Gerard Laval
Washington Times, Oct. 18, 2023
“A cease-fire in Gaza will merely be viewed by Hamas as a hiatus in the effort to achieve their ultimate objective (in this case the destruction of Israel and the murder of its Jewish citizens, as openly enunciated in their charter).”
It is terribly immodest and even arrogant to quote oneself. However, at the risk of being considered immodest and arrogant, I am permitting myself to submit for dissemination an essay that I wrote in 2014 following a Hamas attack on the state of Israel, but regrettably did not publish. I hope that by publishing this essay, word for word, nine years later, it may still have a beneficial impact.
On July 25, 2014, I wrote:
In April 1865, Gen. Robert E. Lee surveyed his army and its capacity to fight the Union armies and he concluded that the Confederacy could not win the Civil War. Further bloodshed was useless, the South would simply not prevail. Lee met with Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox and surrendered — unconditionally. A prominent military leader of the South had come to the recognition that the South had failed in its attempt to secede from the Union and that it could no longer hope to achieve its objective.
Although it would take more than a century, through this surrender, the terrible division that had afflicted the United States since its creation some 89 years earlier could begin to heal.
On Jan. 24, 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in Casablanca to discuss their strategy in the war against Nazi Germany. At the conclusion of their meeting, the two leaders declared that their sole goal in the war was the “unconditional surrender” of Germany and its allies. They had determined, based on the events that had led to the war, that negotiating with Hitler could not result in a genuine end to the conflict. Only surrender, without conditions, could achieve their purpose of bringing peace to Europe and the world.
The overwhelming, very disproportionate, force brought to bear against Nazi Germany and its allies achieved this purpose. By using every means and weapon at their disposal, the Allies completely defeated the Germans and initiated the longest period of peace that Europe has ever known. … [To read the full article, click here]
