UK and Germany, Unlike Canada and France, Are Standing Firm in Support of Israel
UK and Germany, Unlike Canada and France, Are Standing Firm in Support of Israel
HUGH FITZGERALD - NOV 18, 2023
While Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron has called on Israel to “stop the bombing” — which of course would give Hamas the ability to rearm and regroup, saved by the bell — elsewhere in Europe Israel’s friends are standing firm. More on the support reiterated by the Germans and the British can be found here: “Germany’s Scholz spurns calls for Gaza ceasefire; UK defense chief backs IDF efforts,” Times of Israel, November 12, 2023:
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Sunday he opposed an “immediate” ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, as calls multiply globally to halt the conflict triggered by Hamas’s devastating onslaught on Israel….
A “ceasefire” is not as dangerous as a complete halt to the IDF’s efforts to dismantle Hamas, but like a complete halt, it would provide Hamas with the possibility of rearming and regrouping. It hands Hamas a victory. There can only be a very temporary ceasefire, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly said, and only after all of the hostages have been released. Olaf Scholz has made clear he wants Israel to be able to continue in its effort to destroy Hamas, undeterred by those who have so little moral sense, or sympathy for the embattled Jewish state.
“I don’t think the calls for an immediate ceasefire or long pause — which would amount to the same thing — are right,” Scholz said in a debate organized by the German regional daily Heilbronner Stimme.
“That would mean ultimately that Israel leaves Hamas the possibility of recovering and obtaining new missiles,” he added, calling instead for “humanitarian pauses.”
Those “humanitarian pauses” — now lasting five hours, every day — have already been put in place by the IDF. Furthermore, the IDF has made sure that both north-south corridors — the Salah al-Din Street, that runs straight through the middle of the Strip, and the al-Rashid Street, that is the coastal road — remain open and that there are no military operations near them that might endanger civilians. Hamas, however, cannot always be foiled in its attempts to maximize civilian casualties; its snipers have killed Gazans as they try to leave the north, to discourage others from even trying. More than 850,000 Gazans have nonetheless heeded Israel’s warning, and braved the intimidation, and gunfire, from Hamas, to find safety in the south. That still leaves about 200,000 civilians in the north whom Israel will continue trying to persuade to leave. It wants to empty out northern Gaza of its civilians before launching its assault on the thousands of Hamas fighters still underground. It cannot, of course, wait forever. Israel has a predominantly citizen army, and the continued mobilization of more than 300,000 Reservists has had serious consequences for the Israeli economy. While Israel has been warning civilians to leave the Al-Shifa hospital and its environs, Hamas has been doing the opposite, urging Gazans to come swell the ranks of those standing in the precincts of the hospital; the more Gazans it can inveigle into becoming human shields, the more protected the terror group will be.
UK Defense Secretary Grant Shapps backed the ongoing offensive in an interview with Sky News and praised Israeli efforts to evacuate civilians from the battlefield, adding that due to Hamas’s use of human shields, innocent lives would ultimately be lost in the war.
“When Britain bombed Dresden, 35,000 people apparently lost their lives,” he said, referencing the World War II bombing of the German city. “People die in war. When you have an organization like Hamas hiding and shielding themselves with and under the civilian population it’s a sad fact that some people will lose their lives….
Grant Shapps reminds the world that many civilians die in war; he mentions Dresden and the 35,000 people killed when the American and British pilots firebombed the city; the same thing happened in Cologne, and in Tokyo. And of course the war in the Pacific was brought to a precipitous end when the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 112,000 people. Had those bombs not been dropped, Imperial Japan would not have surrendered, and an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have been required; tens of thousands of Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese, would have died. Does anyone think the firebombings of Dresden, Cologne, and Tokyo were wrong, even though they helped mightily to bring Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan, to their knees? Do you think Hiroshima and Nagasaki should not have been bombed because of the civilians who were killed, even though many more Japanese civilians would have died if those cities had not been bombed??
Shapps understands that Israel is making enormous efforts to minimize civilian deaths. It dropped 1.5 million leaflets over northern Gaza, asking, cajoling, warning people to please move to the south for their own safety. 850,000 of them did move south of the Wadi Gaza, despite Hamas’ insistence that they stay put, showing that they had faith in Israeli assurances of safety in the south, and were fed up being exploited as human shields by Hamas. Some of those Gazans in flight can be seen on YouTube, cursing Hamas for the misery it has caused the people of Gaza.
Also on October 12, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell condemned Hamas’s use of “hospitals and civilians as human shields” in Gaza, while also urging Israel to show “maximum restraint” to protect civilians from the war it is waging.
“The EU is gravely concerned about the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” Borrell said.
And Israel is just as “gravely concerned” about a “humanitarian crisis” as the EU. That is why Israel opened up a second north-south corridor along the coast for Gazans to flee south. That is why the IDF delivered 300 liters of diesel fuel to the Shifa Hospital to keep its generators operating, but Hamas intercepted the delivery and is apparently keeping that fuel for itself. That is why Israel has allowed hundreds of trucks carrying humanitarian aid to enter Gaza every day through the Rafah Crossing with Egypt. That is why Israel has instituted these “humanitarian pauses” lasting five hours, each day of the week.
Hamas is indifferent to the lives of patients who will now die because it seized for itself the diesel fuel delivered by Israel to al-Shifa Hospital, fuel that might have allowed the hospital’s generators to work, the lights to come back on, the incubators to start working again. Hamas doesn’t want that. It actively seeks to increase the number of civilian deaths, the more heartrending the better, in order that Israel may be blamed.
The patients and medical personnel both inside the hospital and in the surrounding area are not trapped by the IDF. Israel has kept open an exit on the eastern side of the Shifa Hospital, which then opens onto a path leading to the two north-south corridors of Salah al-Din Street and al-Rashid Street. It is fear of Hamas, whose operatives have been killing people trying to flee south, that keeps some people from leaving for the south. It is Israel, with its humanitarian pauses now being observed every day, and its offer of fuel to the hospital, that is trying to improve the lot of ordinary Gazans who simply want to get out of the way of the fighting. Hamas won’t let them.
The next time you see heartrending photographs of surgeons at al-Shifa operating by flashlight, or see babies lying outside of no-longer-working incubators, ask yourself what more can Israel do than offer the diesel fuel to run the hospital’s generators, so that the incubators may again work, and the lights again go on? Remember that Israel delivered the fuel; Hamas seized it. Hamas combatants fired on the IDF from inside the hospital; the IDF does not return that fire, for fear of hitting civilians. What more can Israel do? Should it have left intact the vast underground headquarters under the Al-Shifa Hospita that Hamas used?
There was no need for the EU to again call for “immediate pauses in hostilities.’ Israel has already, for a week now, without any quid pro quo from Hamas, put in place 5-hour pauses to allow Gazans to move from the north to the south. It is Israel that is keeping open the two north-south “humanitarian corridors” of the Al-Rashid coastal road and the road through the center of Gaza, Salah al-Din street. Hamas, in the meantime, tries to prevent Gazans from reaching either of those streets, by threats for some, by gunfire for others.
The Germans and the British are standing firm in their support for Israel. Neither German Chancellor Olaf Scholz nor U.K. Defense Minister Shapps has found fault with Israel’s conduct of the war so far. They understand the immensely complicated conditions in which this urban warfare takes place, where civilians are being used by Hamas as human shields, and enemy combatants can suddenly pop out from one of the thousands of tunnel exits to shoot at the IDF, or to throw a grenade, or fire an RPG. This war in Gaza is the fourth — after 1948, 1967, and 1973 — that Israelis have had to fight for their survival. They do not want to be forced to fight a fifth.