And so it begins. First humanitarian supplies, and now the European agenda is starting to move toward a "humanitarian ceasefire." All the world leaders and sympathizers who arrived in solidarity, from Joe Biden to Macron, want only one thing: Don't fight. You'll trigger World War III. A leader's role now is to stick to the task that the government has decided upon and see it through. It means instructing the IDF to follow up on its aerial offensive with a decisive ground operation.
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The supreme necessity of an operation on the ground, seizing and purging the territory from terrorists as the forces have been trained to do, is a military one. The daily output of aerial fire and of limited ground incursions isn't known. Surely the IDF knows. But it definitely isn't enough to attain the objective of destroying the military and governing capabilities of Hamas. Israel is not an empire that can besiege a city or a settled region for an unlimited period of time. We can already see the clock running out. Any hesitation will lead to further pressure. Now they say the Americans aren't ready; then we'll hear that they're waiting for the canteen truck.
We have normalized genocide.
The mobilized reserves appear to have reached the stage of initial erosion of motivation, a decline in morale brought on by distrust in the military high command and the political echelon. Pretty soon, Israel will reach the point that Moshe Dayan defined on the eve of the Six-Day War as "either go to war or send the reservists home."
The historical national necessity, however, also has a moral dimension. Anyone who was in the south, in the villages and towns of the Western Negev that absorbed Hamas' pogrom offensive on October 7, knows that in addition to the killing sites, a terrifying phenomenon was created: a model of genocide-in-microcosm that the Muslims displayed for us. Since then, we have normalized it. The remnants of the pools of blood in the kindergarten at Be'eri; the shouting into smartphones by government representatives as they lead foreign journalists and functionaries through the death rooms. Israel is gradually turning these places into a diplomatic Disneyland.
We have to put an end to this. The best way of explaining the severity of the crime against the Jewish people and the population of Israel is Israel's response, which should be a military offensive on the ground that will demolish Hamas, as General Petraeus and seven and a half million Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli citizens have recommended. The difficult and decisive role that history has thrust onto Prime Minister Netanyahu's shoulders cannot be avoided. That's how Israel finds itself in serpentine negotiations with international forces as Hamas looms overhead. The Americans and Europeans are bargaining with those who perpetrated the mass murder.
An additional moral rationale is the restoration of the people's trust in the IDF. It must not be felt that the political echelon distrusts the IDF's ability to surmount the threat. After the events of October 7, the nation, which has mobilized en masse, wants to see the IDF in action and not just by using "firepower from the air." Thus, the only question is the timing of the definitive demarche on the ground. There is a surfeit of will and motivation, backed by abundant confidence among the soldiers and their commanders in their abilities. The battalion and brigade commanders are afraid of only one thing: that they will not be sent in first but will be held back as a reserve or as a second wave.
To play on the strings of the past, even though the IDF has already chosen a name for the ground operation, it is nevertheless proposed to call the follow-up to Swords of Iron "Operation Stouthearted Men II," as in Part 2 of the Israeli counterattack in the Yom Kippur War.
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