David Brooks:
I think it’s about this moment in time. I think what’s happened, and this is true in Israel, too, is a lot of people who thought that Hamas need to be defeated are taking a look what happened in the last six months, eight months, a year or even before and saying, what the heck?
Like, this is callous, cruel. It’s — so many people are dying. And then, as we just saw in Nick’s report, it’s marked by incompetence on all levels. It’s marked by IDF incompetence. It’s marked by the American contractors and the American government. Remember when Joe Biden tried to put a port into Gaza, which was a total failure?
And so there’s just been a level of incompetence on top of what you could call cruelty. And a lot of Israelis are now saying, this can’t stand. And we even have Israeli human rights groups, or at least one calling it genocide, which I don’t think it’s accurate.
I think it’s more accurate to say it’s ruthless warfare. It’s more like the Battle of Dresden in the middle of a war situation of being callously disregarding to civilian casualties. I think that’s more accurate than genocide.
But there has been a shift. And the good — if I can find a silver lining here, the Arab League today or this week, a unanimous vote, said that Hamas needs to step down, free the hostages and get out of Gaza. And somehow this shift is, a lot of — some people, at least in the Arab League, are seeing this as an opportunity.
I don’t know if it is, but there is a shift in the way people are thinking about this conflict.
