Imagine, if you will, that there were ubiquitous iPhones and the internet, and social media in 1944. The scenes, which Joseph Goebbels would be doubtlessly pushing across the West, of German families shattered by the deaths in collapsed houses due to Allied bombing, of orphaned children rescued from the rubble, where they had been buried next to their dead parents.

Were today’s American and European left alive in 1944, but with today’s mentality, we would be seeing all sorts of plaintiff cries on Quitter — the 1944 version of Twitter — saying that Germany was clearly defeated, that the Allied armies were at the Rhine and the Oder-Neisse and the Third Reich had been expelled from all of the territory it had captured in the war, and we should declare a ceasefire, leaving everything in place, to stop the killing, to stop the unnecessary deaths.

That, of course, would have left Adolf Hitler and his henchmen alive, and the concentration camps that were in Germany proper operating. All of the actual extermination camps were located in occupied Poland, to keep them secret from German civilians, but the fanatical Führer and his equally insane Schutzstaffel would have adapted camps like Bergen-Belsen in Germany for more mass killings.

The lead photograph illustrating Nicholas Kristof’s column is supposed to leave you sympathizing with the poor, poor Palestinians. Photo by Mahmoud Issa, Reuters. Click to enlarge.

In Gaza, ‘Psychic Scars of Fear and Rage’

by Nicholas Kristof, reporting from the West Bank and Israel | Wednesday, April 2, 2025

For one brief shining moment, something encouraging unfolded in Gaza: Palestinians protested against Hamas.

As I traveled in Israel and the West Bank — foreign journalists are generally not allowed in Gaza — the protests seemed to capture hope of change, a deadlock breaking, some way forward. But Hamas appears to have squelched the brave protests for now, in part through torture and murder.

In February of 1991, after the American-led Coalition forces expelled the Iraqi army following the invasion of Kuwait, the elder President Bush stopped continuing the war in Iraq, 150 miles short of Baghdad, leaving Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party cabal still in power in Iraq. The assumption seems to have been that President Hussein could not survive in power after such a crushing defeat, but that wasn’t how things happened. Mr Kristof has just told us that Hamas are, at least at the moment, duplicating Saddam Hussein’s survival in power

Despite talk of cease-fire proposals, the two sides still seem impossibly far apart on any deal to end the war for good, so I fear we must brace for more killing. Israel on Wednesday announced an expansion of its military offensive in Gaza, including plans to seize “large areas.”

The people of Gaza are caught between the irreconcilable demands of two parties, Hamas and the Israeli government, that both show a brutal indifference toward Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages alike — in Israel’s case, with a weapons assist from the United States.

The author continued with several paragraphs telling us about the suffering of the children, the children! in Gaza. But perhaps Mr Kristof should have considered a bit of history. Unlike Gaza, in which the Hamas fighters are hiding among the civilian population, the German and Japanese military weren’t among the civilians; we were bombing those nations’ industrial plant, transportation networks, and public utilities . . . and their war industry workers. We bombed them and bombed them and bombed them, until Hell wouldn’t have it anymore. But, in the end, we forced the decision: the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. Tens of thousands more Germans and Japanese, including children, had to die before Hitler shot himself and Germany surrendered. It took two atomic bombs, on targets which were only barely military, as well as the B-29 firebombing campaigns against Tokyo and Yokohama, before Japan surrendered.

And that was the last war we truly won!

Mr Kristof attempted to split the differences, telling us how horrible Hamas are, but also complaining about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He even noted that he was astonished that so many on the left have “embrace (Hamas) as a champion of Palestinians,” given that Hamas are “repressive, misogynist, homophobic and incompetent”.

But he still returned to the idea that Israel should stop fighting the people who want to destroy their country.

It is a credit to Israel that some civil society groups and leading security figures have shown great courage in condemning their country’s Gaza policy. A former defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, has repeatedly warned that Israel is committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Ami Ayalon, a former director of the Shin Bet intelligence agency, has protested Israel’s Gaza policy as “immoral and unjust.”

There is only one crime in war, and that’s the losing of it. Ethnic cleansing? We are a country founded on ethnic cleansing, as our “Manifest Destiny” led us to round up and push the Indians into reservations, killing hundreds of thousands, but the Indians no longer threaten destruction of the United States from within. And there is one great truth here: as long as the ‘Palestinians’ are on Israel’s borders, they will fester and fume and, eventually, they will launch another “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation. So many on the left, and even among more moderate people, see the old “two-state solution” as the only path to peace, but Hamas, the leadership of the ‘Palestinians’ don’t want that, don’t want any ‘solution’ which leaves Israel intact, secure, and free. Like the scenario posited at the beginning of this article, a ceasefire which leaves Hamas alive in any form would be like having allowed Hitler and the Nazis to survive World War II alive and in power.

Hamas and the ‘Palestinians’ at large have told us who they are, and, like Mr Kristof, I am astonished that when the ‘Palestinians’ tell us who they are, so few are willing to believe them.