OPINION:
Last week, the White House announced what it described as a “historic” agreement for the “complete disarmament” of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza.
Except it’s not a complete disarmament.
Hamas has only said that it would place some of its weaponry in a sort of terror escrow, managed by the corrupt Palestinian Authority, while it will retain much of its large-scale weaponry — and this is only contingent upon the creation of a Palestinian state, something the group has repeatedly rejected since it assumed control of the Gaza Strip in 2006.
The Palestinian Authority itself is one election away from being overrun by Hamas, whose popularity has surged, particularly in Judea and Samaria, even after October 7th. After all, Hamas won a surprise majority (74 of 132 seats) during the territories’ last legislative election and previous 2018 polling showed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh nearly 10 points ahead of the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas. Not much has changed. Municipal elections held in April of this year showed Hamas was still the most popular political entity amongst Gazans and Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.
The governing body, as identified in the draft Hamas disarmament agreement, would eventually be the Palestinian Authority — after an indeterminate interim period in which allies of said authority would govern as technocratic stewards. So Hamas would reassume control after friends of Hamas stewarded the strip for the short term.
This is just another containment trap.
You cannot negotiate with a terror group that includes within its very charter its outright rejection of Israel’s right to exist, and you can’t expect a group that views its weapons as central to its very identity to disarm.
What’s more, you can’t “negotiate” with a group that sanctioned the tying of women to trees and raping them to death. You can’t negotiate with a group that sliced the breasts off of its innocent victims, that forcibly sodomized men in public with found objects, that broiled babies in the ovens of family kitchens while ransacking the neighborhood, that murdered parents in front of their children, that committed atrocities so demonic that it traumatized an entire nation and to a less immediate extent, the world at large.
I visited southern Israel last week. I saw the hollowed-out homes still being rebuilt. I ate lunch in Sderot down the road from the destroyed police station that was so overrun with entrenched Hamas terrorists on October 7th that the IDF had to eventually bomb it into rubble.
I walked amongst the eucalyptus and pine trees in the Re’im Forest, site of the Nova Festival massacre on October 7th, and spoke with one of the survivors. The sheer number of signs memorializing the 378 people murdered by Hamas, each printed with a photo of the victim and details about who they were, is overwhelming.
I stood in the bomb shelter where Aner Shapira and his friend Hersh Goldberg-Polin holed up with over 25 other Nova attendees fleeing the carnage. Hamas tried bombing them out of the shelter, firing rocket-propelled grenades into the opening, only for Shapira and Goldberg-Polin to throw them back. One ultimately exploded in Shapira’s hands, killing him. The pair is credited with saving lives. Seven survivors lived by hiding amongst the bodies in the shelter after Hamas took four as hostages.
I asked Ilay David, brother of hostage survivor Evyatar David, “While your brother was in captivity, did anyone, anyone at all, try to help him? Was anyone at all kind to him?”
The answer to both was “no.” It’s a common refrain from all hostage survivors.
Hamas murdered 1,200 people in one day.
I’m not going to tell another nation what it should do to protect its borders or its people.
I do know how the United States would respond if cartels in Mexico brutally executed the per capita equivalent of 40,000 Americans in a single day, a figure that is 13 to 14 times the per capita loss of the 9/11 attacks. No one could restrain the fury of the United States’s response — and no one would dare try. It would be entirely, wholly, unequivocally justified.
I won’t tell Israel how to react, but I will encourage our leaders in D.C. to do only this: Let them act. Israel knows what it needs to do and has the capability to do it. What it doesn’t need is to be dragged into the indulgence of more circular containment nonsense — the exact type of cautionary, empathetic suicide that helped create the environment for October 7th.
Israel’s efforts to please the cowards, the pacifists, the geopolitical illiterates, the couch crusaders of the world are getting its own people killed. Real allies understand when a nation needs to act to eradicate threats and protect its own people.
Believing that Hamas wants a truce is the same fatal error as believing they were contained prior to October 7th.
Let Israel loose. It’s past time.
• Dana Loesch is the host of the No. 1 nationally syndicated weekday talk program, “Dana Show,” a bestselling author and a Second Amendment advocate. She lives in Dallas.
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