THE Israeli-Hamas war goes on, so does the attendant hysteria and melodrama on the global stage.
One reason why the Israelis continue to kill Palestinians is that the global outcry has been hypocritical and made for social media.
The global south that has traditionally stood for all things anti-West has condemned unconditionally the Israeli attacks and killings.
The Western countries have either, depending on one’s perception, condemned the Israelis with caveats or supported them with the same.
The calls for an end to the war have grown louder as Benjamin Netanyahu has taken what many perceive as more extreme actions against the Palestinians.
The point that many have missed and which justifies the continued killing is that not all wars end in a negotiated settlement.
Wars can and do end in the capitulation of one of the combatants.
In other words, Hamas can, through capitulation, stop the killing of the people for whom it carried out the October 7 atrocities.
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The question to pose is who bears the greater responsibility to end this war.
Conversely, one can also ask who bears greater culpability for the continued dying of the Palestinian people.
It is critical to put these issues out on the balance.
Hamas began this war with the greatest military success ever achieved against the Israeli security system.
It was not only devastating in terms of the human cost, but it was also an abject humiliation.
That humiliation has been largely ameliorated by the spectacular successes Israel has achieved against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
But the mystic of the Israelis has been shattered forever.
Hamas knew that Israeli retribution would be terrible their one hope was that the civilian casualties inflicted by Israel in this process would cause exactly the uproar that is going on all over the world.
Every single Palestinian death since October 7 was planned and accounted for by Hamas before launching the attacks.
Hamas, therefore, can take the terrible toll that is being taken of the Palestinian people. Can Israel?
The war for Israel is not only about retribution on a biblical scale it is also about establishing once more a deterrent so that none among its many enemies will ever commit such an atrocity as October 7 even if the opportunity presents.
That is the only way Israel can be safe.
This deterrence can be achieved by inflicting losses on Hamas but would be best served by the destruction or capitulation of Hamas.
It is not wrong for Israel to seek this end.
How this war ends must be proportional to the damage: human, material, social and psychological inflicted on Israel.
It would be pointless for the war to end with Hamas in its original form still scheming other atrocities against the Jews and lapping up the accolades from every Islamic extremist or anti-Semitist.
Hamas cannot live to celebrate October 7 just as the Nazis and Italian Fascists were not allowed to exist post-World War 2.
Israel must, therefore, take those ghastly civilian casualties and suffering it is inflicting in Gaza.
Israel has a right to pursue the capitulation of Hamas.
It is up to the latter to put a figure on Palestinian lives and suffering.
The rest of the world has an obligation to view this issue in these cold and dispassionate terms and begin to put pressure on Hamas that surrender is also a way to end the conflict.
At the moment Israel has every right to disregard the international hysteria that has sprung up around the conflict because it is so hypocritical and rooted in bias.
Direct or collateral civilian casualties have always been a part of human conflict.
Civilians can die as collateral where the intention is to target the military assets of the opposing side, but civilians are caught up in the crossfire.
The risk of killing non-combatants has never precluded a military operation: cities like Stalingrad, Warsaw, Berlin were devastated in World War 2 regardless of the civilian populations in them.
But also, since antiquity, civilians have been targeted directly in war.
In medieval times a besieging army would try and induce a famine or disease pandemic in a besieged city.
Often when such a city fell there would be an indiscriminate slaughter of all within.
It was hoped that the death of civilians would figure in the calculus of the ruler on whether to continue to fight or not
The advent of airpower and explosives brought this all to a terrible scale in World War 2.
The Germans kicked it off with the bombing of Rotterdam and the Allies finished it off with Operation Gomorrah, the indiscriminate bombing of major German cities like Dresden, Cologne and Hamburg, with tens of thousands killed per raid.
The targeting of civilians as a strategy of war reached its horrendous apogee with the apocalypse of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today, the world has sufficient nuclear stockpiles to end human civilisation — man, woman and child.
In certain circumstances civilians are deliberately targeted and, indeed, annihilated.
If Russia were to attack Poland as the hub of the Ukraine war aid effort and kill 1 000 Poles, it’s more than likely there would be World War 3 and the end of human civilisation. Billions would die.
The post-World War 2 international security system is predicated on the premise that a country can kill millions of the citizens of another country in defence of its interests.
The world cannot, therefore, stand up in all honesty and say Israel cannot kill 100 000 or 200 000 Palestinians after losing 1 200 of its own citizens.
The Russians, Americans, French, British, Pakistanis, Indians and North Koreans would do the same, they have nuclear weapons so the intent and purpose is there.
Recently, there was even a debate in the US about whether America will consider a nuclear response to a devastating cyber-attack.
This is intended to deter any State actor from attempting such an attack by holding its civilians and way of life under threat of annihilation.
Should deterrence fail, then millions of people will die as a consequence of that cyber-attack.
Hamas was well aware of the terrible cost in civilian lives that would be paid as a result of the attack on Israel.
It was willing to take the risk.
Israel should not be deterred from pursuing its implacable foe to conclusion.
Other countries would do the same.
War is about a nation or people having the resolve to condemn its citizens to untimely death.
It would be naive to expect that after such resolution, it would be squeamish about the death of the other side’s civilians.
Israel has only caused civilian deaths as collateral in the pursuit of the destruction or surrender of the foe who inflicted such pain and suffering on its people.
These deaths are regrettable, but if truth be told, are completely acceptable.
We have Africans, South Americans, Arabs and Asians speaking out about these deaths, but why aren’t they speaking out against the Ukrainian civilians being killed by Russia in a war of aggression?
Evidently, it is not about the dying.
It is about who on the global divide is doing the killing and who is doing the dying.
This reduces the entire outrage against Israel to political theatre.
If the suffering of the Palestinian people is so terrible, then it’s about time the world woke up to the possibility that Hamas can, through capitulation, also end this war.
The people of the world should not view the war through a prism tainted by geopolitical, ideological bias.
It is time to confront Hamas and make it clear that if it cares about its own people, then perhaps it is time to surrender and go down in the blaze of glory of having inflicted such pain on Israel.
Surrender is the price it has to pay for an operation that was perhaps too successful.
The world cannot resolve this crisis and stop the killing by baying at the Israelis alone.
It is time to put pressure on Hamas too.
By the measure of how modern war is conducted, Israel has the right to kill thousands more and raze every building in Gaza, that is the way of war.
That is part of the deterrence of war, there is a terrible, terrible price to be paid.
