Mohammed Dahman/AP Photo
Palestinians evacuate a wounded woman following Israeli airstrikes in Khan Yunis refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, December 7, 2023.
In his public remarks about Israel’s war in Gaza, President Biden has urged Israel not to make the same mistakes America made in responding to the attacks of 9/11: overreacting, which in the case of the United States consisted of taking the war to a country (Iraq) that wasn’t even involved in the attacks, and to another country (Afghanistan) where we remained enmeshed for 20 years.
If anything, though, Israel has opted to ape an even greater American folly. It is waging war on Gaza much as we waged war on Vietnam.
Both the U.S. and Israel insisted they sought to make war only on a distinct military target. In Vietnam, that was the Viet Cong and eventually North Vietnamese troops. In Gaza, that’s Hamas. The problem in both cases has been that the American and then the Israeli forces couldn’t really separate out their designated enemies from the general population. In both cases, they quickly gave up trying, which meant they ceased to care about the civilian deaths and injuries they caused—if indeed, they ever cared at all.
In Vietnam, as the VC were indistinguishable from ordinary villagers (in part because a large number of them were ordinary villagers), it became all-too-ordinary practice to lump said villagers into the Army’s metric for success, the “body count.” It proved both emotionally and operationally easier, though, to destroy villages and villagers by air. We ordered millions of Vietnamese into “strategic hamlets” (how many Vietnamese actually received such orders was never clear), and then designated much of the rest of the country to be “free-fire zones” where our B-52s could drop bombs if they spied anything moving, or, alternatively, anything that didn’t move. The figures on the number of Vietnamese killed during the war have ranged from 1.5 million to as high as four million. Whatever the precise number, a good share of them were civilians. And yet, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops were nonetheless able to roll into Saigon and take over the country in 1975.
The parallels between these two wars were driven home to me by a story The Washington Post ran earlier this week, in which the Israeli military claimed to have killed 5,000 Hamas soldiers out of the 30,000 that Israel says comprise Hamas’s military forces.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that by now attacking Southern Gaza, Israel will kill another 5,000, or even another 10,000. A full half of Hamas’s terror legions would still be in existence, though a greater share of their weapons and provisions will have been destroyed. And of course, virtually all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure—homes, schools, shops, you name it—will have been destroyed as well, and the number of civilian casualties will almost surely exceed the number of Hamas casualties by a wide margin. As in Vietnam, most will have been killed, injured, or left homeless by aerial bombardment.
This isn’t a perfect parallel, of course. Hamas is genuinely devoted to the destruction of Israel, while the Vietnamese Communists never devoted so much as a nanosecond’s worth of thought to destroying or attacking the United States. That said, indiscriminate wholesale attacks on civilian populations and civilian infrastructure are a terrible form of cruelty, particularly since, if they’re indiscriminate, they’re also unavoidable for those on the ground. In good part because of the way we waged it, the war we waged in Vietnam plunged the United States into international opprobrium, just as the war that Israel is now waging only deepens its already widespread international opprobrium—including here in the U.S.
As that opprobrium is now the common reaction of most Democrats, Biden will have to (and certainly should) go further than he otherwise might in insisting on a two-state solution to Israel-Palestine, and a number of Democrats on the Hill will likely seek to condition U.S. aid to Israel on things like the withdrawal of Israel’s settlements from the heart of the West Bank. (Bernie Sanders voted against the Ukraine/Israel aid package yesterday because he insisted that U.S. military aid to Israel be limited to the Iron Dome—that is, to its missile defense system.)
Israel is now meeting Hamas’s retail barbarism with wholesale barbarism. Barbarism of either variety quite rightly exacts a very high price.
