‘After the Dust Settles and Tears Dry in Gaza, We’re Going to Have Lots of Dead People, Anger and More Extremism than Before’

It’s counterintuitive for some, but it’s the only rational approach. If Palestinians had employment, if they had a future, if they had a sense that they will get independence, they will get freedom, that the occupation and the strangulation of their country will end, that would take care of so much of what we consider violent extremism.

If you think about it, it’s logical. If they had a reason to live, they would, but they don’t, the young kids don’t. And I think that’s the one thing I want people to understand about Gaza is that if there were a radical transformation of daily life, a lot of what we see today as problematic would go away.

They go after a Hamas leader who’s living in an apartment building with his family and there’s families around, they kill a bunch of people, they say it was collateral damage or human shields. No, there are rules of war that are honored more in the breach than in the observance.

And the fact is that when you bomb a congested area, when you bomb a church, when you bomb a hospital, when you bomb a school, even if there is a bad person in the school and you kill 100 other people or 50 other people or 10 other people, that is a crime. There’s no such thing as an excusable killing of dozens — and in this case, thousands and thousands of civilians — there just isn’t.

And frankly, if Israel thinks that by doing this, they’re getting rid of Hamas, every one of those families that lost people, every one of those families that have been forced to flee from the north and go to the south where there is no infrastructure, where there is no housing, where they had to leave all of their belongings, their photographs, their family treasures, their memorabilia, all the stuff that was a part of their lives, they’ve had to abandon it and now these buildings have been bombed into rubble.

They’re not going to grow up loving Israel, they’re not going to grow up wanting peace. You’re going to get something more virulent than Hamas itself at the end of this. There is no logic to this. If the idea is to make peace, there’s no logic to killing thousands of people and just saying, “Ah, it’s collateral damage. And they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, we told them to leave.”

Look, Hamas is a deplorable organization with an ideology that I find contemptible. They’re misogynist. They use theology as an ideology, which is always dangerous just as it is for the extremist religious groups in the West Bank, the Israeli groups, and just as it is for some of the religious nationalists here in the U.S.

When you use God to justify all your behavior, you’re trying to justify evil things you do. I do not have any feeling for Hamas at all other than anger at what they’ve done over the years.

But having said that, to allow Israel to kill 10,000 people, to exterminate them, when you know or we should know from history, that will not happen. What’s going to happen when the dust settles and the tears dry is we’re going to just have lots of dead people, lots of anger, and probably more extremism than we had before. This is not the way to solve this problem.

And frankly, I fault Hamas to be sure. I clearly fault Israel, but more than that, I fault the United States because we should have been the adult in the room, we should have put restraint on this. And when we give Israel $4 billion a year and we’re giving them another $14 billion, and we go to them and we say, “Please don’t do this. And please think about civilian casualties. And it’s not a good idea if you do this.” I mean, (beep), pardon my French.

The point is that we could put conditions on that aid. They put conditions on us. They say, “We’re not going to do a ceasefire unless Hamas does this, this, this.”

We can say to them, “And you’re not going to get the $14 billion unless you pause and stop bombing and stop your settlers from rampaging through the West Bank, evicting innocent people from their orchards and from their villages,” which is what they’ve been doing under the cover of what’s going on in Gaza. A couple dozen Palestinian villages have been evacuated by terrorist settlers who’ve come in and have just scared them out of their homes.

These are crimes and we’re guilty of them, America is, because it’s been happening on our watch, and we have done nothing other than plead with the Israelis not to do it when we have far more leverage than that.