Newly-confirmed Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. is pressuring Israel to give up on the idea of eliminating the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, claiming a prolonged war risks turning more of the Palestinian population into terrorists.
Gen. Brown, whose nomination stalled amid concerns about his “woke” record — including support for Black Lives Matter radicals and racial promotions in the military — expressed skepticism despite rapid Israeli gains on the ground against Hamas.
The Times of Israel reported:
The top US military official indicated Thursday that Israel will have a harder time eradicating Hamas the longer its military campaign in the Gaza Strip drags out and the more civilians that are killed in the process.
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“That’s why when we talk about time — the faster you can get to a point where you stop the hostilities, you have less strife for the civilian population that turns into someone who now wants to be the next member of Hamas,” he said.
A senior Israeli official retorted to The Times of Israel that if the Israel Defense Forces is forced to work faster, it has less time to carry out operations surgically and in a manner that limits civilian casualties.
At first, President Joe Biden said that Israel had a “right” and a “duty” to respond to Hamas terror. He also visited Israel to show support in the wake of the October 7 terror attacks. But Biden has begun to backtrack amid pressure from Arab- and Muslim-American voters, as well as pro-Palestinian members of his administration. He has demanded longer “pauses” in Israeli military activity, and now members of his administration, like Brown, are hinting at stopping short of eliminating Hamas in Gaza.
For many Israelis, the question of allowing Hamas to persist is a non-starter: the brutality of the October 7 attacks made clear that Israel cannot live alongside a territory run by the terror group. And giving up would send a signal of weakness across the region.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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