President Biden is urging Israel to avoid harming civilians in its war with Hamas. By saddling the country with that burden, the president ensures that the cycle of violence rolls on, failing to learn the lessons of the past where America achieved lasting peace only through total victory.  

Speaking at Tel Aviv on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said, “The Palestinian people are suffering greatly… The people of Gaza need food, water, medicine and shelter.” Last week, the secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, said, “Terrorists like Hamas deliberately target civilians, but democracies don’t.”

They’re noble sentiments, but off the mark. Hamas is Gaza’s governing body, elected with 44.4 percent of the vote in 2006, about equal to the 43.9 percent Adolf Hitler’s party earned when he came to power in 1933. Although minority parties, civilian supporters and opponents alike paid the price when the nations they attacked fought back.

At the urging of the Soviet Union in 1945, Britain’s deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee, ordered the firebombing of Dresden, killing 25,000 people. That same year, between 80,000 and 130,000 Japanese civilians died when America unleashed incendiary bombs on Tokyo.

President Truman, in his statement announcing the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima to end the war in the Pacific, said, “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city.”

President Ulysses S. Grant prosecuted America’s war to crush the Confederate States despite the suffering it caused even those loyal to the Union. While some demanded ceasefires and negotiations in 1863 at Vicksburg — where civilians ate rats and dug into caves to escape the shelling — Grant demanded complete capitulation.

When someone complained about Grant’s resort to drinking whiskey, Lincoln is supposed to have replied, “Find out what he’s been drinking and send some to the rest of my generals.”

Afterwards, Americans said that the U.S. in Grant’s name stood for “unconditional surrender.” When President Lincoln promoted Grant to general-in-chief in March 1864, the two authorized seizing and destroying civilian property that supported the enemy’s war effort.

The object was not vengeance, but to wear down local support for the rebellion. Major General Philip Sheridan executed Grant’s strategy in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, saying he wished to leave it “a barren waste” so that even crows flying over would have to carry provisions with them.

“War is the remedy our enemies have chosen,” Grant’s lieutenant, General William Tecumseh Sherman, wrote in 1864. “Other, simple remedies were within their choice. You know it and they know it, but they wanted war, and I say, ‘Let us give them all they want; not a word of argument, not a sign of let up, no cave in ’til we are whipped or they are.’”

Sherman knew that half measures would only prolong suffering and anything short of total victory would allow the South to rise again, as has happened repeatedly with Hamas. So, Sherman didn’t relent. He promised to “make Georgia howl” and did it with his March to the Sea.

“War is cruelty,” Sherman told the leaders of Atlanta, a major transportation and manufacturing hub for the Confederacy, after they surrendered to the Union army. “There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” As Sherman’s army left Atlanta to continue its scorched-earth march toward Savannah, he ordered any buildings in the city with military or industrial value to the Confederacy to be burned, to deny those resources to the rebel forces.

Sherman rejected a plea to reverse his “orders removing all the inhabitants” of Atlanta, saying he did so to secure a lasting peace. The Confederates’ use of the city “for warlike purposes,” he said, “is inconsistent with its character as a home for families.” The city was left largely destroyed.

In his address at the Michigan Military Academy’s graduation in 1879, 14 years after the Confederates stacked arms, Sherman made his famous statement, “War is hell.” It was a warning to graduates against romancing battle or failing to prosecute hostilities with all their might when it was thrust upon them.

Hamas, like other enemies, had peaceful options available and chose instead to make Gaza unsuitable for families, launching an attack targeting Israeli civilians. In response, the IDF will make war, which means innocent civilians — like those in Germany, Japan, and the Confederacy — will pay the price, unjust as that is.

Failing to crush Hamas will only sow the seeds of the next conflict, as happened after World War I when Germany stopped fighting in November 1918 under the terms of an armistice, not an unconditional surrender. War is still cruelty, and by pushing Israel to refine it, Mr. Biden only dooms the chance of lasting peace.