NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {S} ubscribers to the New York Times received an urgent alert on their mobile devices from the world’s foremost journalistic enterprise on Tuesday morning: “While Israel has continued to decimate Gaza and its people from the air,” the Times reported, “its ground operation has been more incremental, and shrouded in secrecy.” The alert augments a growing body of evidence indicating that the Western journalistic establishment wants Israel to lose its war against the Hamas terrorist organization.

What the alert manages without a hint of self-awareness is to establish a moral parallel between the well-planned, multi-axis assault into Israel on October 7 — an event in which Hamas terrorists invented new levels of human depravity — and Israel’s response to that attack. It elides intent, insofar as Hamas sought as high a civilian body count as possible and Israel goes to great lengths — transparently and in independently verifiable ways — to avoid civilian casualties, despite Hamas’s efforts to put as many Gazans in the path of Israeli ordnance as possible. The article the Times alert was designed to promote complains about the opacity of IDF operations on the ground, which is a dog-bites-man story. Of course, operational secrecy is desirable. What the Times would prefer is either that Israel openly broadcast its movements, undermining its operational efficacy, or that it go into Gaza loudly and flamboyantly, which runs the risk of triggering a broader regional conflict. Either way, Israel loses.

This straight news item is of a piece with the growing consensus on the world’s most respectable opinion pages that Israel should consent to an immediate ceasefire. Some of those calls even acknowledge that a ceasefire would allow Hamas to rearm and regroup, and it would convey to Israeli civilians that they just have to live with the prospect of another genocidal massacre of their friends, family, and neighbors at some indefinite but predictable future date. And yet, none of these concerns deterred Israel’s critics.

In its call for a ceasefire, the Financial Times editorial board mourned the scenes of devastation in Gaza — consequences that accompany the governing regime’s sponsorship of an existential threat to the Jewish state. It bemoans the “shortages of food, water, and fuel needed to power desalinization plants and generators.” It makes no mention of the vast stockpile of these resources Hamas maintains, or of the fact that the terrorist sect uses those resources to provide for its operatives, ventilate the tunnels it uses to stockpile weapons, warehouse its hostages (including U.S. citizens), and maintain its ceaseless barrage of rockets into Israeli population centers.

The editorial perfunctorily acknowledges Israel’s “deep sense of vulnerability,” as though it was a mere psychological malady, but finds the Jewish state guilty of meting out “collective punishment” against the Gazan people. It even goes so far as to chastise Joe Biden for failing to take at face value Hamas’s casualty figures, insisting that the United Nations eventually produces similar figures on its own (as if Hamas doesn’t maintain editorial control over the work done by U.N. representatives in Gaza). Israel, the editorial concludes, is losing the global public-relations fight by pursuing its right to defend its people and territory. If it is to avoid further losses, Jerusalem must preemptively surrender. We can only hope that the Financial Times’s editorial board is just hopelessly naïve and overcome with emotion, because every other conclusion we might draw about the motives that produced this twaddle are far less charitable.

The Financial Times is joined by a growing body of outlets that have produced editorials appealing to readers’ emotions so that they might stifle their capacity for reason. The Washington Post treats its readers to an op-ed via Atef Abu Saif, the culture minister for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, who is on the ground in Gaza and details the horrors of this war. The word “Hamas” appears nowhere, which is unsurprising given the document’s origins inside Hamas-controlled territory. Saif does, however, lament the extent to which the lack of Israel-provided electricity and internet access has left him feeling “disconnected from the world.” Indeed, that’s the point of cutting off communications to an enemy combatant, though it was apparently insufficient to prevent the transmission of this dispatch to the Post.

“If diplomacy and international relations can acquiesce to this kind of war, then what is the point of diplomacy and international relations?” read New York Times contributing opinion writer Megan Stack’s lament. “What outcome does this strategy avert that would be worse than the outcome it has already created?” The answer to that question — one she presumably rejects — is that an operation that successfully neutralizes the regime that sponsored the slaughter of Jews for being Jews and kills those responsible for that massacre ensures that neither the regime nor its fighters will ever again execute a similar massacre. Seems pretty straightforward. “But they say we should not call for a cease-fire,” she scoffed. Yes, because that would prevent Israel from ensuring that the executors of this massacre face just consequences.

These are not elusive concepts unless you are deeply, philosophically committed to the notion that Israel should simply absorb the murder of its citizens in ways no other nation on Earth would.

Elsewhere in the Times, opinion writer Tom Friedman echoes calls for a cease-fire with childlike credulity. A cessation of hostilities would allow for a “prisoner exchange” — the culmination of an extortion racket that would only demonstrate why it’s valuable to take civilian hostages, ensuring more abductions in the future. It would “allow Israel to pause and reflect” on its goals for this operation and on “the price it could pay over the long haul.” The notion that Israel has not reflected on either its goals or the consequences of going back into Gaza after its 18-year absence is remarkably condescending. The three weeks that elapsed between the 10/7 massacre and Israel’s ground invasion were sufficient to perform a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis of the unenviable situation that has been imposed on the Israeli government. Friedman notes, however, that a ceasefire would also allow Hamas to reflect on its atrocities and come to terms with the shame of it all:

I want to see Hamas’s leaders come out from their tunnels under hospitals and look their people, and the world’s media, in the eye and tell everyone why they thought it was such a great idea to mutilate and kidnap Israeli children and grandmothers and trigger this terrible blowback on the children and grandmothers of their Gaza neighbors — not to mention their own.

This saccharine conception of the Hobbesian state of nature in which Hamas operates is unworthy of a young-adult fiction writer, much less a professional observer of geopolitics. The people who executed civilians in droves, burnt down homes with families inside them, slaughtered children, defiled women, and paraded their corpses down Gaza’s jubilant streets are not overcome with remorse. Friedman’s demand is that he be privy to some sort of performance from Hamas officials, many of whom live in luxury far away from Gaza’s battlefields. His appeal is not for justice but the satisfaction of his own conscience — deliverance from the discomfort of feeling morally obligated to choose a side.

So far, the calls for a ceasefire before Israel has had the chance to defend itself amount to solipsism. They say far more about their authors than they do about Israel or the tactics it has deployed in its effort to communicate to Hamas and every other Islamist terrorist organization that the civilized world will fight back. If Israel’s critics really desire a better future for long-suffering Gazans, they should want to see regime change in Gaza come sooner rather than later. On the other side of that mission, there will be relief for the Gazans who languish in an “open-air prison” of Hamas’s making. The fact that this elementary logic seems to escape Israel’s critics suggests they wield humanitarian considerations like a cudgel — a weapon to be used in their campaign of emotional and moral blackmail. And in a time before 10/7, Israel would likely be sensitive to these voices and their concerns. But that was a different time, and the Israelis aren’t listening anymore.