Israel has some tough choices ahead. Amos Harel of Ha’aretz writes:
According to leaks from Jerusalem Sunday, a decision has been made for an extensive military action, and a ground operation is not out of the question. At this stage, Israel apparently prefers other options. First, the air force will go in, striking not only rocket-launching cells but also attempting to hit the manufacturers, suppliers and commanders. Targets might also include Hamas bases, offices, and if there’s an escalation, assassinations of senior Hamas officials.
As for a ground operation, the question is how to get Hamas to go back to the understandings in place at the beginning of the cease-fire without risking all-out fighting that would begin with rockets on Ashdod and Be’er Sheva and end with the return of Israeli armor to Gaza.
But as Harel noted earlier:
Israel’s leaders seem to be realizing their error of recent weeks vis-a-vis Hamas. Hamas concluded from Israel’s declarations that we want peace and have no intention of taking over Gaza; that it is free to strike at the Negev as much as it wants because Israel is afraid of an entanglement.
In other words if Hamas thinks that it will suffer no consequences, it will attack Israel.
On the other hand.
A point the media has missed over the past few days is that most of the rockets are being launched by Islamic Jihad and smaller factions, which Hamas has stopped reining in. If Hamas goes into action, there could be 100 rockets a day instead of dozens.
Understand then, what Harel is saying, is that Hamas allowed the rockets to be fired into Israel. The problem is that if Hamas actually gets involved in rocket firing, the violence against Israel will be greater.
Yaakov Katz of the Jerusalem Post writes about what Hamas has accomplished in the past six months
Since the unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Hamas has been involved in one of the most intensive military buildups – for a terrorist group – in modern history. It, everyone knows, is no longer a small terrorist group just capable of building explosive belts for suicide bombings.
While Hamas used the past six months of a “cease-fire” to train its forces, it also took advantage of the suspension in IDF operations to fortify its military posts in the Gaza Strip. According to one high-ranking security official, Hamas has dug dozens of kilometers of tunnel systems throughout Gaza that will be used by fighters to move from one place to another undetected.
Knowing this renders today’s Washington Post’s nostalgic editorial More Rockets From Gaza even more lame than it appears at first glance. The subtitle of the editorial is “Israel must protect its citizens — but can it do so by military action?” and, as you can guess the answer is “It depends how you define ‘must’ and ‘no.'”
The Post’s editors lay out:
Neither side seems to want such an all-out fight — particularly not Israel, whose defense minister has pointed out that an invasion could cost hundreds of lives and leave thousands of Israeli troops stranded in Gaza without an exit strategy. But neither Israel nor Hamas has been satisfied with the informal cease-fire they reached in June with the help of Egypt. During the summer and fall, the rocket fire from Gaza diminished but never entirely stopped. Israel, in turn, allowed only a modest increase in the flow of goods into Gaza, which has been under virtual siege since last year, and frequently sealed off the strip entirely in response to fresh attacks.
Notice the equivalence between Israel’s blockade and Hamas’s targeting civilians. Unfortunately the Post uses the inflammatory language of “virtual siege” when in fact it has been nothing of the sort. First of all, Gaza abuts Egypt too. If there’s a siege of Gaza it’s something that Egypt participated in too. Second of all, these past six months Hamas has been importing weaponry and construction material through their infrastructure of tunnels. If civilian supplies are short, it’s because Hamas has chosen Qassams over butter.
The editorial spends a lot of time concentrating on Hamas’s popularity and uses that supposed popularity as an argument against an Israeli military campaign. Of course, if they’d been paying attention, the editors would know that Hamas’s popularity has decreased lately and would lose elections to Fatah. And of course worries about Hamas’s popularity should come second to protecting Israeli citizens, so saying that Israel shouldn’t attack Gaza.
Overall the editorial fails to acknowledge that Hamas has used the quiet to re-arm and protect its infrastructure against Israeli attack. This has now put the Negev – possibly even as far as Be’er Sheva – into rocket range. So the basic flaw in the editorial is a failure to take Hamas’s threat to Israel seriously.
But more troubling is this. Nearly three years ago at the time that Hamas won the legislative elections, the editors of the Post welcomed the victory:
Having prescribed democracy as an essential condition for a Palestinian state, the Bush administration can hardly stand in the way of electoral participation by a movement that represents a large fraction of Palestinians. It must hope that Hamas eventually will embrace democracy as the sole means of advancing its agenda, rather than as a mere tool to prevent its own disarmament or any Palestinian concessions to Israel, and that it will feel obliged to moderate its tactics and agenda while serving in government. Whether or not that happens, a Palestinian Authority backed by Hamas may be able to restore a semblance of order to Gaza. In the dismal present circumstances, that would be a step forward.
The problem then, as it is now, is that Hamas – regardless of the fact that they won a majority votes – is not a democratic movement. It is a terrorist organization devoted to the destruction of Israel. The only order that Hamas brought to Gaza was its own. It brutally drove out (and killed) Fatah’s people and used Gaza as a base to launch attacks against Israel. Now, as Ha’aretz and the Jerusalem Post report, they’ve used the territory they control to build a military infrastructure that threatens a significant portion of Israel’s Negev. Now having seen that Hamas has parlayed its electoral win into an improved positions for its terrorist operations, it’s disingenuous for the Post’s editors to tell Israel, well, they ought to trust the electoral process again.
When I saw this editorial, I figured I wouldn’t be the only one who would be bothered by it. So in these troubled economic times, I did what any other enterprising capitalist would do: I outsourced the fisking of this editorial to some friendly bloggers. The do great work, and what’s more they work for cheap. Joshuapundit brought a military perspective to his response, Mere Rhetoric a rhetorical and political perspective and Elder of Ziyon marshaled the facts that contradict the Post’s assumptions.
I can just imagine the sort of ‘Israeli thinkers’ the WAPO has in mind..probably the same sort of people who thought Arafat could be trusted, totally retreating from Gaza was a great idea and that a six month respite for Hamas to build up its military was an even better one.
Another ‘ceasefire’ is going to bring Hamas around? Wasn’t that the idea of the last one? Worked well, didn’t it?
I’ve got a small bit of news for these people. An all out war against Hamas would not ‘strengthen radical factions’ it would kill and defeat them.But only if it were an all out war,that included shutting down the Israeli-supplied electricity and taking out the power plant and Gaza’s infrastructure as well as targeting Hamas’ military and its leadership for annihilation.
It won’t easy or pleasant, but the longer Gaza festers the more costly it will get. The Palestinians will not do a damned thing to dismantle Hamas. Israel will have to do so itself.
Mere Rhetoric quoting and then skewering the editorial sentiment:
After six months of relative calm, hostilities once again are escalating between Israel and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Between Friday and yesterday some 60 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel, whose air force responded with strikes against the launchers. So far there have been no serious injuries on the Israeli side, and one Palestinian has been reported killed.
That’s a blase way of putting it. I would have written something like “over the weekend Palestinian soldiers rained down explosives on Israeli schools and hospitals, reaching Israel’s largest port city, scoring direct hits on homes, and turning southern Israeli into a warzone.” But I guess “some 60 rockets were fired from Gaza” adequately conveys the situation. And I do appreciate how they’re using the passive voice / active voice trick – “rockets were fired” / the Israeli “air force responded.” It’s been a mainstay of anti-Israel bias since before I began blogging and I give a little sniff of nostalgia every time I see it.
Wow. Israel sent in daily deliveries of goods essentially every day from August through October, truckloads of food, medicine, fuel, clothing, building materials, and other goods. In return, Hamas built up an arsenal of more rockets, imported tons of explosives, gathered more money by taxing smuggled goods, didn’t lift a finger to take administrative responsibility of Gazans’ daily lives (leaving that to Western money filtered through Fatah institutions,) and created an infrastructure to kidnap more Israeli soldiers. And the wise old men of WaPo now say that Israel should do exactly the same thing again?
UDATE: A number of other bloggers joined in. Daled Amos mixed a reference to domestic politics in with Washington Post: Israel Should Give Hamas A Bailout Too and uses sarcasm to good effect:
Please join me in a moment of silence out of respect for Hamas in Gaza and their long history of searching for a peaceful end to the war they have declared on Israel. Or has nobody at The Washington Post read the Hamas Charter?
The Washington Post does not revile HAMAS terrorists, it lends them credibility. And it warns Israel not to respond militarily to the rocket attacks -timed just so, to hit children on their way to school- because “a war would only strengthen the movement’s most radical factions.” Instead they urge that Israel feed their enemy and make certain they have plenty of medicine and fuel, as if on a full stomach, in good health and with their tanks all gassed up, HAMAS would somehow be more palatable… or less dangerous.
And My Right Word fisks selected quotes in WashPost is really dumb. The naive silliness of the editorial is emphasized by updates at the end of the post on the latest escalation by Hamas against Israeli civilian targets.
And finally Meryl points out the Post is doing Hamas’s work for them:
Second, they want the fiction of the truce so that idiots like the editorial writers at the Washington Post will chastise Israel for refusing to supply her enemies with the means of her destruction, rather than chastise the terrorist group that wants to destroy Israel.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
