Skyline Happenings

By Thomas L. Friedman Opinion Columnist in the NYT

The leaders of Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and the United States have one thing in common: None of them want a commission of inquiry looking into their performance in the latest Middle East conflict. So I have decided to do it for them, and I can summarize my conclusions in two words that apply to them all: “You lost.” There — I’ve saved you all the time and money of an internal investigation. You’re welcome.

This truly is the Middle East war that everybody lost. Even though it’s not over, I can see that. In fact, one reason this war may linger is because most of the leaders of these countries and militias know that history has its eyes on them and the minute the guns fall silent there will be a moral, political and economic accounting that will be devastating for each one of these fools.

Let’s go around the table. Hamas started this latest Middle East conflict on Oct. 7, 2023, with an invasion of Israel from Gaza in which in one day it murdered more than 1,200 people — men, women and children — and abducted more than 250. What was Hamas’s war aim? As far as we can tell, its fantasy was that by invading Israel it would spark a regional uprising in which “resistance” forces — including Hezbollah, Iran and even some Arab nations — would help it to annihilate the Jewish state.

Hamas did not launch this war with any peaceful intent — that is, with a gun in one hand and a peace map in the other showing how two indigenous people, Jews and Palestinians, might coexist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. No, the only maps Hamas fighters carried showed them where to find the most Jews to kill in the border communities they invaded, including at elementary schools and a youth center.

It is hard to forget the phone call, released by the Israeli Army, of a Hamas gunman who took part in the Oct. 7 onslaught and who excitedly tells his parents that he is in Mefalsim, a kibbutz near the Gaza border, and that he alone killed 10 Jews. “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” he says, according to an English translation. “Mom, your son is a hero.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his far-right government of Jewish supremacists launched a war of annihilation right back. The only map he offered was one in which only Jews would control the area from the river to the sea.

Because Hamas embedded itself inside Gaza’s civilian population, and because it refused to allow Gazans to take shelter inside the hundreds of miles of war-fighting tunnels it had dug under Gaza, the civilian population was ravaged by Israel’s ferocious retaliation. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, Israel killed more than 70,000 people — a majority civilians, including thousands of children — and wounded at least 170,000. That’s a shameful total — about 10 percent of the approximately 2.2 million people living in Gaza before the war.

The Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar reportedly described such losses as “necessary sacrifices” to advance the Palestinian cause globally. It worked. His human sacrifice of Palestinian civilians has delegitimized Israel around the world to a degree never seen before. The Jewish people’s movement for self-determination in their biblical homeland — called Zionism — has become a dirty word on college campuses and in liberal political parties, and increasingly in some conservative ones. Israeli artists and academics are simply no longer welcome in many corners of the world today. Israel’s brutal war has also given cover for antisemites to crawl out from under the rocks.

No surprise. Because, though Netanyahu defeated Hamas militarily, he never nurtured or welcomed a moderate Palestinian alternative. So, killing all those Palestinian civilians during the war looked to the rest of the world just like that: killing, pure and simple, not to clear the way for better Palestinian governance but to clear the way for NO Palestinians in Gaza.

Let’s do the math: Israel has spent billions of dollars, destroyed its international reputation, lost much of its support in the liberal parties in America and Europe — and Hamas is still in charge in 40 percent of Gaza. There is today zero prospect of peace with the Palestinians. Many of these decisions were made so Netanyahu could retain the support of the far-right extremists keeping him in power and avoid a possible jail sentence on corruption charges. Now you know why Bibi is doing everything he can to quash a court-led Israeli inquiry into the failure to prevent the Oct. 7 attacks that could undermine his re-election chances.

As for Hamas, it too will have no commission of inquiry. Whatever tactical P.R. victory it has won for the Palestinian cause, it cannot translate it into a lasting political gain for Palestinian statehood, because it, like Netanyahu, refuses to embrace the idea that the land between the river and the sea can be shared by two peoples. So the roughly two million Palestinians in Gaza are now living in greater misery than ever. Some victory.

It is rivaled only by Hezbollah’s “victory” in Lebanon. Hezbollah dragged all of Lebanon into a war with Israel that no one in Lebanon voted for and that was obviously done at the behest of, and for the interests of, Iran. Because before Oct. 7, 2023, Israel was not occupying an inch of Lebanese territory. Israel now has troops all over southern Lebanon and has responded to Hezbollah’s attacks on northern Israel by smashing Shiite villages there and Shiite neighborhoods in Beirut. Roughly one million Lebanese have been turned into refugees in their own country, and Hezbollah has exposed itself for what it is: a mercenary army acting in the interests of its Iranian paymasters, not the interests of Lebanon or even Lebanese Shiites.

So, don’t hold your breath for a commission of inquiry from Hezbollah.

As for the Iran front, it is now clear that President Trump and Netanyahu started a war with the Islamic regime to topple it by aerial bombardments and had no Plan B, if Plan A failed — which it did.

Iran, alas, had a Plan B and a Plan C. Once the regime survived the initial U.S.-Israeli attack — albeit with the loss of dozens of senior officials and military commanders and much military equipment — Iran blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, choking off some 20 percent of global crude oil supplies. It also attacked America’s Gulf Arab allies, in effect sending Trump the message that “if you kill us, we will destabilize them and then you will really see a global oil crisis.”

Iran’s shadowy leaders want no part of any commission of inquiry, because while they did have Plans B and C to ensure that their regime survived, they had no Plan D for the Iranian people to thrive. The first question an Iranian inquiry commission would surely ask would be: “Exactly what have you achieved from the billions of dollars you have spent trying to build a nuclear weapon and to extend Iranian imperialism over Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and the Arab Gulf states?” Iran’s leaders know that question is coming from their own people, so it’s better for them to keep the war going so they don’t have to answer it. (No surprise to me that they just shot down, according to Trump, a U.S. helicopter in the Strait of Hormuz.)

As for Trump, he can still salvage something from this war if he can persuade Tehran to turn over all its near bomb-grade uranium. I hope so. That would be important. But at this stage, it happens only if Trump gives a new lease on life to this terrible regime in Tehran. That is because Iran will surely not agree to abandon its nuclear materials unless Trump, at least tacitly, accepts Iran’s de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz (Iran’s new weapon of mass disruption), the transfer to Iran of billions of dollars in frozen assets and the lifting of economic sanctions. A U.S. president who promised Iran’s “unconditional surrender” will be delivering its unlimited survival. I don’t think Trump will want any congressional commission of inquiry examining the art of that deal.

Bottom line: The war that started on Oct. 7, 2023, was launched and prosecuted by very bad men, who consistently put their own interests and fantasies ahead of their people’s simple dreams for a decent life. If you are looking for a ray of hope, it would be that the pain of it all forces them all into a cease-fire. And then that this cease-fire creates space for politics — for the people’s inquiry commissions that say to the leaders of Iran, Gaza, Hezbollah, Israel and America who made this mess: “What were you thinking? Begone with you.”