More than nine months after Hamas committed the worst massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, the war sparked by that act of evil continues to rage. The US is attempting to push forward a ceasefire deal to free many of the 120 remaining hostages held in Gaza and, the Biden Administration hopes, end the current conflict permanently. And yet two words are missing completely from the discourse surrounding the war.
Unconditional surrender.
In December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an ultimatum to the tens of thousands of Hamas fighters in Gaza, “surrender or die.” But this was addressed to the individual fighters and terrorists, not to the terrorist organization as a whole.
Amazingly, and foolishly, neither Israel or its allies seem to have made the surrender of Hamas an issue at all. Despite the IDF’s overwhelming military power relative to Hamas, despite the devastating losses Hamas has suffered and continued to suffer, the idea that Hamas should surrender to end a conflict it cannot hope to win is never so much as suggested.
Forcing one side to surrender is how wars are usually ended and is the fundamental condition for bringing a war to a true conclusion. Union General Ulysses S. Grant demanded the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Unconditional surrender is what the Allies forced on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan at the end of World War Two. It should have been Israel’s primary demand of Hamas since at least the end of the late-November ceasefire. The fact that Israel has not demanded Hamas’s unconditional surrender is a strategic blunder as great as any made before or after the October 7 massacre.
What would an unconditional surrender by Hamas look like?
-It would mean the immediate release of all hostages without Israel releasing any terrorists in return.
-It would mean Hamas leaders like Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, if he still lives, would surrender themselves to stand trial for their crimes against humanity.
-It would mean the disbandment of Hamas’s military battalions and its removal from the seat of power in Gaza.
-It would mean the end of the war with Israel victorious.
By failing to issue this most basic of demands, Israel has allowed Hamas to dictate the terms of the hostage talks. It has allowed Hamas to believe it can it make things worse for Israel on the international stage by deliberately dragging out the talks, making unreasonable demands, and directly causing more and more people to die in Gaza. It has allowed Israel’s own allies to conclude that the goal of dismantling Hamas is impossible. It has allowed for the world to accept that a ceasefire in which Hamas claims victory, remains in power in Gaza, and rebuilds its forces to carry out more October 7s is the best possible outcome.
Would Hamas acquiesce to a demand to surrender? Certainly not at first. That does not matter. If you never even try, you certainly will not succeed. The Allies demanded Japan’s unconditional surrender despite knowing that Japanese pride would sooner see the country fight to the last child than surrender, just like Yahya Sinwar would sooner see every last child in Gaza dead than admit defeat at the hands of Israel. In the end, Japan was forced to surrender despite this going against everything the country stood for at the time. Had the US never made any demands that Japan or Germany surrender, their evil ideologies might never have been so totally defeated.
It should not take an atom bomb to compel to Hamas to surrender. Sinwar may be as evil as the rulers of Japan were during World War Two, but he is a coward compared to them.
Israel has had never before had the chance to demand that at enemy surrender, as international forces have always acted to save those who seek to destroy it through the imposition of ceasefires that allow them to try again.
This time should have been different, given the scale of the atrocities committed on October 7, Israel’s stated goals of dismantling Hamas, and who is leading the country. Prime Minister Netanyahu likes to call himself a student of history. He should know the importance his hero, Winston Churchill, placed on Germany’s unconditional surrender, as opposed to the demands Germany had made when it surrendered at the end of the First World War, which did not lead to a lasting peace.
In a speech before Parliament in February 1944, Churchill explained, “The term ‘unconditional surrender’ does not mean that the German people will be enslaved or destroyed. It means however that the Allies will not be bound to them at the moment of surrender by any pact or obligation. There will be, for instance, no question of the Atlantic Charter applying to Germany as a matter of right and barring territorial transferences or adjustments in enemy countries. No such arguments will be admitted by us as were used by Germany after the last war, saying that they surrendered in consequence of President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points.’”
How different would America’s position have been if surrender had become part of the lexicon surrounding the war? How different would European nations’ positions have been if this sensible way of immediately bringing the war to an end, along with all of the death and destruction that it has wrought, had been consistently raised? How different would things be if supporters of Israel could counter the pro-genocide protests calling for the mass murder of Jews with protests calling for Hamas to surrender because that was what Israel was demanding?
By never uttering the words ‘unconditional surrender,’ Netanyahu has dropped the ball and failed to live up to Churchill’s example. He has allowed Israel’s position to deteriorate to the point where far too many are demanding that Israel surrender instead, that this war end as all of Israel’s previous wars ended, with the other side licking its wounds but preparing for their next attempt to wipe out the Jewish State.
If the current talks fail, as they likely will, Israel must change tack and start doing what it should have done from the beginning, demand Hamas’s unconditional surrender. Anything less allows Hamas’s genocidal ideology to survive and condemns both Israel and Gaza to further bloodshed in the coming years.
Gary Willig is a member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.