If you listen to Israeli media for any length of time nowadays, you will eventually hear some military expert or former officer make the claim that militaries can’t defeat terrorists or that you can’t destroy an idea with tanks or some other version on the same theme. And the message is clear: Israel needs to make a deal with Hamas and stop the campaign to eliminate it.

As the American actor Bradley Whitford said, “There’s no military solution to terrorism. If there were, Israel would be the safest place in the world.” He claimed to be quoting an unnamed Israeli human rights activist. And Major General (res.) Yair Golan, former Deputy Chief of Staff of the IDF, and head of the newly minted far-left Democrats party, former IDF Chief of Staff and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, and former IDF Chief of Staff and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz have all formulated versions of that same idea.

In June 2024, IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said, “Hamas is an idea. Those who think it can be made to disappear are wrong.” He added that anyone promising Hamas’s eradication is “misleading the public.”

Oh really?

We just marked Tisha B’Av, when Jews mourn the crushing defeat of an eight-year-long Jewish insurgency against the Romans under Titus. The Romans methodically subdued rebel strongholds in Galilee and Judea, killing or enslaving tens of thousands, and then besieged Jerusalem. When the dust cleared in 70 CE, the Temple was destroyed and any semblance of Jewish autonomy ended.

Just over 60 years later, as the military pundits would have predicted if cable news had existed back then, the Jews again rose up against their Roman overlords. This time, the insurgency was led by Shimon Bar Kochba and he managed to establish an........

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