The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin describes herself, in her Inky bio, as “writ(ing) the Worldview column that tries to make sense of the world’s chaos and conflicts as they affect Americans at home,” but she has made it abundantly clear that she does not understand the world’s chaos and conflicts. She has been an endless shill for continuing American aid to Ukraine, in good neocon fashion, and that’s seven columns on the subject, just since mid-August, and I could have linked more, but believe that I have made the point. She understands that Hamas are wholly evil, but just doesn’t get it about the ‘Palestinians.’

The fog of rage should not guide Israel’s wartime decisions on humanitarian aid to Gaza

Palestinian civilians in Gaza, who desperately need humanitarian aid, are trapped between a furious Israel and Hamas, which uses them as human shields.

by Trudy Rubin | Saturday, October 21, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT

On his trip to Israel Wednesday to support the war on Hamas, President Joe Biden also pushed for humanitarian aid to be allowed into the Gaza Strip.

As of Friday, more than 100 trucks packed with urgently needed food, water, and medical supplies were still lined up on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing to Gaza, despite Israel’s promise to Biden to start letting aid in.

Egyptians insisted the border was open from their side. The Israeli hitch apparently revolved around the adequacy of security checks, and whether this would be, as Egypt sought, the first of regular aid convoys. Meantime, hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians — half of them children — are unable to find water, food, medicine, or safety, as Israeli troops prepare to invade.

I’m trying to remember: in the last war we actually won, did the United States and its allies allow aid convoys to bring “urgently needed food, water, and medical supplies” to the Third Reich or to Japan? There were, of course, Japanese ships trying to bring in the things Japanese civilians needed to survive the war, and when we detected them, we sank them.

I get it. In a tiny country like Israel, everyone knows someone who was killed, injured, or kidnapped. The never-before-imagined ability of Hamas to wipe out whole communities inside Israel adds fear — and a sense of vulnerability — to the anger, exacerbated by memories of the Holocaust. There is near unanimous accord across the political spectrum that Hamas must be destroyed.

But where does that leave ordinary Gazan civilians caught in a double trap?

I’ll put it very bluntly: it leaves them on the precipice of Hell.

We knew, during World War II, that there were Japanese civilians who were opposed to the militarist regime of Hideki Tojo, and we knew that there were many Germans who were not Nazis. But it didn’t matter, because we also knew that the non-militarist Japanese, and the Germans opposed to Nazi’ism, were still vital cogs in those nations’ war machines. Japanese and German civilians worked in the factories that sustained their countries generally, and in the more specific war munitions and aircraft factories that supplied the military directly. We knew that innocent civilians worked in plants which supplied things as innocuous as uniforms and boots, for the fighting men in the field, and the sailors at sea.

And we bombed them mercilessly, because that was what it took to defeat Japan and Germany. Even before the two atomic bombs, we firebombed Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, attacks which had some military value, but were targeted on the cities themselves. The firebombing of Dresden was meant, in large part, to disrupt the flow of German civilians westward, as they were fleeing the oncoming Red Army troops, in an attempt to limit movement of the Heer, the German army, as it faced the Soviets.

Let’s be clear here: by New Year’s Day of 1945, Germany was defeated, even if der Führer was still alive and giving orders. All German offensives had failed, and the Allies were closing in from the east and the west. Germany was defended by old men and child conscripts, including the then-16-year-old Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, who was drafted “into the German anti-aircraft corps as Luftwaffenhelfer.” But the Allies didn’t just stop at the border, declare a cease-fire, and let the Nazi regime survive in a beaten Deutschland; we pushed on until all of Germany was occupied, as many of the Nazis as could be found rounded up, and the country was forcibly ‘re-educated.’ Along the way, we killed or wounded so many of the adult men, and the teenaged and even younger boys, that the boys who would grow up into fighting age would have no thoughts of restarting the war against their occupiers.

This is what was done in the last war America actually won. It’s arguable that the US won the first Persian Gulf War, except that the elder President Bush stopped the war too soon, leaving Saddam Hussein still in power, and we had to go back twelve years later in what proved to be a colossal failure, one that deposed and killed President Hussein but, in the end, left Iraq no better off.

Miss Rubin wants to know what will happen to “ordinary Gaza civilians,” and the answer is something she does not want to hear, that no one on the left wants to hear:  there are no “ordinary Gaza civilians.”

Hamas do not live in a vacuum. They hide amongst Gaza’s supposedly civilian population, and from the ordinary civilians, they get whatever they need: food, clothing, shelter, transportation, infrastructure, and the ability to be the guerrilla fighters that they want to be. Without the civilians, Hamas would be hard pressed to scramble for food every day. Though the civilians might not see themselves as Hamas, they are as much a part of Hamas as cooks and truck drivers and other logistic personnel are of the United States Army, even if they aren’t the ones in combat.

What Miss Rubin and the left want is another Vietnam, another war in which we tried, and utterly failed, to distinguish between the Viet Cong and ordinary Vietnamese civilians, and what did that leave us? It cost us over 58,000 American lives, many more wounded, and, in the end, we left Vietnam in the hands of the Communists we were fighting. We lost in Vietnam, and if the Israelis give up and do as the international left want, they, too, will lose in Gaza.