% satisfied with Chamberlain, 33% dissatisfied and 10% undecided."
When Hitler continued his aggression it got the entire country behind the idea that he had to be confronted regardless of the sacrifices.
5) The freak outcome of the Battle of France is the only reason we think of Munich as a failure. If the Ardennes strike doesn't work (and it shouldn't have) Chamberlin is remembered as the man that tried to avoid war, built up a winning army, and then ground the Germans down.
The point isn't to prove that Munich was absolutely the correct call. The point is that it was a perfectly reasonable foreign policy response to a difficult problem given the evidence available at the time. It wasn't a morality play about a naive pacifist. It was a complex problem with few good solutions.
"Palestinians" are not low IQ. "Palestinians" have the misfortune to be born into a territory where the government won't permit you to develop the ability to feed yourselves, because their only use for you is as a pawn. Whenever the state feels it's not being paid enough tribute, it commits a terrorist attack (which I define as acts of war targeting non-combatants), launching their weapons from the middle of "Palestinian" residential areas thus forcing Israel to create apparent martyrs when it defends itself. I refuse to hold Israel responsible for this practice.
If I were Israel's defense minister, then, I wouldn't go to all-out war against Gaza. I'd go to all-out war against the sponsor countries, Qatar and Iran. The Gazans really are martyrs and hapless pawns, but they're being used that way by the sponsor countries, not by Israel.
Yes, Arab IQs are somewhere in the 70s or 80s. Pretty terrible.
"I refuse to hold Israel responsible for this practice."
As do I.
"I'd go to all-out war against the sponsor countries, Qatar and Iran."
I'd say "just as long as my country doesn't get pulled into that mess", but I doubt that if Israel gets in a big quagmire that the US will be able to keep itself out.
I think the biggest similarity to WWII is that this is a true war between nations and the modern world hardly believes that exists. A nation is a collection of people, and until their will to fight is extinguished, they will continue to resist.
Nobody doubts that Israel can occupy land and kill every member of Hamas they find. The question is how they might, short of simply killing everyone, convince the Palestinians not to fight. After World War II, the allies forced the German populace to look at the concentration camps and bodies. They changed the German national character from one of militance to pacifism.
Obviously one doesn't know if that's possible, but it's certainly a more humane approach to try than wiping them all out. Which, I think, one might have reasonably said was the only way to get rid of the Germans after fighting two world wars.
Were the axis powers convinced to give up the fight by being forced to look at their atrocious crimes? It seems they actually got to that point by having suffered a truly devastating defeat.
Agreed. I wasn't saying, "do only this". If I were Israel, my "victory conditions" would probably be something like:
1. Destroy Hamas (and all formally or informally associated Palestinian groups) in Gaza.
2. Whatever successor governance is eventually established, such governmements must have constitutional statements that recognize the right of Israel to exist and the right of Jews in general to exist, to adopt specifically pacifist military posture, etc.
3. All educational and religious gatherings are subject to approval and censorship. There will be no more teaching that Jews are inhuman.
4. Further, I'd adopt the Salvadoran approach to mass incarceration. IIRC, in El Salvador, it's approxiamately 80,000, and I'd plan to double or triple that capacity. Effectively, plan to hold most Gazan males 16-64 for the rest of their lives. Over the following years, efforts should be made to deprogram and release all who can be. The rest should be kept impotently imprisoned for life.
5. On top of that, plenty of efforts to shame and deprogram the populace. Force everyone you can force to bear witness to what's been done in their name.
With Germany and Japan you had the genetic raw material to build successful first world states. You just had to reboot their successful societies with the militaristic parts cut out.
The Middle East and especially places like Gaza don't have good raw material. There is no successful society to reboot. Part of the reason they can't move on to some kind of constructive path forward is they lack the capacity to do anything constructive.
Other then paying us to figure out how to harvest their oil and then selling them things they couldn't make on their own to buy that oil, what has the Middle East produced?
Sorry, I just don't buy into this kind of genetic determinism. Disregarding all the other Arab societies that are somewhat functional, it's rhetorically too close to the sort of "the Jews don't have the genetic raw material to be anything but subversive destroyers of society".
Even if it's true, it's irrelevant from a moral perspective that should guide the Israeli response. Because the alternative to trying these approaches would be what? Genocidal extermination? Mass deportation that would have to be repeated every few years?
Might as well try to do the right thing.
"Sorry, I just don't buy into this kind of genetic determinism."
Well, I do. People that don't buy into it do stupid shit, like nation building in the middle east or starting the Arab Spring which ended in ISIS.
If people had listened to genetic determinist Steve Sailer in 2003 we wouldn't have invaded Iraq:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/cousin-marriage-conundrum/
"Mass deportation that would have to be repeated every few years?"
Its not clear why this would need to be repeated more then once.
Anyway, I'm not going to make the call as to whether Israel should engage in a permanent solution or simply accept periodic attacks of this nature. That's their own moral call, and I wouldn't judge them either way. I'm just not optimistic that any third option really exists.
We are lucky that our country isn't in the middle east so we have a "not have anything to do with them" option.
We do not, I think, have a great deal of trouble from - or awareness of - the Palestinians during the Ottoman period when the great majority of them lived in villages?
I cannot help but feel that the urban environment is the through line that means Israel will never be rid of this problem while Gaza exists.
This of course flies in the face of confident predictions that the future must be cities, we must all live in cities forever; it is the best life - it is "green".
Someone mentioned the Sioux. The Indians of the Northern Plains to the Rockies needed freedom of movement, and buffalo. They lost both, the latter through deliberate slaughter, and they never recovered. Everyone can't be made into successful urbanites. Can this be uttered?
I mean Gaza is like an Indian reservation with too many damn people.
There are 1.8 million Arabs in Gaza and 2.2 million Arabs in the West Bank.
Israel only has 7.1M Jews. Imagine for a minute if like 1/3 of the country were still Native American living on reservations. Wouldn't work.
At the very least, aid needs to cease. People mustn’t be encouraged to procreate in these circumstances.
That’s why I feel so despairing about “just get Hamas and win hearts and minds” solutions.
I think there are many far better reasons to be discouraged by that approach.
Feel free to tell us what trumps those 3 million reasons.
Population is always my prime mover.
I lived in a town in Norwest Minnesota that had a fair number of Native Americans. Might not have been 1/3 but the town worked. The Native Americans all lived in the exact same type of house in a part of town and worked. They didn't interact much unless they came from a mixed family in which case they didn't live in the same area. Israel has a fair number of Arab citizens too; sometimes they cause some problems but for the most part I think relations are o.k. but I don't know that.
They made the Germans look at the bodies in concentration camps, (many of who died from typhus and starvation due to allied bombing of supply routes) but then the US committed the same crime with 1 million purposefully starved to death in Eisenhowers death camps.
Bingo. Whenever I hear today's citizens of the then Allied powers condemn the morality of the Axis I generally tell them to go read Savage Continent by Keith Lowe. As Canadian's recently figured out with their heroic Ukrainians.
War is evil. Everything it takes to win a war is worthy of moral condemnation because totally evil, because short of evil, people won't give up. The trouble is that it is sometimes the lesser evil.
That's like saying that all violence is evil. No. It matters who started it and whether the response was out of proportion.
I think this makes more sense to argue that pacification happened after German unification. Before that, East Germany was highly militarized and West Germany was considerably more militarized than it is now. The Germanies accepted their status as a quasi-protectorate (not the first time Germans have had to do that this millennium), but the post-History Germany is really more recent. Peace as compared to pacification in part happened the way that it did because the alternative to peace with the west was a far worse deal with the Soviets.
I find your optimism regarding Biden touching. I suspect it's misplaced though because Biden is surrounded by the same people that Obama had around him that enabled the Iran deal and thus funded HamAss
Last week, before the Hamas attacks, I received an email from Substack with a sample of Substack Notes (which I don't follow), including yours referencing "Canada's accidental honoring of a former Nazi ...". This was no accident. It was a deliberate attempt at revisionist history that backfired. The purpose was to whitewash the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalist groups with the Nazis in WWII, and the participation of these groups in carrying out the Holocaust. Although this was Canada, the Biden administration has similarly whitewashed the Nazi history and ideology of some of the Ukrainian nationalist groups it is supporting in the conflict with Russia. It has also, in collaboration with the media, fanned the flames of russophobia to gin up public support for Ukraine, and has overlooked, and perhaps tacitly supported, the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians by the Ukrainian government (eg. the assassination of Darya Dugina). To be fair, organized Jewish groups on the left (ADL) and the right (RJC) have supported Biden's policy on Ukraine, and in so doing have tacitly gone along with the whitewashing of history. Of course, the Biden administration could have no way of knowing that Hamas would attack Israel (at least, so we hope), but in light of this background, I think you are being (characteristically) too charitable in your opinion of Biden's policy response to the attacks. I have to acknowledge, based on comment threads I have been following, that critics of Biden's policy response to the Hamas attacks on both the left and the right include people that I would regard as rabid jew-haters, and that would be the case regardless of Biden's Ukraine policy. Nevertheless, I think the support given to extremist Ukrainian nationalist groups and the whitewashing of their history has had the unfortunate unintended consequence of undermining Israel's cause. I have seen reports that the Biden administration is considering linking aid to Israel to continued financial support to Ukraine in a single package to be voted up or down by Congress. To me that would be deeply cynical and sinister. My understanding is that, unlike with Ukraine, the Administration can provide the necessary aid to Israel based on existing arrangements, without having to go to Congress. Regardless, I would object to such a linkage, think it would be damaging to Israel, and would not support the passage of such a package.
Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were no different in the kinds of patriotic fervor stirred up. And the cooler heads after 9/11 *were* correct (e.g., Barbara Lee and others). Of course you can always expect fervor to oppose reason, but that doesn't make it right. If killing civilians is wrong, it's wrong. If civilization over barbarity resides at least partly in upholding principle, then you stick with principle and don't capitulate to fervor.
Were the cooler heads saying, decapitate the Saudi regime, or end this cynical foreign aid dance with Pakistan?
Biden is seething? I doubt it. He does not remember what he said yesterday. Maybe Obama is seething but no, not Biden.
Pearl Harbor may be a little better analogy than 9/11, but it's not very satisfactory either. Hamas is not a peer nation with a military capabilities comparable to the IJAF. If we have to stick to US history, a better analogy might be something like the 1862 Sioux massacre of 800 Americans in Minnesota. As a non-American, it makes me think of the Ulster Massacres of 1641. But if people aren't familiar with the analogy, it's not very useful either!
The analogies matter because the story we tell matters. Israel is, or should be, engaged in a security operation, to prevent Hamas perpetrating further massacres. I assume that means locating and destroying Hamas and their confederates, both organisationally and as cells/individuals. That will look much more like US operations in Afghanistan post-9/11 (or the pacification actions during and after the Dakota War of 1862) than the Pacific Theatre of WW2.
Like you, I am not particularly worried about a purported Israeli "overreaction," but that is because I have faith in Israel's institutions and good sense. It is certainly possible to overreact, and deciding first that you have to fight WW2, then casting around for an opponent, would be a good way to do so.
Americans didn't worry about over-reacting to Germany or Japan. They worried about under-reacting. They didn't.
I assume you mean they didn't overreact to Pearl Harbor.
I find this a stunning statement. The internment of tens of thousands of American citizens who happened to have Japanese ancestry is near-universally agreed to be a shameful overreaction. The USG later apologised and paid compensation, and this is now generally seen as a canonical example of war hysteria and overreach.
It would have been impolite and insensitive to go around in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor saying "Careful you don't overreact now." But it's precisely for that reason that there was insufficient contemporary pushback against the overreaction.
I meant they didn't under-react.
Well it's equally obvious and uncontentious that they underreacted to Germany, so now I really don't know where you're going with this.
Oradour-sur-Glane
Lots of critical differences from Oradour-sur-Glane:
- Hamas has just irregular forces, only Israel has an army in the field (the opposite situation from Oradour-sur-Glane)
- Oradour-sur-Glane was done by occupying military forces, Hamas does not occupy Israel
- This was a surprise attack, Oradour-sur-Glane was in the midst of a hot war
Maybe some of the various Ustase/Chetnik/Partisan massacres in the former Yugoslavia would be a better analogy.
Salemicus, of course there are differences. But distinguishing it based on the occupation and the fact that it was perpetrated by German panzer units is, to me, a distinction without a difference. And it is a tad misleading (if you will excuse my saying so) to say that Oradour was "in the midst of a hot war." France was, but Oradour was a small village (population less than 700, I believe) and there was no battle there. and it was most definitely a surprise attack. But in response to Germans being kidnaped (and perhaps killed) by the resistance, troops from the Das Reich SS Panzer division surrounded the town and killed virtually every inhabitant. Estimates I ha have seen give varying numbers, but all agree it was around 650 or so. The SS herded the women and children into the small church, machine-gunned them and then burned the church to kill the survivors.
As you correctly point out, there are other valid comparisons as well. One was on the Western Front in WW II when the Germans herded a large number of people into a barn and then burned them to death. And, of course, on the Eastern front, that kind of thing was just another day's work.
My larger point was that these were considered among the worst atrocities in WW II (excluding the camps from this) and Hamas is not doing the same type thing and should be equally condemned as were the original Nazis.
Respectfully,
John Lucas
https://johnalucas6.substack.com/
If you are saying this massacre is comparable in terms of evil and moral responsibility to Ouradur-Sur-Glane I agree. In fact I think it is worse. Hamas should indeed be condemned in similar terms to the Waffen SS and other vile criminals.
But frankly this should go without saying.
My analogies (and I believe Dr. Kling's) were in terms of the appropriate response. The differences are critical because the way to stop more Ouradur-sur-Glanes was (1) end the German occupation of France and (2) prosecute the perpetrators for war crimes as punishment and deterrent. This would be a completely inadequate response to Hamas's attack, because Hamas wasn't occupying Israel to begin with. Instead, this was a kind of cross-border raid. Moreover, there was a German army in the field that could be defeated (needed to be defeated!) that is not present in the current case.
To achieve safety for its citizens, Israel is going to need to do some combination of border security, pacification, and outright destruction, that is very unlike the Allied response to WW2. It is as if unrepentant Nazis in Allied-occupied Germany were launching cross-border raids to massacre French civilians. As a result I find the analogy to the Ulster Massacres much more on-point.
My point was the one you make in your first sentence. You may (or may not) appreciate this. Appeasement in Real Time - by John A. Lucas - Bravo Blue (substack.com)
All criticism is welcome.
Interesting point on Chamberlain. I honestly don't know much about him.
I'm not sure how sympathetic I am with your point comparing Churchill and Netanyahu. Churchill became PM in May 1940, well after the start of the war. He was brought in specifically with the mandate to form coalition government after the German invasion of Norway weakened support for Chamberlain. Netanyahu isn't in the same position as Churchill. If anything, he is more in the same position as Chamberlain in that he is PM at the start of the war.
Netanyahu also has had since Saturday to come to terms of the invasion. For Churchill, the war was well underway when he took over. He had more time to digest what was happening.
That's not to say that a coalition government may not be beneficial or whatever or whether Netanyahu has done a good job or not. Just not sure it's fair to contrast Netanyahu with Churchill.
And Netanyahu has formed a unity government.
"Look, I don’t claim to be able to read Joe Biden’s mind."
Good, because trying to read Joe Biden's mind would be like trying to read a rain-soaked newspaper.
Unconditional Surrender is the missing phrase in this fine note. Israel won’t have peace with Gaza until after their leaders surrender, lose, and the occupied territory is freed from Hamas oppression. That may not be sufficient, but is now clearly necessary. Tho maybe anti-Bibi elite disagree, which might lead Bibi to hesitate in giving Israeli appeasers more influence (I certainly don’t know).
"More than one pundit has remarked that within a year both Hamas and Netanyahu will have been tossed from the political stage"
It will be one or the other.
Netanyahu has said every member of Hamas is a dead man. That's the political equivalent of throwing out the steering wheel in a game of chicken. He can't stay boss without getting it done. But if he gets it done, he'll be boss a long time, because compared to that no one will even remember disappointments in the first days.
He is an extraordinary political survivor in an infamously treacherous political culture. He has always known exactly what he needs to do to stay or get back in power, and he has always done it.
So there will be one tombstone, and we shall see what name is written on the epitaph, but I doubt it will be his.
Most reporting out of Israel about politics there comes from rabid, long-time Bibi-haters. But I have been in contact with Israelis who are more center-Right, and they have turned against Bibi. No matter how effectively the war is prosecuted from now on, his reputation cannot be salvaged.
Bibi might not be “allowed “ by the USA/Biden admin to do the minimum to achieve Peace, especially when so many international elites envy and hate the Jews, and prefer never ending war over victory by Israel.
Bibi seems quite aware of expected constraints by Allie’s and PR.
Glick is correct. There is only one moral path for Israel which, unfortunately, it has neglected for far too long. When an enemy makes clear that its goal is your destruction, your duty is to rise and kill him first. The government of Israel, whose primary obligation is assuring the safety of its citizens, has allowed genocidal organizations dedicated to the destruction of Jews to gain territorial footholds to its west (Gaza), north (Lebanon) and east (Judea and Samaria). These groups are in an ongoing war with Israel, whether or not at any given moment that war is hot or cold. The Israeli government needs to come to grips with the fact that wars need to be won, finally and decisively.
I actually agree with a lot of this, but there are a couple important differences.
First, Japan was an adversary that the US could defeat militarily without resorting to ethnic cleansing. I don't believe there is a way to end the threat to Israel from Gaza with force unless the Israelis go so far as to get rid of the Palestinians. Since that is completely unconscionable, a non-military solution will need to be found.
Second, Pearl Harbor badly degraded the US navy's combat strength, putting Japan in the position of (temporary) superiority where they could take the offensive and potentially win on the battlefield. This attack has not come anywhere near achieving anything similar and there is still no feasible way for the Gaza Palestinians to defeat the Israelis militarily. (On a related point, going on the offense immediately after Pearl Harbor meant relatively "clean" naval battles where the best force and the best strategy would win, and without encountering many Japanese civilians. An offensive war for Israel in this situation is going to be a nasty block-by-block ground operation in unfriendly urban territory.)
I am not someone who thinks the Palestinians are pure and righteous revolutionaries, although I do believe if Israel had made wiser decisions in the past they would probably not have radicalized to this point. But whatever one thinks of the Palestinians, they are not going away and suppressing them with unilateral force is not a long-term solution.
> although I do believe if Israel had made wiser decisions in the past they would probably not have radicalized to this point
It would have taken the wisdom of God and his angels, I'm afraid. It is well worth re-reading Ze'ev Jabotinsky's pair of Iron Wall essays, published exactly 100 years ago this year: https://www.infocenters.co.il/jabo/jabo_multimedia/a%201/114767.pdf His point is that if Jews are to have a national home (i.e. a country where they are a majority) anywhere, they have no choice but to displace pre-existing population (there being no habitable but uninhabited land left) or, if not displace, at any rate put it into the position of a minority ruled by Jews, and no pre-existing population will accede to that peaceably if it has the slightest hope of successful resistance. My small addition to this point is that, just as European wars became much longer and costlier after they became coalition wars, nationalist struggles became much longer and costlier after the development of rapid transport, mass media, and so on, making the situation even more hopeless, unless one either ditches democracy (the Ottomans were foreign rulers with no particular liking for either Jews or Arabs) or the national principle (which the Jews don't want to do for understandable reasons). Similar problems have been resolved in the Middle East via large scale population exchanges, such as Greece-Turkey in 1923, the one which coincided with the creation of Israel in 1948. Post-WWII Europe has kept a lid on them by mostly ditching the national principle (EU).