There's more good news out of the Middle East, I'm happy to report. On the heels of yesterday's news that the Israeli Defense Force was doing an admirable and rapid job of eliminating Hamas leadership in an explosive game of Whack-a-Mole, today we learn that the Gazans themselves finally show signs of turning against their terrorist government.
We saw tiny signs of this in the awful weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror invasion that kicked off the Israel-Hamas War, such as the old Gazan woman who accused Hamas of stealing humanitarian aid meant for the people. "Everything goes to [Hamas] houses," she complained. "They take it; let them take me, shoot me, or do whatever they want with me."
But Tuesday saw a rare mass protest against Hamas.
Before posting this video, I waited 14 hours for BBC and Al Jazeera to air it. They refused. Why? Because it shows Gazans furious at Hamas terrorists using their hospitals as shields, chanting loud and clear: “Hamas are terrorists.” Yes, that supports Trump’s plan to crush the… pic.twitter.com/6CsjPVsf24
— Amjad Taha أمجد طه (@amjadt25) March 25, 2025
Even the mayor of Beit Lahia, Gaza, got in on the action.
BREAKING: The mayor of Beit Lahia, Gaza is out on the streets with other local leaders and Palestinians, calling for an end to Hamas’ rule of the Gaza Strip.
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) March 25, 2025
This is absolutely unprecedented and an incredible display of bravery.
pic.twitter.com/QZj0SGcmV2
If Hamas finds him, I suspect he won't die well.
Why the mainstream media chooses not to air clips like these is anyone's guess, but anyone's most cynical and accusatory guess is probably the correct one.
None of this is perfect, of course. "Why aren't they chanting to release the hostages then?" one critic wondered. Then there's Iran, the official sponsor of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Until Iran is put back in the box President Donald Trump had them in during his first term, the terrorist kudzu will grow back.
But turning the population against the people who started the war is how you end a war, and Israel's renewed offensive — the IDF's WWII-style rubble-ization of the Gaza Strip — might be doing just that.
Most wars fail to accomplish that vital goal.
World War II was the exception that seems to have established the rule we seem to believe always applies. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were such noxiously aggressive regimes that there was only one acceptable way for WWII to end. Both regimes had to be completely crushed, and such destruction visited upon their populations — yes, even the innocents — that neither country would ever again threaten the peace.
The American effort was smashingly successful. Our air power didn't merely reduce the Axis economies to something below subsistence levels, we did so at a relatively low cost in blood. The U.S. suffered about 416,800 combat and non-combat deaths during the war and the overwhelming majority were uniformed personnel. While that's a horrific number, the Soviets lost 24 million people at a bare minimum — with about two-thirds of those civilians.
Needless to say, our performance in WWII set people's expectations unrealistically high. The Russo-Ukraine War is a much better example of how most wars go. At three-plus years old, Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has gone on nearly as long as America's involvement in the Second World War. Yet, despite Western support for Ukraine charitably described as inconsistent, Russia has come far short of its original war aims and at a cost of more than 750,000 killed and wounded. That isn't to pick Russia out for any special criticism. I'm just trying to make it plain that if you need a one-word answer for how most wars go, it's "Badly."
If you need two more words, I'd add "inconclusively" and "overlong."
That's why I've often found the phrase "forever wars" so frustrating. In context, complaining about "forever wars" is often more of a way to shut down debate than a historically accurate assessment. What makes our poor military performance in places like Afghanistan sting so much isn't that we were mired in so-called "forever wars," but that they were wars of choice, not of national survival, that we chose to conduct inconclusively. All that spilled blood, and for what?
But sometimes a World War II comparison is spot-on, which brings us back to the Middle East and the Hamas terror invasion of Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas's aims were explicitly genocidal and their means — including uploading videos of murdered civilians to the victims' social media accounts for their families to see — were so horrifying that Hamas and Gaza must be smashed as badly as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
If the Israel-Hamas War is to end, it ends in the ruined streets of Gaza.
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