Among the many disingenuous and ahistorical narratives that have developed surrounding the Hamas-Israel war is one that Israel has done enough harm to Hamas that it should allow the damaged but not defeated organization to survive and perhaps even remain in power in Gaza.
Such an argument is often made under the premise that Hamas will be difficult to destroy and that Israel should cut a deal to free its hostages.
One commentator even posited that it would be “extraordinary” to suggest Hamas should accept its absolute annihilation during ceasefire negotiations, implying that it was irregular for a victor to insist that its opponent disarm and dissolve.
White flag
But such an allegation is patently false, as many times in history, one side has demanded the unconditional surrender of its adversary or annihilation of its military force.
During World War II, the Allied powers expected an unconditional surrender from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Indeed, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander in Europe, told his troops before D-Day, “We will accept nothing less than full victory!”
For the Pacific Theater, the Potsdam Declaration decreed that Japan surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction” and threatened “the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and... the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.”
There was no illusion on the part of the Axis powers that their governments would be dismembered and their military forces annihilated when they accepted those terms. And yet in both cases, the defeated powers agreed to unconditional surrender and accepted their fates.
World War I concluded with an armistice followed by a negotiated settlement, but there was little question as to what would become of the military forces and political systems of the Central Powers. The Triple Entente demanded the near annihilation of the German war machine, with bans on conscription, submarines, and an air force. Its army and navy were largely dissolved, and the scuttled remains of its once great fleet can now be visited by vacationing scuba divers. Germany lost more than a tenth of its territory, and its allies, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were carved up by the victors.
During the American Civil War, Union forces infrequently required the unconditional surrender of Confederate forces, but still left the Confederacy as a gutted military force. At the Battle of Fort Donelson, Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant earned the moniker “Unconditional Surrender” Grant for telling his opponent, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.”
The larger conflict, however, gave slightly more generous terms to Confederate forces when they surrendered at Appomattox Court House, with combatants paroled and allowed to keep their sidearms as they returned home.
Military material such as rifles, cannons, and other public property were stacked and handed over to Union soldiers, preventing Southern forces from resuming large-scale conflict and abolishing them as an organized military. The Confederate States of America, the South’s political governing body, was dissolved and a military occupation began.
Achieving a successful war termination that creates a lasting peace afterward is a strategically difficult challenge but not a rare occurrence. When utter annihilation of the enemy is paired with a generous peace, such as with the Marshall Plan after World War II, there is greater likelihood of a long-lasting peace. On the other hand, creating a Carthaginian peace, with a post-conflict period that punishes rather than rebuilds, can often pave the road for the next conflict, as it did with the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
Even worse, the nuances of those peace accords later allowed Germans such as Adolf Hitler to declare that their country had never been defeated militarily, paving the way for rearmament. In the American Civil War, an inability to rebuild the South during Reconstruction and punish those who continued to fight for their tortured ideologies led to nearly endless low-level conflict that America still endures. The worst possible war termination option is completing a negotiated settlement that leaves the combatants ready to resume fighting: a real recipe for perpetual conflict.
IF ANYTHING is to be learned from the endings of these earlier conflicts, it is that letting Hamas survive after the barbarism of October 7 would be tantamount to permitting Nazi Germany to end the war in 1944 with Hitler still in power.
Imagining a world in which the fascist powers from that conflict had been allowed to endure as wounded versions of themselves is nothing less than a ludicrous nightmare that today we should do everything in our power to prevent with the modern-day fascists of Gaza, who cloak themselves in a false anti-colonial liberation narrative.
The writer, a PhD, is a publishing contributor at The MirYam Institute and a 26-year veteran of service in the US Army and Special Forces.