The fog of rage should not guide Israel’s wartime decisions on humanitarian aid to Gaza

On his trip to Israel Wednesday to support the war on Hamas, President Joe Biden also pushed for humanitarian aid to be allowed into the Gaza Strip.

As of Friday, more than 100 trucks packed with urgently needed food, water, and medical supplies were still lined up on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing to Gaza, despite Israel’s promise to Biden to start letting aid in.

Egyptians insisted the border was open from their side. The Israeli hitch apparently revolved around the adequacy of security checks, and whether this would be, as Egypt sought, the first of regular aid convoys. Meantime, hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians — half of them children — are unable to find water, food, medicine, or safety, as Israeli troops prepare to invade.

» READ MORE: In Gaza, time to stop the blame and recognize the humanity | Trudy Rubin

A thick fog of rage is enveloping Israelis as they mourn the slaughter of Jewish civilians, including women, children, and babies — a fog that obscures almost any sympathy for the suffering of Palestinian civilians. That’s why the following advice, from an empathetic Biden, was so important:

“Justice must be done,” the president said in Tel Aviv. “But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we got justice, we also made mistakes.”

Yet, driven by fury, Israel appears resistant to alleviating the growing civilian carnage in Gaza, a mistake that will undermine their fight against terrorism and could dangerously widen the war.

I get it. In a tiny country like Israel, everyone knows someone who was killed, injured, or kidnapped. The never-before-imagined ability of Hamas to wipe out whole communities inside Israel adds fear — and a sense of vulnerability — to the anger, exacerbated by memories of the Holocaust. There is near unanimous accord across the political spectrum that Hamas must be destroyed.

But where does that leave ordinary Gazan civilians caught in a double trap?

In a small territory no bigger than the city of Philadelphia, with a third more residents and intense population density inside Gaza City, many civilians are fleeing south as Israel has ordered, only to be hit by Israeli missiles. There are no humanitarian safe zones where they can seek shelter.

Rage seems to be guiding Israeli wartime attitudes toward humanitarian aid. Palestinian civilians are lumped together with terrorists as equally guilty.

“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” the normally calm Israeli President Isaac Herzog said at a recent news conference. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil [Hamas] regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”

In fact, polls taken by the Washington Institute, a pro-Israeli think tank, show that most Gazans are fed up with Hamas governance and would like the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to take over. However, the PA’s armed forces were routed from Gaza by Hamas fighters in 2007, and ordinary Gazans have no means to overthrow an armed Hamas. Gaza has been mostly cut off from the world by an Israeli air, sea, and land blockade since the Hamas takeover.

Unlike a war against an enemy state, where civilians are often inevitable collateral damage, this is a war against terrorists who use the public as human shields.

Yet members of parliament from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party have called for “bombing without distinction” between Hamas and civilians, and “flattening Gaza without mercy.”

Former Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, who served as national security adviser under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when the latter withdrew Israeli troops from Gaza, now says Israel should tell all Gaza residents “to either leave for Egypt or gather on the seashore.” He argues that “Israel has no choice but to make Gaza a place that is temporarily, or permanently, impossible to live in. Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.”

Former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told Al Jazeera that people in Gaza should “Go to the Sinai Desert. There is a huge expanse, almost endless space in the Sinai Desert just on the other side of Gaza.”

This is clearly code language for ethnically cleansing Gaza of much of its population, and consigning them to tent camps in Egypt. With its struggling economy and fear of internal upheaval, Cairo won’t accept this, especially as it knows Israel wouldn’t let them return.

“This shows the psyche of the place that Israeli society is now in,” I was told by Yehuda Shaul, a cofounder of Breaking the Silence, which collects critical testimonies of Israeli soldiers who served in the West Bank. “Blood is boiling. Most Israeli Jews want revenge.”

Shaul himself has been deeply shaken. Two members of Breaking the Silence were killed by Hamas. “We knew there was nothing good at the end of the tunnel of permanent occupation,” Shaul said softly, “but when it happens at this scale — the orgy of mass murder of entire families …”

Still, Shaul believes it is important to permit humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. “First and foremost,” he said, “it’s morally necessary because we aren’t Hamas.”

“But then, of course,” he added, “it is strategically necessary. If we make it about every Palestinian in Gaza vs. us, it’s a very bad place to be.”

» READ MORE: As Israel strikes back against Hamas, questions linger about the long road ahead | Trudy Rubin

Indeed, Hamas is trying to rouse public wrath in Arab states to press their leaders to support it. Israel is being condemned throughout the region for the bombing of the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City (even though Israel has made a good, although not totally verifiable, case that the hospital was hit by a misfired rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad).

Moreover, Hamas is trying to encourage Tehran to give the green light to Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon to open a new front on Israel’s northern border by unleashing a surge of their 150,000 rockets and missiles. More catastrophic scenes of Gazan children dying en masse will put pressure on these militants to act.

So, after committing full support and billions in aid to backing Israel, it is time for Biden to call in his chips with Netanyahu. The U.S. should insist that Israel establish “safe zones” in southern Gaza, and, if it is not too late, permit a bombing pause so more civilians can proceed south. Then a system for regular aid delivery to the safe zones should be set up that will continue during wartime. (If Hamas seizes any of the aid, that system can be reviewed.)

Biden was correct to warn Israelis against letting war policy be driven by fury. But unless he convinces Israel to conduct a more strategic policy toward Gazan civilians, Washington will be complicit as the death toll soars.