“If you get them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” That’s one version. Another, from a veteran military adviser in Vietnam, turned it around: “It was hard to win the villagers’ hearts and minds when the VC had them by the balls.” As we hover on the brink of a full-scale Israeli invasion of Gaza, these wise words have never been more relevant and, sadly, never more likely to be ignored.

In the three weeks since Hamas terrorists inflicted a murderous and cowardly attack upon innocent Israelis, we’ve heard no end of voices calling for “understanding” and “proportionality,” voices that, in essence, are calling for Israel to tie one hand behind its back in its military response. Or, worse, we’ve heard some very loud voices — including, unsurprisingly, the members of the “Squad” — demanding that Israel simply acknowledge its manifold sins and accept the Hamas attacks as just punishment. Even the secretary-general of the UN has piled on, in effect contending that the Jewish people somehow deserved their worst day since the end of the Holocaust. (RELATED: To Hell With the United Nations)

Fortunately, there are many other commentators, including many on The American Spectator (here and here and here, to offer a few), who’ve called attention to these issues. My purpose today is to challenge another — and more insidious — idea, namely that, in dealing with Hamas and the Palestinian population of Gaza, the IDF should be guided by a “hearts and minds” strategy. Since World War II, it has become axiomatic that the only way to defeat a terrorist insurgency lies in winning the “hearts and minds” of the larger populace. In the present circumstance, it insists that the IDF must prioritize a “conversation” with the civilian population of Gaza, even if it means being “careful” in attacking Hamas fighters.

This approach is profoundly wrongheaded. It misreads the very history its proponents draw upon to make their case. Our intellectuals, including, regrettably, some of the uniformed variety, have lionized Lawrence or Mao or Fidel or Giap, convincing themselves that “sending the right message” is more important than actual military success. None of the aforementioned icons of guerilla warfare ever made such a mistake. Nor should we.

Hearts and Minds and Communism

Lawrence’s Arab revolt, however fascinating, served only as an adjunct to the conventional warfare of Allenby’s army, as Lawrence himself — unlike his later hagiographers—understood full well. Mao won China when his Red Army, outfitted generously by the Soviets with captured Japanese weapons, became capable of winning conventional battles. Fidel triumphed less through popular support than because the Batista regime stank to high heaven and collapsed under its own weight. Giap’s resounding victory at Dien Bien Phu was predicated on the concentration of overwhelming conventional resources around the isolated French outpost. Tragically, when the Viet Minh finally offered an almost perfect target for conventional airpower, the French lacked the necessary air assets, and the U.S. refused to make up the difference — a decision we would come to regret.

Or consider our own Vietnam experience, which, frankly, still haunts the entire “hearts and minds” discussion. As former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger noted in his foreword to Bing West’s study of the war for control of the Vietnamese villages, the Viet Cong ultimately lost the “village war,” which meant that, in the end, the Communist triumph depended wholly upon a direct invasion from the north by 18 conventional NVA divisions, spearheaded by hundreds of Soviet-built T-54 main battle tanks.

One of the most iconic images of the 1975 fall of Saigon was that of an NVA T-54 tank crashing through the gate of the presidential palace. In 1972, without U.S. ground troops but backed by American air power, the South Vietnamese army, the much and unfairly maligned ARVN, had defeated just such a conventional NVA invasion. But in 1975, after the U.S. Congress had reneged on our promises of ammunition and equipment, including those necessary to maintain South Vietnam’s own air force, ARVN collapsed in the face of overwhelming odds. (One might reflect that something very similar occurred in the run-up to Biden’s precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, when the Afghan National Army was deprived of such essentials as maintenance for the helicopters we’d given them.)

The Communists ultimately won the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people by taking them firmly by the balls, with tanks rolling through major cities and armed Communist cadres, backed by NVA regulars, on the ground in every town and village. Thousands were shot outright, while many thousands more were incarcerated in “reeducation” camps. Among our own “progressive” intellectuals in the U.S., there remains a tendency to romanticize this Communist victory; after all, many in our professoriate once filled the streets, wearing their “Che” T-shirts and chanting their support for “Uncle Ho.”

Now, as the IDF ground assault begins, we seem determined to make the same mistakes, insisting that the Israelis indulge in a quixotic quest for Palestinian “hearts and minds” while ignoring the need to take Gaza by the balls. We worry loudly over how to open a corridor into Gaza for humanitarian assistance while knowing full well that Hamas will divert this to serve its own military purposes. Again and again, we’re told that Israel’s air assets must be employed with absolutely surgical precision, that the avoidance of “civilian” casualties must be paramount — otherwise, Israel might forfeit the potential support of those “Palestinians of good will,” along with the larger “Arab street,” and “worldwide public opinion.” This must be Israel’s priority, and we must insist, as a condition of our continued support, that they act accordingly. No less a sage than Barack Obama, the éminence grise of the Biden administration, has told us so.

Take ’Em by the Balls

At the University of Munich, I found myself discussing with one of my professors how German attitudes toward Nazism changed after World War II. He was a scholar of postwar Germany and also had served as a teenager in the Wehrmacht. Observing that many Germans had been active Nazis and that most of the rest had supported Hitler until the war was lost, he observed: “Your 8th Air Force did more for de-Nazification than all the military government lawyers you deployed after the war. Reducing our cities to rubble, and then having one of your Sherman tanks on every street corner — that’s what turned most Germans against the Nazis.” Simply stated, winning “hearts and minds” after 12 years of Nazi indoctrination meant first taking an entire nation “by the balls.”

Therein lies the real message of “hearts and minds”: Israel must crush Hamas utterly and completely — there can be no half-measures. For decades now, Hamas has spread its poison throughout the larger Palestinian community so that young men now exult in the murder of Jews, and their exultation is celebrated in cities across the Western world — and very much here in the U.S. These murderers must be relentlessly pursued and eliminated. The “civilians” of Gaza voted these thugs into power and stood by while Hamas trashed the functioning civilian infrastructure left behind when the Israelis withdrew from Gaza. The civilians, like those long ago “ordinary Germans,” have supported Hamas, at least passively, and they’ve allowed their children to be thoroughly indoctrinated by Hamas hatred. This dynamic must be broken, once and for all. (READ MORE: Gaza Gets Who It Voted For)

Then — and only then — should we start the process of providing humanitarian aid. The Marshall Plan, the greatest and most successful humanitarian aid program in history, came to Germany only after Nazism had been crushed and its values discredited by a force that reached into every corner of German life. If, instead, Hamas is merely punished surgically — “mowing the lawn,” to use the Israeli term — then the cycle of violence will only continue until, one day soon, the whole world is drawn into an Iranian-fueled morass of destruction, the outlines of which are already evident. Make no mistake about the global significance of the current struggle. Israel is merely the canary in the coalmine for Western civilization, a vulnerable outpost, in the terms favored by Iran’s mullahs, the “Little Satan” to America’s “Great Satan.” And both Xi and Putin are watching.

The days to come will obviously be existential — literally, not metaphorically — for Israel. The ground war in Gaza will be a slugging match. Can the IDF prevail? What happens when IDF successes in Gaza are followed by the inevitable Hezbollah incursion in the north? What will Iran do? Israel is certainly capable militarily of cleaning up Gaza, and it might be capable of resisting Hezbollah. In the end, however, its freedom of action will be severely constrained by the vagaries of international support — above all, support from the U.S.

And while the Biden administration has talked a good game, the “great waffle” apparently has already begun. The Democrats, after all, have a powerful pro-Palestinian internal constituency and, more broadly, are subject to the “progressive” influences that are overwhelmingly anti-Israel, and the administration has yet to forthrightly confront the longstanding Iranian support for Hamas. And the Republicans? One can’t help but suspect that their resolute words will not be matched by resolute actions. For decades, U.S. foreign policy has been driven by a “heckler’s veto,” and the heckler’s voices are already ringing loudly — and against meaningful support for Israel in its hour of supreme crisis.

Don’t kid yourself. What lies before us is no longer a “war of choice.” We might still have some choices regarding how we engage, but the war has already started. The hatred currently displayed across Europe and in our own major cities isn’t just about Jews or Zionism. From the Muslim banlieues of France to the streets of London, and our own college campuses, we too — Protestant, Catholic, atheist alike — are the objects of an unreasoning and passionate radical Islamist hatred. Our borders, just like the borders of western Europe, are wide open to the terrorists — they don’t need hang gliders to cross our southern border. And, terrifyingly, they’re likely already here. (WATCH: Terror Threats to U.S. Amid Israel-Hamas War)

Never Again

In the end, this is a fundamental conflict about values. “Never again” versus “from the river to the sea” is a discussion on genocide. When Hamas’ desired outcome is the eradication of the Jews, one can hardly expect the Jews to negotiate their own demise. We Americans, in our comfortable isolation, sometimes forget that there are issues beyond the reach of the ivory tower professors or the pompous politicians.

The greatest constitutional question in the history of the United States, the right of an individual state to leave the United States, wasn’t settled by a Supreme Court decision. Instead, it was settled at the point of a bayonet, at the cost of over half a million lives. That great constitutionalist Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman said it best: “My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them into their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.” Sherman understood a thing or two about winning “hearts and minds,” and he understood the necessary first principles of “reeducation.”

Hamas came for Israel on Oct. 7. Allowed to flourish, they will destroy Israel, and then they, and others like them — ISIS, Hezbollah, and a host of others — will be emboldened to come for us. Along the way, like their Nazi forerunners, they will drag people of good will everywhere, including many moderate Muslims, into their cesspit of nihilistic destruction. For decades now, we’ve been engaged in a battle for “hearts and minds,” one we’ve been consistently losing because we’ve failed to recognize what it takes to win. We will either take those who hate us by the balls and squeeze hard enough and long enough to make them surrender, or they will do the same to us.

Look around — they’ve already started. And, right now, we are losing.

James H. McGee’s 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. Not incidentally, it is also a meditation on the nature of heroism as exemplified by an international team of special operators. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.