OPINION:
For all of the rhetoric in international circles regarding the war in Gaza, one word is never uttered. Yet that word, “surrender,” is the key to ending the conflict. Even more precisely, the end of the conflict calls for surrender with the modifier “unconditional” in front of it.
All of the hand-wringing regarding civilian casualties, destruction, and the need for Israel to conduct its war with restraint would readily be resolved if the Hamas terrorists would simply release their hostages, throw down their arms and unconditionally surrender.
Israel would no longer need to bomb terrorist targets lodged amid civilian populations. Civilians would cease to be caught in the crossfire. And the risk of a greater conflict in the Middle East would be eliminated.
Ironically, only through a surrender can Hamas terrorists actually escape death. If they put down their weapons and become prisoners of war, Israel will be constrained by international law from killing these killers.
The failure of the great powers, including the United States, as well as other nations with an interest in the Gaza conflict, to demand that Hamas surrender is deeply disappointing but hardly shocking.
For the most part, Western nations with the power to compel Hamas to surrender are fearful of their Muslim citizens and of the growing strength of left-wing radicals, who increasingly populate their academic and urban centers and who have a shockingly ignorant and entirely a historical understanding of the conflict.
Yet the notion of surrender is hardly a strange one. Most significant wars have ended in precisely that manner — one of the parties has had to surrender.
In January 1943, during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt flew to Casablanca to meet with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and representatives of other Allies to discuss war strategy. While they explored the options available to them to bring the global conflict to an end, the most important outcome of the conference was the decision that only total victory would be acceptable.
The words “unconditional surrender” were used to define the ultimate goal of the war against the Axis powers.
Through the balance of World War II, there was never any talk of an arrangement with Germany, Italy or Japan. No negotiations were contemplated or sought by the Allies. The objective set in Casablanca was honored completely through military victory.
In order to achieve the specified objective, there were hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. None were more dramatic than those resulting from President Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs on civilian targets in Japan. More than 200,000 civilians died in those bombings, sacrificed in order to achieve the necessary objective. Those bombings in effect induced the Japanese to unconditionally surrender and brought the worst conflict the world has ever seen to a rapid and conclusive end.
It is important to remember that demand for an “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers was hardly an obvious position for Roosevelt and his allies to take. Just two decades earlier, the first major conflagration of the 20th century, the Great War (later renamed World War I) ended not with surrender but with an armistice — a cease-fire. The desire to bring the carnage of four years of war prevailed over the need to destroy the enemy’s ability and will to fight.
The cease-fire that brought World War I to an end is hardly a model of how to conclude a conflict. By failing to defeat Germany, the successful combatants — Britain, France and the United States — left the embers of anger and resentment among the German people and with them the belief that they could resume the fighting in the future. The armistice, the cease-fire, did not end the conflict. Less than 20 years later, the war began again with ever-greater virulence.
The resurgence of a Germany that never surrendered caused the world to experience some of the most horrific consequences ever witnessed. Only the total and unconditional surrender of Germany and its ally Japan in 1945 provided the world with an era of peace. Finally convinced by its total defeat that it could not dominate Europe, Germany ended once and for all its century-old efforts to defeat and conquer France and much of the rest of Europe.
The lessons of the last great global conflict should not be lost on today’s generation. In order to end a long conflict, one side or the other must be convinced that violence is futile and that nothing will be gained by engaging in war.
It is this lesson that needs to be imposed on Hamas and other Muslim terrorists who have, for three-quarters of a century, sought to annihilate their Jewish neighbors and have refused to accept them (a people that is far more indigenous to the area than the terrorists and their supporters) as neighbors.
Just as Roosevelt and Churchill, having fully recognized the evil perpetrated by the Nazis and their Japanese allies, determined that only the utter and complete defeat of the enemy would bring peace to the world, so the rational actors in today’s world must encourage Israel to destroy the Hamas terrorist entity. Anything less is merely a delusion.
There are those who claim that you cannot militarily defeat an ideology and, therefore, that it is futile to combat Islamist ideology through military means. Those who say that might consider having a dialogue with German Nazis or Japanese imperialists. They can’t, of course, because the force of arms destroyed those ideologies.
Similarly, the toxic Islamist ideology of Hamas and other terrorist groups, encouraged and funded by Iran, can and must be defeated.
President Biden and other world leaders need to demand and encourage Israel to obtain the unconditional surrender of the Hamas terrorists. This is the solution — the only solution — to the Gaza conflict. Anything less merely prolongs the suffering of the very civilians these leaders purport to be trying to protect.
• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. His book, “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution,” was published by HUC Press in 2022.
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