When critics accuse Israel of “disproportionate” force in Gaza, it’s worth recalling how the Allies decisively defeated Nazi Germany.
At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared that the Axis powers must accept unconditional surrender. This wasn’t rhetoric; it was policy. The Allies had concluded that regimes bent on genocide and conquest couldn’t be bargained with, only defeated.
That doctrine meant the war wouldn’t end until the enemy was utterly destroyed militarily. And so, in the spring of 1945, the Allies launched the final offensive into Germany. Cities were bombed, bridges blown and industrial zones leveled. The civilian toll was staggering. In the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden, an estimated 25,000 civilians were killed in just a few nights. In the Battle of Berlin two months later, at least 80,000 civilians died, caught between the ferocious Soviet assault and the last fanatical defenders of Hitler’s Reich. The German capital was left a smoldering ruin.
While the exact figures were not fully known to Allied publics until after the war, there was no doubt at the time that the toll in human life was immense. Civilian casualties were accepted as the price for defeating the enemy. No one in Britain, the United States, or liberated France and other freed European nations said at the time that Berlin should be spared because of civilian deaths. Everyone understood that Berlin was the enemy’s capital, the command center of Nazi tyranny, and it had to fall – whatever the cost. Civilian suffering was tragic, but allowing the Nazi regime to survive would have meant more world war, more death and ultimately more civilians killed.
Like the Allies then, Israel faces a genocidal enemy – Hamas. On October 7, 2023, it launched a savage assault on Israel, murdering some 1,200 people – mostly civilians – and carrying off more than 250 men, women and children as hostages. Entire families were slaughtered in their homes. Babies were murdered. Women were raped. Communities were burned. It was the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Hamas has never hidden its aim: the destruction of the Jewish state. As a proxy of Iran’s clerical fascist regime – which is itself bent on annihilating Israel – Hamas burrows its weapons, tunnels and command centers under homes, schools and hospitals, cynically transforming its own civilians into human shields.
Gaza, like Berlin in 1945, is the enemy’s stronghold. And like Hitler and his henchmen, the remaining Hamas leaders – among them figures tied to the October 7 massacre – are believed to be hiding in their Gaza City bunkers, directing a war from beneath the ruins while their people suffer above.
Israel’s military operations have from the start been complicated – militarily, by Hamas’s taking of hostages, and politically, by Israel’s friends and allies, including the United States under President Biden, failing to immediately demand both the release of all the hostages and the unconditional surrender of Hamas, which the U.S. has formally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
The fight has also been distorted by the actions of left-wing and left-leaning media outlets that applied a magnifying glass to Israel’s every move while blindly accepting casualty figures from the Hamas health ministry, relying on the claims of so-called journalists who were in reality Hamas operatives and agents of influence. These narratives were amplified by anti-Israel and Hamas-manipulated UN agencies, further complicating Israel’s ability to defend itself with legitimacy in the eyes of the world.
And yet, despite all this, Israel fights under far more restrictive rules of engagement than the Allies ever imposed on themselves. Civilian casualties in Gaza, while tragically high, are in fact much lower than they would be if Israel fought by the standards of World War II. Precision strikes, early warnings, evacuation corridors and humanitarian aid shipments are measures unknown in the Allied campaigns against Germany.
The lesson of history is plain: genocidal enemies must be defeated decisively, or they rise again. Israel’s critics demand standards of wartime conduct never required of the Allies, and never met by any army in history.
In truth, the remarkable fact isn’t that civilians have died in Gaza, but that the toll has been restrained compared to what it would be if Israel fought by the same rules under which the Allies achieved victory in World War II.
Israel’s war isn’t only defensive and just. It is by historical measure, restrained. The international community – assuming the term still has any real meaning – should acknowledge that fact, and recall that victory over totalitarian evil has never come cheaply.
Jonathan Braun is a former managing editor of the NY Jewish Week newspaper and former associate editor of Parade Magazine who reported from Iran before the 1979 Revolution.