‘Congress is Going to Have to Steel Ourselves’

Lawmakers are backing Israel in next phase of conflict.

By and
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U.S. Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) wears an Israeli Defense Force uniform as he arrives at a House Republican caucus meeting at the Longworth House Office Building on October 13, 2023 in Washington, D.C.(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The Israeli government hadn’t even collected all the bodies of the more than 1,300 people slain in Hamas’ horrifying terror attacks over the weekend before American progressives and international human rights groups cautioned the country to be restrained in its response.

This isn’t a new dynamic for Israel. As my colleague Kevin argued earlier this week, no other country reeling from extreme violence and hatred—like what Hamas carried out last weekend—would face such high-profile, immediate calls for a ceasefire. Some people pushing Israel to stand down are brazenly antisemitic. Others are reacting to photos and videos of carnage in Gaza—some accompanied by misinformation, some from entirely different conflicts.

But there is very real carnage in Gaza, too, and it will likely escalate into a brutal humanitarian crisis. As Israel bombs Hamas sites and equipment, innocent people are being hurt and killed—sometimes because of faulty intelligence, other times because of the sheer density of the enclave, and often because Hamas views Palestinian civilians as some of its greatest military assets, with its leaders all too willing to use them as human shields. People in the Gaza Strip are facing dire conditions, prompting plenty of good-faith reservations about what comes next in this war.

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Comments (47)
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  1. Avatar photo
    Sad Trombone

    I'd love to see The Dispatch do more coverage of an issue tangentially touched on in your main story - why are 600 "Americans" living in Gaza? I would wager the vast majority of these people are folks that became dual citizens and wanted an American passport as a modern day flag of convenience; they have no true allegiance to the US or our values. The same issue presents itself when talking about the thousands of Somali's escaping their war-torn hellhole to claim asylum in the US, acquire citizenship or a green card, and then immediately run back to live like a prince in Mogadishu on American welfare. The Florida Sun Sentinel did an extensive series a few years ago about the Cuban refugees living on American welfare while spending 11 months a year on the beaches in Cuba.
    If and when we get a coherent Republican/conservative government in this country one of the priority issues we will have to confront is thinking anew on how we approach immigration and asylum policies. As Lincoln said we will have to disenthrall ourselves of old ideas to cope with the new realities.

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    CJ

    It's wild that very few people in Congress can get the "Palestinian civilian casualties" discussion right.

    Israel obviously needs to defend itself, and strike a blow against Hamas. But "complete eradication" or "permanent eradication" is impossible short of genocide. The Palestinian people, right or wrong, believe the land Israel is on was taken from them, so there will always be an irredentist movement and thus always be a Hamas or equivalent.

    I'm very hopeful that Israel will exercise a measure of restraint and avoid extreme civilian casualties in its efforts. I'm sure we'll give them every bit of help (advanced high-precision munition restock, intelligence, etc.) to keep casualties as low as possible. But reasonable people of good faith can have a limit for what they'll except in pursuit of vengeance and justice. Where's the line in the sand for Palestinian civilian casualties, and why does most of Congress refuse to say it even exists? How many dead Palestinian civilians per dead Israeli civilian is morally acceptable? 10:1? 100:1? How much infrastructure damage is acceptable? Who's going to help pay to rebuild the homes of 1 million people? To house a million new refugees?

    Let's start having the debate now, because it's coming whether we want it or not.

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    1. Jaybrown

      Americans can debate all they want. Israel will act as it thinks it has to, regardless.

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        CJ

        Yeah, no they won't. Israel is economically and militarily heavily dependent on assistance from the US and our friends. We manufacture a lot of the equipment they use, we manufacture a lot of the ammo they use, we buy 27% of their exports and have huge levels of business ties with them. This is well-evidenced by the fact that we began resupply operations for their armed forces within days of the start of this conflict. The leverage we have is quite significant.

        Certainly we don't have all the power in the world, and we need to avoid overplaying our hand. And of course Israeli and US politics both benefit from that link being more financial than overt political interference. To that end I'm absolutely sure Biden has already had a private, detailed conversation with Netanyahu (along with similar conversations between senior and mid-level US government staff and their counterparts) about "acceptable losses", and somewhere on a whiteboard in Netanyahu's war room that number is written in big red letters and I really don't want to think about how large it is. What I wish is that members of Congress didn't treat the rest of us like we're stupid and pretend otherwise, that such a number doesn't exist - or to hear people like Lindsey Graham talk, shouldn't exist.

        Talking out their butts, as Congress often does but shouldn't, just confuses the stupid. But alas, we have a lot of stupid people in our country just like any other country, and that segment of the population takes things like "we should eradicate X from existence" to heart, and see anything less as a sign of weakness rather than just sanity.

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        1. Jaybrown

          Your opinion is noted, but disregarded, since you know so much you don't really know. You don't really know the Israeli mindset and opinion. That's all that matters now.

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            CJ

            We're not that different, and politics has a lot of similar threads regardless of where you go.

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  3. Avatar photo
    The Bell Tower

    Of course Americans and Israelis should be concerned about civilians but we must also recognize that:

    A. Hamas is intentionally using civilians as human shields. To put that plainly: Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran want Palestinians to die because it gives them political capital to spend. It would be nice if morons like AOC and Bernie Sanders recognized this instead of playing into their hands.

    B. Hamas just murdered Jewish babies in the street. It’s nice that outfits like Human Rights watch want to claim the mantle of moral superiority but when they put out junk like “Israelis use white phosphorus!” not a week after such a massacre based on uncorroborated reports, you have to wonder if they see themselves at all.

    The only people not trying to protect the Palestinians is their own elected government. Why doesn’t this get pointed out more often?

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  4. Avatar photo
    Stephanie

    Buried in all this dysfunction is the fact that there are some of the hard liners who have what might be a worthy goal: returning to regular order, where bills are developed within committees, and brought to the floor in an orderly way. In this theory of the case, the speaker doesn’t have as much power.

    There’s something to be said for the idea, but whether or not the partisan divisions in the country, and in the House, will permit it, or if it would even work, is another matter.

    There’s an awful lot of obstruction merely for the sake of obstructing.

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  5. Trichwages

    From Andrew Sullivan today—don’t worry, there’s also a lot in there about the behavior of Hamas and some progressives for those that think this is apologetics, etc. but I am posting it because this column contains some quotes that made me cringe in their callousness toward Palestinian civilians. Especially the bit about only Israel being subject to calls for a cease fire in response—which is simply about how they are retaliating (24 hour evacuation, no water, electricity, etc.) and not that they are retaliating.

    The whole column is good - I even signed up for a month ($5) so I could read the whole thing.

    “What about the broader context for this latest horror — all the way back to 1948? Yes, that’s a necessary conversation, vital even. But in judging the events of the past week, it’s utterly irrelevant. There is no historical context — none — which can excuse or mitigate what Hamas did and what Hamas is. There is no oppression that justifies the murder of infants in their beds. And from some of the videos, you can see how the act of personally murdering a Jew is cherished by these fanatics, a glorious achievement, a life goal.

    But has the Israeli government been reckless, expansionist, and determined to destroy any chance for a Palestinian state for a while now? Yes, it has. Since the excruciating near-miss of 2000, Israel has treated the Palestinians as a menace to be managed and, with any luck, ignored. Has it treated the population in the West Bank appallingly in this century? Yes, it has. Has the Israel lobby supported the unconscionable and relentless establishment of settlements for decades? For all their hand-wringing, yes. Is Israel’s achievement the immiseration and dehumanization of all Palestinians in the occupied territories? I don’t think any objective observer at this point could deny it. The attempt to deny the core problem has only made it worse…..

    And while one can sympathize with Israel’s conundrum on how to take out Hamas within the laws of warfare, since Hamas has embedded itself among civilians and hostages as human shields, that does not, cannot, justify collective punishment. As I write, Israel has cut off water and electricity to the whole of Gaza; hospitals may soon run out of power; brutal carpet-bombing has laid waste to whole neighborhoods; innocents are dying under a bombardment that must be simply terrifying. Israel has ordered the population to move out of Gaza City, Hamas’ base, to the south. Better than Hamas, but still redolent for many of the expulsions that created the state of Israel in the first place.

    And I worry that the vehemence of the response will be both vulnerable morally and stupid strategically….. I truly, deeply do not want Israel to make the same errors in the same headspace that we did after 9/11. In fighting Hamas, it remains vital not to become them. Or to create new generations of Hamas terrorists. And in the history of the Jewish state, the moral corruption that comes with occupying and controlling another people for decades is real and cancerous. It’s a risk Israel runs. I pray she overcomes it.

    The bigger picture? The more I’ve thought and read about Israel, the more it seems that its founding was both a moral necessity and a practical insanity. The moral necessity is proven by last weekend. If Jews can be subject to a medieval pogrom in their own country in 2023, what hope could they ever have without a country at all? The practical insanity lies in the simple fact that the state of Israel was created on land laden with deep religious symbolism, where much of the existing population did not give consent, and despite the early promise, no country for the Palestinians was ever constructed alongside it.

    Worse still: in its subsequent wars of legitimate self-defense, Israel found itself occupying the whole region, and then took the fateful step of settling it with the most fanatical parts of its own population, deliberately preventing a two-state solution from ever taking place. For me, that’s where I draw the line. Those settlements are still growing. They are indefensible. They are essentially a form of ethnic cleansing — and they have been protected and enabled by almost every Israeli government and almost every US administration in my lifetime. And any serious American attempt to stop them — from the first President Bush to Barack Obama — has been met with implacable hostility from the Israel lobby.

    Israel needs our support right now. And we should give it forthrightly. But in due course, if Hamas is destroyed, and things calm down, we need to confront the Israelis with a sobering reality. There is no future for Israel without a state for the Palestinians, however hard that may be. And the longer we postpone that day, the darker the future will become.”

    https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewsullivan/p/darkness-visible?r=3ynoe&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

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    1. Avatar photo
      Sad Trombone

      I strongly disagree. The German people had even more valid complaints about the implementation of the Versailles Treaty after they had had a revolution and overthrew the Kaiser, but when they turned to the Nazi's to express their grievances the moral bankruptcy of that act forfeited all of their prior calls for justice.

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      1. Trichwages

        So, according to this, the moral bankruptcy of some of the population voting for a nationalist, populist strongman faction makes justice forfeit for the entire population, collectively, even women and the old and injured and wounded, and children born or not yet born if that faction commits an act of barbarity—all are collectively guilty, and all actions against them are justified.

        This is dangerously similar to what Hamas says about Israel and their leaders.

        What Hamas did was morally wrong and unjustified. Israel has a moral right to target Hamas in self defense. They do not have the moral right to take any action they want against innocent civilians to make it easier for them to do so. It certainly does not absolve the state of Israel for any of its own immoral behavior prior to 10/7 nor any other states’ for their condoning of it. That is moral clarity in my book.

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        1. Avatar photo
          Sad Trombone

          Nope, your conventional platitudes don't work. We already know the Israelis will do everything within their power to spare civilians, but ridding the region of Hamas is the only way to save lives in the long run. Some cultures have to be destroyed; in our own country the Comanches in the Southwest had to be culturally exterminated before any progress could be made. Kibbitzing and second-guessing whether the innocent Gazans aren't being attended to sufficiently will have to wait until another day.

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          1. Trichwages

            Wow.

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      Stephanie

      This is a valuable perspective.

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      1. Trichwages

        I thought this too was invaluable, if only as a cautionary tale on the dangers of strong-man populism.

        https://wapo.st/3PUIPyQ

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  6. Brandon Hartley

    So, here's another question. Much ink has been spilt over the closed border in Egypt. And I'll be the first to say that the surrounding Islamic nations have treated Palenstinians horribly. But why are the talking points and the air-dropped leaflets all about fleeing to the south? Am I missing something, here? Yes, Egypt should open humanitarian corridors to the South, but shouldn't Israel have corridors to the East and the North? Or are those already in place?

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      Pat @ Tavi Hall

      I've been considering other options too. Like picking people up from the beaches, but I keep hitting both logistics and terrorist hijacking concerns.

      Should we really expect a country who experienced this ugly sneak attack against civilian targets to let 2 million people travel through their country to get to another country?

      It's a shame no one is working with Egypt to line up transport to other countries. Several Arab countries use a lot of non native labor. Why shouldn't some of that come from Gaza?

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    2. Trichwages

      Egypt is to the North, the sea to the West and Israel is to the East and South of Gaza. There is a lengthy process with Egypt to pass through the ONLY exit point, made more difficult because of Israeli bomb damage to that exit. Since that is effectively closed as a result, Israel wanted all civilians (including hospitals and patients) of north Gaza to move to south Gaza within 24 hours.

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        Pat @ Tavi Hall

        Pretty sure Egypt is south of Gaza.

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        1. Trichwages

          Oops! Yes - duh. Israel is to the North. Got myself turned upside down!

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  7. Avatar photo
    George.Skinner

    In Westminster parliamentary systems, the speaker of the house is required to act in a non-partisan fashion and doesn't sit with their caucus. That's not to say they're non-partisan - a governing party always wants one of their own to be speaker. However, the speaker is focused on running the house, not performing the partisan leadership function as in the US House of Representatives. Maybe that's a change of focus that should be tried . The problem of rallying a dysfunctional caucus with a tiny majority just gets bucked to somebody else in the party leadership, but at least the House could theoretically do some of its business.

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      Stephanie

      I was too young to recall, but what you’re describing was more the norm with Tip O’Neill, I think, and earlier with Sam Rayburn.

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    Murrayprof

    I'd give various body parts for my congressman Tom Cole to be speaker. But as others have pointed, he is too smart to do it.

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  9. Coyneric

    I had a conversation about the Israel - Hamas this afternoon that sheds light on why the GOP is in such disarray. Said person is the exemplar of the 'lives way out in rural America in a Red State/hasn't left in years/only consumes right wing garbage media/Tucker and FOX are the 100% truth' type. Within seconds of mutually lamenting what's going on, he switched it to "well college kids all over the country are having demonstrations cheering on Hamas!! The college kids on on their side!" (this claim made by someone who lives far away from any colleges and hasn't been on a campus in 20+ years).

    When the GOP base has been fed that level of garbage disinformation 24/7 for decades, doesn't it make sense why the current House GOP is such a dumpster fire of dysfunction and nihilism?

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  10. Learnin4life

    Unless there is a reprise of the weak Speaker arrangement we experienced with McCarthy, it's unlikely the Repub caucus will be capable of agreeing on a new Speaker. While it may result in GOP representatives being primaried, the middle lean right majority that now appears silent must advance a Speaker nominee that center and lean left Dems will support. This coalition could get past the current quagmire, reduce the influence of extremists in both parties, and actually accomplish some governing.

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