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> _“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews > and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and > the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O 

Muslim, there is a Jew hiding > behind me, come and kill him.”_ So states Article 7 of the Hamas charter, quoting one of the Hadiths, or sayings, attributed to Mohammed in Islamic

scripture. The organization’s objective is not merely to destroy the State of Israel, it is to kill Jews wherever they might be. And that, of course, includes me. Apologists for the

atrocities Hamas has just committed against Israeli men, women, children, against aged Holocaust survivors and tiny infants, argue that Hamas is simply expressing 75 years of rage. These

apologists tot up the numbers of dead on both sides of the current war, as if the terrorists’ brutality is somehow equivalent to the deaths resulting from Israeli military operations that,

under impossible circumstances, nevertheless seek to adhere to the laws of war. But the intent of those who would diminish the magnitude of Hamas’ crimes is not merely to find a safe place

for Palestinians in a state alongside Israel. When they scream for a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea”, they mean the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state, the sole

refuge for Jews suffering from persecution. And when they shout “gas the Jews”, it is clear that they, like Hamas, want to rid the world, and not just the Middle East, of the Jewish people.

There is no excuse for beheading children or taking old people as hostages. Moreover, there certainly is no excuse for doing so with malice aforethought, as captured documents indicate was

the Hamas plan from the very outset. Calls for “proportionate” Israeli reprisals have already begun to emerge. What is proportionate to the deliberate slaughter of infants? Israel must

eliminate the Hamas leadership. It has no alternative. Yet it must do more, and unfortunately it is not at all clear what the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has in mind. The man

who has torn his country apart; who has tolerated extremist provocations on the West Bank; who has ignored the strife among Arab Israelis; who seeks to undermine what has long been a model

judicial system that sought to protect the rights of Israel’s minorities, is capable of anything. Because he has only one real objective: to stay out of jail. Netanyahu has once again

coopted General Benny Gantz, the former Israeli defence minister and chief of the Israeli Defence Forces staff, into his government. He fooled Gantz once by breaking his promise to rotate

out of the prime ministership so that Gantz would succeed him. Gantz is a patriot, however, so he joined the unity government. But Netanyahu, ever the manipulator, has permitted his two most

extreme ministers, the racists Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar ben Gvir, to remain in the “security cabinet”. It is with good reason that Yair Lapid, leader of Israel’s opposition, has refused

to join the “unity” government as long as those two remain inside it. Whether Gantz and his fellow war cabinet member, the former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, can really influence Netanyahu

is therefore an open question. For there are steps Israel must take if it is truly to “win” this war. It must first provide an incentive for those Palestinians in northern Gaza to leave

their homes and possessions despite Hamas’ opposition to their doing so. Telling these anguished people that they must move to southern Gaza is simply not enough. Israel should permit,

indeed enable, electricity, food and water to flow to southern Gaza. In addition, it should work with the United States, and other friendly countries like Britain, France, Germany and Italy

to press Egypt to open several safe havens across its Gaza border for fleeing Palestinians. (As I write, it is reported that Israel is allowing water supplies to resume in Gaza and that more

than a million Palestinians have indeed moved south, away from the IDF’s designated combat zone in Northern Gaza and in defiance of Hamas.) Yet Israel must do even more. It must account for

Major-General David Petraeus’ famous question that he posed in 2003 at the outset of the Iraq War: “Tell me how this ends.” The United States never did provide a serious answer to that

question. As a result, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in a decade of civil war. Thousands more died at the hands of ISIS, which set a new standard for

brutality that Hamas has emulated in its attack on Israeli civilians. Israel simply cannot let the Petraeus question go unanswered. Jerusalem, in conjunction with Washington and the EU, must

develop a plan for the reconstruction of Gaza. It must lift its blockade of the strip as soon as Hamas is defeated. It must encourage Palestinians like Salam Fayyad, the technocrat who was

for a time the Palestinian Authority’s Prime Minister, and other talented Palestinians—and there are many—to help organise the rehabilitation of those who have suffered under Hamas rule. And

if Netanyahu retains even a modicum of concern for his country as opposed to his self-centred drive to avoid prison time, he must do still more. He should dismiss Smotrich and Ben Gvir from

his government. He must call an immediate halt to settlement construction. He must terminate infrastructure expansion on the West Bank. He must drop all efforts to undermine the Supreme

Court and instead agree to compromise proposals put forth by the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog.   And he must get serious about fostering the emergence of a Palestinian state alongside his

own. Unless Netanyahu gives the Palestinians both inside and outside his country some hope for the future, the conflict will not end, even if Hamas is destroyed. Israel cannot wait to deal

with these issues at some future time on the grounds that it currently is at war. It was in August 1941, at the height of World War II, that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt unveiled

the Atlantic Charter, their vision of a better post war world. As part of that vision, the charter called for “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they

will live”. Now is precisely the time for Israel, in conjunction with the United States and its other allies, to do exactly the same. _Dov S. Zakheim was Under Secretary of Defense in the

George W. Bush Administration and Deputy Under Secretary in the Reagan Administration._ A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We

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