If Only Hamas Had Listened to Gen. Sherman

Last week, the Israel Defense Force conducted a daring raid in central Gaza to rescue four hostages that had been held by Hamas for the past eight months. According to Hamas, 236 people were killed and more than 400 wounded in the rescue operation. Israel placed the casualties at less than 100, including an Israeli policeman from a special counter-terrorism unit.

As Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman told graduates at the Michigan Military Academy in 1879, “War is hell.” Truer words have never been spoken. However, it is also undeniably true that Hamas started this war that has brought so much death and destruction to the people of Gaza… the same people who foolishly elected Hamas to represent them.

The full context of Gen. Sherman’s words was, “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”

True to form, Sherman warned the southern states about the horrors of war – and their certain defeat – a full year before the “War of Northern Aggression”, a misnomer if there ever was one because it was the Confederacy that fired the first shot on April 12, 1861, just like Hamas did on October 7, 2023.

Here is Sherman’s dire warning…

“You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it. Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth – right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.”

How prescient was that? Just imagine how much suffering could have been avoided if the South – and Hamas – had listened to Sherman’s admonition. Instead, they “poked the bear” and can only blame themselves for the catastrophic results.

As Gen. Sherman told a Mississippi woman who complained about the devastating affects of the Civil War and the Union Army’s tactics in particular, “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our Country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”

I agree 100% with Gen. Sherman’s logic. Simply put, Hamas is solely to blame for the “curses and maledictions” of the war in Gaza.