When the Smoke Clears in Gaza

with John McWhorter

In this clip from this week’s episode, John gives voice to a common response to Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza. Though regrettable, it is the “least bad” option. It will result in thousands of dead soldiers and civilians, but if Hamas is not rooted out and, as John puts it, “exterminated,” they will rebuild. And then Israel will face, in five or ten years’ time, another October 7-style attack. The only viable option is to enter Gaza and capture or kill as many Hamas fighters and leaders as possible, despite the inevitable loss of innocent life.

As I acknowledge repeatedly, I’m not an expert. I don’t pretend to speak from a position of authority on this matter. Israel has the right and the responsibility to defend its people. And yet, the “collateral damage” necessary to secure Israel’s safety will devastate the lives of many thousands, sick and elderly, young and innocent, ordinary people merely struggling to survive under hellish conditions. This cannot simply be regarded as inevitable.  More is required of us.

It may well be that Israel believes it has no other viable strategy. Indeed, it may even be—again, I’m no expert—that no other viable strategy exists. That could explain why these deaths are necessary for Israel, but it could never explain them away. 

The smoke in Gaza will not clear for some time. It may yet engulf more of the region and beyond. Should that horrific scenario come to pass, will we be prepared to truly reckon with what has happened? Will we be prepared to be honest about America’s role in it?

Perhaps my distance from the conflict zone affords me the luxury of ambivalence and moral probing. Perhaps I would feel more resolute if I lived a hundred miles from Gaza instead of many thousands. Certainly, the stakes are higher for those who do. But, while we shouldn’t mistake physical distance for objectivity, neither should we mistake proximity for license.

What is happening in Gaza is already having repercussions throughout the world. Perhaps it’s the economist in me, as much as the moralist, but I cannot forestall this sincere question: Will it have been worth it?

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GLENN LOURY: You know, there's going to be an extensive ground campaign undertaken by Israeli military into the Gaza Strip to root out Hamas. It's going to be horrifically bloody. A lot of people are going to die. How is that and the anticipation of that necessary (is it necessary?) defensive (is it defensive?) mobilization by Israel against Hamas—which is deeply embedded, dug in underground within the Gaza territory—how does that affect your thinking about this?

I mean, because we're not anywhere near the end of this. We're not even at the end of the beginning of this. I shudder to think that the bitterness and the vitriol and the hatred and the animosity—enmity—that we've seen over the last couple of weeks will be sustained and amplified and entrenched as we go forward. I don't know. Do you share my foreboding? It's a dark, dark time that we're entering into here.

JOHN MCWHORTER: It's horrible. It can only be less bad. That's the best that it can be. And it can only be so much less bad. Even last time we talked, I was saying that I worry about the idea of going in and flattening Gaza. What would that do? Especially since it would only buy time. I would say at this point that it seems to me that the idea—and listen to me, a non-expert on this situation—but it seems to me that as many people as possible who live in Gaza should be gotten south and beyond.

But the tragedy is that Hamas is not going to stop. There is nothing we can do to make them stop. They are not the PLO. They don't want to sit at a table and negotiate. They want Israel to go away, and they're not going to stop wanting Israel to go away. And so, to not try to exterminate them, I think it's become clear this time in particular, is to essentially settle for things maybe being calm for five years or ten years, and then they're going to do it again.

I'm someone who, Quakerism played a major role in my childhood. And even if it hadn't, I think I'd feel this way. War is hell. I would like to be a pacifist. Sometimes that just doesn't work, because Hamas won't stop. And if they don't go in there and uproot Hamas—not Palestinians, but Hama—then this is going to keep going. And so if it's possible to go in and seal off the tunnels and really make it so that there was no more Hamas, despite the fact that thousands of Palestinians and thousands of Israelis would die in the effort, I can't see any other way.

This is the test that I gave myself twenty years ago with Iraq to say that I think we should do this. And I was mistaken about Iraq. Colin Powell and the media fooled me. I thought we were going in there for a reason. I should have known better. But I remember thinking, if I'm going to espouse this, would I go? Would I go and get my legs blown off? And at the time I said, yes. If this were my effort, I would go in there because I really do worry about X, Y, and Z.

And in this case, if I were Israeli, yeah. I mean, I think I'm maybe getting too old for it really to matter, but let's say I'm saying this at 35. Yeah. Otherwise Hamas isn't going to stop. And you can talk about why they're not going to stop, but the fact is they're not. What else could be done other than going in and smoking them out? How do you feel about that?

Well, I said I have a sense of foreboding. I feel that I'm looking over the precipice into a chasm that goes down very deep, and I think the word “tragedy”—historical tragedy—is apt. I'm no military expert, but I have been following a few of them as they comment on the tactical problem of actually rooting out Hamas in the Gaza territory. It's not even clear that it can be done. I mean, you can kill a lot of people, you can destroy a lot of infrastructure, but do you end up with an even more fiercely mobilized hatred of your presence and a determination to resist and to fight?

What are you gonna do? You're gonna kill them all? You're not gonna kill them all. So there's that. Again, I'm not an expert. People tell me that the risk of a wider regional war being precipitated by the slaughter that would ensue if a serious operation on the ground to root out Hamas were undertaken—the slaughter not of thousands, probably of tens of thousands, maybe of hundreds of thousands—that one is playing with fire here. One doesn't know where. A second front in the North, Iran, drawing in Turkey.

There's bloodlust. Maybe you've seen some of the comments about the revenge that needs to be wrought on those Palestinians, not just the fighters at Hamas. I'm depressed here.

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That revenge is more laziness. That's the easy way out. You resist that if you're trying to think on a higher level. And everything that you're saying: yes. We're going beyond what we have any expertise in, in terms of what the wider ramifications might be.

I can't get away from, if you don't go into Gaza now—and I don't know if anybody would have said this ten years ago—but if you don't go in this time, they're going to do it again. And the idea is to eliminate most of the leadership and to eliminate the tunnels. If that could be done relatively quickly, say six months, maybe that, even with the risk of larger repercussions, would be better than taking the higher road and leaving Gaza under some sort of supervision. But it's the same old thing, with a new generation growing up with absolutely nothing to do. They barely have jobs. They're penned into that area, for better or for worse, where what they live for, their whole sense of identity, is based on hating Israel.

And then this will happen again. It'll be very easy to find men who are willing to die to kill more Israelis. I have the hardest time seeing that as what is the good thing to do now. Anybody getting blown up: horrible thing. That person has a family. That person valued their life as much as we do. And for it to happen in the thousands? But I'm not sure I see anything else.

You're going to kill a lot of civilians. You're going to lose a lot of your own people. It's door-to-door, block-to-block, basement-to-basement, tunnel-to-tunnel. Tactically, it's a nightmare, I'm told. Again, I don't really have much to say.

It's not like just doing it from the air. Yeah.

And politically, I imagine the Israeli political establishment—the Netanyahu government and so on, the IDF—have to come with a heavy hand just to maintain their own legitimacy in the face of this horrific ...

This is the last government you would want to have behind this. Yes, exactly.

And yet, I'm sitting over here entertaining the idea of this kind of world-historic gesture of—looking three moves down the line—recognizing that there, at the end of the day, is no military solution to this problem. There is only a political solution. That's the only thing that's going to stick, somehow. The land between the river and the sea has to be divided somehow between Israeli and Palestinian. I have no idea how that's going to be accomplished, but my gut is telling me that, you say it'll happen again? It'll happen again anyway without the political solution.

So this world-historic gesture would be to forbear. Of course, there has to be some response. But it would be not to have it at the scale that roots out every tunnel and ferrets out every fighter and “eliminates” them. I'm gonna stop. The longer I talk, the more trouble I'm gonna get myself into, because I'm speculating off the top of my head.

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