Victor Davis Hanson: Who Is Really to Blame for Gaza's Destruction?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Welcome to the Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

Victor Davis Hanson (0:08)

Nations or countries that want to commit genocide do not pull all of their military and civilians out of the area that is targeted, and then see it increase by one million people in a mere 20 years.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. We're at the third anniversary week, and just last week of the October 7th, 2023 massacres. Remember what happened?

About 4,000 terrorists from Gaza, Hamas terrorists, accompanied by 2,000 opportunistic Gazan civilians, swarmed into Israel in a pre-planned assault. They penetrated 17 miles. They would have gone a lot further had the IDF and armed civilians beat them back. They killed almost 1,000 of the terrorists and their accompaniment. But the question I have is, why is Gaza now in rubble? We hear about genocide. We hear about settler colonialism. We hear about apartheid. But why is Gaza in rubble? And I think I can answer that in 2 ways. What happened before October 7th and what happened after. Let's go first to what happened after. The Israeli government on October 8th and subsequently, for the next 20 days, asked Hamas, such as it is, to do 2 things. Turn over the 251 hostages and turn over the architects and those who participated in the murder. They waited 20 days before invading Gaza. In that 20 days, the Gazans sent about 8,500 rockets into Israel's civilian centers. These were not aimed at military targets or even dual use target. They were aimed at civilian targets. So for 20 days, Israel waited for them to give back the hostages before they invaded, give back the architects of this terror. They refused both counts, and they sent about 8,500 rockets. They would all together send 13,000 rockets, we forget that, at Israel. So that's number one and two. And next, they exposed civilians at the entries and exits into the tunnels below Gaza. There was about almost 500 miles in this labyrinth. And to get in and out, you had to go through a hospital, a mosque, or a school, or in some cases, private homes. The Hamas terrorists, the people responsible for killing everybody, was hiding in this labyrinth, quite safe, while they were exposing their own civilians to retaliation for the crimes that they had committed. Can you imagine during the Blitz, for example, if British civil defense people who were manning the barricades and were afraid of bombing went down into the subway and they denied the use of the subway to British civilians? That would be unheard of. But that's what exactly Hamas did. So, number three. There were about 2,000 to 3,000 civilians that either planned all along to go into Israel to be opportunistic killers, looters, thieves and rapists.

And they participated in the mutilation and the desecration and the hostage tanking. We know that. They had their own. We had about a couple of hundred people who were captured. We had their GoPro cameras. We had security cameras in the kibbutz. And by the way, of the 6,000 who participated, the Israeli government has taken out about 4,000. The next 2,000 must know that they are marked people and they will not be here very long.

Another reason, why when they brought back hostages and corpses and they paraded them in the streets of Gaza, why were they not only met by a mob that was cheering, but the mob actually tried to spit, hit, club those hostages who were alive and mutilate the bodies of those who were dead and brought back as trophies? In other words, the civilians, think of this, the civilians of Gaza that we say were innocent had to be stopped from further atrocities by the people who created the atrocities, the Hamas terrorists.

Let's ask another reason why Gaza is in rubble, and in the context of before October 7th. In September 2005, all Israelis were out of Gaza. There was not one Jew, there was not one Israeli inside Gaza. American philanthropic organizations and donors bought key infrastructure, especially greenhouses, and the Israelis turned them over to the Gazans, who immediately looted them and destroyed them against their own self-interest. They were very lucrative businesses, and they could have been using them.

So my point is, there were no Jews in Gaza. This is 22 years ago, or 18 years ago, by the time of the October massacres. So Gazans and Hamas terrorists wanted to kill Israelis, even though no Israelis were in Gaza. And they had not been there for about 18 years on October 7th. And the West, mainly the United States and Europe, and the UN had given Gaza in that period from 2005 to the day of the massacres about $40 billion.