Why Israel Can‘t Just “Stop” the War in Gaza

What Douthat, Galston, and Linker are missing

Gaza as seen in an image from a recent social media post of the Israel Defense Forces.

Over the past week three columnists have written a version of a similar argument, arguing that Israel’s war in Gaza is futile and that Israel should stop it.

Ross Douthat in the New York Times, July 26, “How Israel’s War Became Unjust”: “right now, if I were predicting an endgame for the struggle, it would involve Israel finally stepping back in exhaustion, cordoning off the Gaza Strip again, watching bloody power struggles play out in an isolated Gaza and accepting that some kind of terrorist threat will be harbored there for years to come. If that’s the outcome, then fighting on for another year to end up there is an unjust waste of life.”

William Galston

in the Wall Street Journal, July 29, “Hamas Will Never Surrender,” “Rather than wait for an unconditional surrender from Hamas that will never come, Mr. Netanyahu should declare victory and accept a cease-fire that returns all the remaining hostages and withdraws the IDF from Gaza.”

Damon Linker

in his “Notes from the Middleground” Substack, July 31, “Still Stuck in Gaza,” “Israel keeps saying it intends to eliminate Hamas, and yet continually fails to achieve this aim, and yet continues to kill residents of Gaza in its efforts to do so. …If Israel cannot eliminate Hamas from Gaza without committing acts that would rival the worst deeds in human history, it must stop pursuing that goal and figure out an alternative endgame….No conflict in the world inspires despair quite like the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”

This is mainly an Israeli decision—they are the ones fighting in Gaza, they are the ones whose hostages are being held by Hamas, and they are the ones whose security would be put at risk by leaving a Hamas state in power in Gaza. It’s a decision that affects America too, to the extent that we are helping arm and supply Israel, some Americans were killed and kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023 and in earlier attacks, and America has interests in a peaceful, prosperous, and secure Middle East that is not threatened by extremist Islamist terrorists.

So in explaining the case for continuing the war, I do it with a lot of humility—it’s not me or my kids fighting in Gaza. If the majority of Israelis decide democratically, without a lot of external pressure, that a retreat is the best move there, I’d understand that decision.

With that important caveat, it seems to me that the “stop the war” now argument sketched by Douthat, Galston, and Linker is flawed in several significant ways. Here are some of them: