The spirit of Buchenwald lives on, we are supposed to believe, in the Israeli military operation in Gaza.
It's nearly mandatory for progressive Democrats to denounce Israel for its alleged genocide, while Tucker Carlson and Hasan Piker — radical influencers on the right and left, respectively — say that the moral offense is the same as the Holocaust, even if the scale is less extensive.
Israel's haters surely enjoy the perversity of accusing the Jewish state of the same enormity that contributed to its creation, of comparing the Jews to heinous murderers of Jews.
The charge is a grotesque libel. If Israel wanted to kill everyone in Gaza, it could do it easily. What we have witnessed in the Hamas-controlled territory is not a genocide — the deliberate destruction of a people — but an urban battle.
Warfare in urban environments is almost always highly destructive. When the Iraqi army retook Mosul from ISIS in 2016–2017 with our air support, tens of thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed, along with an estimated 80 percent of the Old City.
Vietnam gave us the famous (perhaps apocryphal) line, “We had to destroy the city in order to save it.†The city in question was Ben Tre, infiltrated by the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive in 1968. We used air strikes, helicopter gunships, artillery, and ground troops to extricate the communist forces, and the Mekong Delta town suffered extensive damage, even though the fighting only lasted days.
The old imperial capital of Hue suffered the same fate, but on a larger scale. Communist forces took most of the city and dug in, requiring street-to-street combat over a period of months to take it back. About half the city was damaged or destroyed.
The lesson is that cities never fare well when they are the locus of combat, whether Seoul or Pyongyang during the Korean War, Manila or Stalingrad during World War II, Vicksburg or Charleston during the Civil War.
Civilians inevitably suffer and die. This is true of even the most honored military operations. The Allied invasion of Normandy killed 20,000 French civilians as cities such as Rouen and Le Havre were pulverized by our bombardment.
