If Not This, Then What Should Israel Do?
About this episode
Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp, drawing on interviews with counterterrorism specialists, military historians, and Hamas experts, argues that Israel must confront the threat from Hamas but that siege tactics and collective punishment cross moral and strategic lines. He examines what 'destroying Hamas' could actually mean amid Gaza's tunnels and dense urban terrain, the likelihood that reoccupation would breed a grinding insurgency, and why a narrower campaign targeting the group's leadership and capabilities is preferable. Military force, he insists, cannot substitute for a political strategy; he discusses the corrosive role of settlements, Netanyahu's past policy of bolstering Hamas to divide Palestinians, and incremental steps toward West Bank reform and trust-building.