Israel has the right to defend itself. While worldwide opinion is turning against them, I hope they hold firm. A precedent cannot be established that all terrorists need to do to evade accountability is capture hostages and hide behind human shields. Destroy Hamas!
"But you're never going to completely crush Hamas. That seems to be the problem. There's an analogy I like to use, imagine all the ants, crawling in your home, and the only tool you have is a baseball bat, and in your efforts to kill the ants, you demolish your home, but the ants are still going to come.
That's where Israel is right now."
Israel could absolutely destroy Hamas in Gaza with a prolonged occupation. Antiterrorism campaigns conducted by advanced militaries have actually been quite successful. The notion that Israel's campaign in Gaza will lead to more radicalism in Gaza is not exactly accurate. Israel is truly reducing the number of deaths within Israel to terrorism by attempting to destroy Hamas, it's just that it might be losing an equal or greater amount of its young people in the campaign in addition to the tens of thousands of Gazans dying. I think arguing that the campaign in Gaza will hurt Israel in the future weakens the pro-ceasefire argument. A better argument is that Israel is gaining nothing from this now because, outside of the massive failure of the Israeli government to prevent 10/7 when it easily could have, terrorist attacks into Israel have been largely ineffectual and a return to the status quo pre-10/7 is better than a post-10/7 world with no Hamas and 5k Israeli soldiers dead.
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was surely a success. You know it when troops have been stationed there fighting for two decades.
A lot of the problem in the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was that the US put too much trust in pro-Western Iraqi and Afghani troops who revealed themselves incapable of fighting insurgencies. If the US had surge-level troop numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan those wars would have been much more successful. Instead, politically expedient half measures led to further instability.
I like to think of it as a metaphor of demolishing a building and constructing a new one. If you demolish the building but don't clear the rubble then you've accomplished nothing and gone backwards. The US demolished the building, cleared out some rubble, then left the Iraqis/Afghanis to clear it out, build a foundation, and construct the building without any tools to do so. When the US came back and cleared out more rubble things got better but again left without finishing the job. Nation-building is not impossible, it's just a costly and lengthy process.
If Israel were to leave Gaza now, a still partially intact Hamas would recover eventually. Israel either has to finish the job and completely dismantle Hamas or withdraw and guard its borders more vigilantly against future terrorism. It might take 5 or 10 years for Israel to destroy terrorism in Gaza and build the foundation for a more prosperous Gazan society, but it can be done. The bigger problem is that Israel seems ambivalent (or even opposed) to the advancement of Gazans and definitely does not want a Palestinian state, so they might not build a foundation for a prosperous society.
