Why this war should not end until Hadar Goldin, Oron Shaul and Avera Mengistu come home
A victory needs a symbol. There is one attainable profound symbol that will assure this time that Israel’s victory and Hamas’s crushing defeat is unmistakable.
By DOV FISCHERDemonstration on May 19, 2021 for the release of Hisham al-Sayed and Avera Mengistu, Israeli captives held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip as well as the bodies of Israeli soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, kept by Hamas as bargaining chips.(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
A national consensus has unfolded in Israel that there must be more than “mowing the lawn” to show for yet another war with Hamas. Hamas this time must know it has been defeated and crushed. No less importantly, the people of Israel need to know it. Most of all, the “Arab street” needs to know it. Israeli deterrence depends on this broad-based recognition.Israel’s history confirms the power of leaving an adversary aware that he has been crushed. Jordan and Egypt opened fronts and fought Israel aggressively in 1948 and 1967. However, Jordan did not again participate when Egypt and Syria launched the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The difference was that in June 1967, Jordan had experienced the full meaning of losing to a victor: Judea and Samaria – the “West Bank” – was lost, and all of Jerusalem was now united as Israel’s capital.In 1973, Egypt also experienced being crushed. After early advances in that war, Egypt’s invasion was repelled, and its Third Army was spared utter annihilation only because of urgent American intervention. Anwar Sadat had sustained enough losing wars with Israel, and when the fierce Menachem Begin emerged in 1977 as his new adversary, Sadat resolved to negotiate for the Sinai and thereupon end battle with Israel. That peace so far has outlasted the proverbial Biblical milestone of forty years’ quiet.It is likewise telling that Mahmoud Abbas has not opened an eastern front during the current conflagration.On the one hand, since the war really began as a Hamas political power play to wrest power and support among the Arab public from Fatah and the Palestine Authority it controls, Abbas has had a personal and political interest in leaving Hamas isolated. If Hamas cannot show that its war indeed advanced objectives important to Arabs in Gaza and Judea-Samaria, its political position relative to Abbas and Fatah is deeply weakened.On a second level, Abbas stayed out of this war because he, too, has experienced the price of losing and an Israeli victory that transcends “lawn mowing.” He knows with assuredness that, if he had joined in the fracas now, Israel would do at war’s end as it did in 1967 when it annexed east Jerusalem and then populated the rest of Judea and Samaria with more than 130 communities comprising more than 475,000 Jews.This time, Israel would annex the Jordan Valley and the territory designated as “Area C” in the 1995 Oslo II Agreement, substantially diminishing the Palestinian Authority. That is what victory connotes: Stay out of a new war because a severe price will be exacted.NOW THE FOCUS turns to identifying a decisive symbol of victory as Israel contemplates winding down the current Hamas conflict. Israel has successfully targeted several Hamas military leaders for permanent elimination, has eradicated countless rockets and launching platforms in Gaza, has toppled several structures that stood larger than ten stories and that housed Hamas military and intelligence facilities, has destroyed miles of Hamas’s underground military-tunnel infrastructure, and has put the lie to Hamas’s earlier boasts to the Arab street that it had proven itself the “Defender of Jerusalem” and had demonstrated a sort of parity with Israel.Still, a victory needs a symbol. Jordan did not disappear after 1967, nor did Egypt vanish after 1973. Rather, in both cases, a resulting demonstrable and symbolic change in the playing field left no doubt Israel had won those wars.Hamas will likewise not disappear overnight. Several of its leaders apparently will be left alive to confront another day. They immediately will proclaim they “won” and have “defeated Israel.” Among a gullible Gaza population whose access to independent media is limited, the consistently disastrous wars typically leave residents somehow imagining that perhaps they did win.
However, there is one attainable profound symbol that will assure this time that Israel’s victory and Hamas’s crushing defeat is unmistakable. The symbol is deeply poignant.Israel must demand the release of Hadar Goldin’s and Oron Shaul’s bodies and the freedom of Avera Mengistu, the Ethiopian Jew who haplessly wandered into Gaza in September 2014. Israel has been engaged in diplomatic efforts for nearly seven years to gain Mengistu’s freedom and to secure the remains of Lt. Hadar Goldin and Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul, who fell in the summer of 2014 during Operation Protective Edge.IT HAS BEEN central to the Arab terror playbook, from Fatah to Hamas, that they never release Jewish hostages, not even the bodies of the fallen, except for insanely disproportionate ransoms of hundreds of murderers. In one case in 1985, for example, Israel released 1,150 Arabs in return for three Israelis. These past seven years have been gut-wrenching, not only for the Goldin, Shaul and Mengistu families but also for the entire nation, as diplomatic efforts continually have failed.It now is time for Israel to get back the two who have fallen and to secure the freedom of Mengistu. Even countries now pressing Israel to cease military operations will be hard-pressed to justify such demands if the only item remaining on Israel’s agenda is the freedom of Mengistu and the release of the two fallen. In Mengistu’s case, Israel also can remind the American administration that “Black lives matter.”If Israel makes this the final demand in this war, it will have a moral basis for securing additional days to continue conducting bruising operations on its military and strategic agenda, and will focus world attention on how satanically evil her Hamas adversaries in Gaza truly are. If Israel actually obtains these final demands, it will be clear to the Arab street that such an unprecedented Hamas concession reflects that this time there indeed was a loser and a victor.Rabbi Dov Fischer, a law professor and Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, is Contributing Editor at The American Spectator and a congregational rabbi. His book, General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, explored the 1982 war in Lebanon and the libel trial that followed.
