Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” is a rebuke to an insincere ex-friend. It’s impossible to read a recent New York Times editorial “A way out of Gaza?” without feeling the same disgust towards the editors of the Times. It begins.
We agree that Israel had to defend itself against Hamas’s rocket attacks. But we fear the assault on Gaza has passed the point of diminishing returns. It is time for a cease-fire with Hamas and a return to the peace negotiations that are the only real hope for guaranteeing Israel’s long-term security.
Actually the Times believed that the war against Hamas reached the point of diminishing returns, right when it started. In an editorial right after the Israeli offensive started read like this:
Israel must defend itself. And Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory. Still we fear that Israel’s response — devastating airstrikes that represent the largest military operation in Gaza since 1967 — is unlikely to weaken the militant Palestinian group substantially or move things any closer to what all Israelis and all Palestinians need: a durable peace agreement and a two-state solution.
In other words, Israel must defend itself, but it won’t help. The editors of the Times were never truly interested in seeing Israel defending itself, the first sentence drips with insincerity. And nothing Gail Collins and company have written since then have shown them to be comfortable with the idea of Israel defending itself.
In “A way out of Gaza” the editors of the Times writes later:
As part of a cease-fire deal, Israel is right to demand a permanent halt to Hamas’s rocket fire. Israel is also right not to rely on Hamas’s promises. Hamas used the last cease-fire to restock its arsenal with weapons ferried in through tunnels dug under the Egypt-Gaza border.
The best protection would be to place monitors on the Egypt-Gaza border to stop the smuggling that is Hamas’s lifeline. The Israelis also must be ready to ease their blockade of Gaza to allow more food and normal economic activity.
Best protection? Well when Israel was trying to hold onto the Philadelphi corridor after withdrawing from Gaza, the Times opined:
Condoleezza Rice has now had her first taste of the Middle Eastern shuttle diplomacy that has drawn in almost every secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. She did a good job, staying up most of the night to extract a sorely needed agreement on moving people and goods in and out of Gaza.
Yet the very fact that Ms. Rice had to lose sleep on something so technical is a reflection of the impasse toward which the Israelis and Palestinians have been headed since Israel withdrew from Gaza.
Got that? Israel’s insistence on holding onto the Philadelphi corridor, and eventually giving into pressure, was just “technical.”
After the fact, Israel Matzav reported that, indeed, Israel fears had been confirmed that the smuggling of weapons into Gaza had gotten much worse. But this result wasn’t so obscure. Gen Doron Almog wrote a year before Israel withdrew, that there were significant dangers to Israel in withdrawing.
The United States has to shift its perspective on this issue. The smuggling and infiltration network should be regarded as part and parcel of the global terrorism network, and the battle against it as part of the global war on terror. Smuggling constitutes a strategic convergence between the Palestinian terror apparatus in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and global militant Islam. It is a reflection of the strengthening of militant Islam in post-9/11 Egypt and in the post-Saddam Middle East. The border will only become the “border of peace” envisioned twenty-five years ago, if and when the United States realizes many of its broader goals for Egypt and the Arab world–goals that include profound political and economic reforms and the triumph of secular democracy over militant Islam.
Until that happens, there is no alternative to a border regime that rests on forceful deterrence, active interdiction, and swift reprisal. And that means that there is no alternative to Israel’s continuing presence at this crucial point on the regional map.
Acceding to American pressure and relinquishing control the Philadelphi corridor was a risky action. The consequences of doing so were predictable. When Israel agreed to do so, the Times, though, dismissed it as something technical.
Now the Times claims that placing monitors on the Gaza border with Egypt is essential to preventing arms smuggling. Its position would be a lot more convincing if it showed any concern for the dangers involved in failing to secure to the border in the past. In fact, it’s pretty clear that Times had no interest in Israel pre-emptively protecting itself three years ago. The concerns cited the other day by the Times can’t be taken seriously. (The concerns are real, though it’s not at all clear that the editors of the Times appreciate their seriousness.)
One final observation about the Times’s editorial: there’s no mention of Gilad Shalit.
There is nothing sincere in the Time’s editorial about its concern for Israel’s security. No thought went into it. The only thing the editors of the Times believe is that negotiating with terrorists alone can bring peace. They still have not learned the lesson of the past 15 years.
Barry Rubin, in a preview of an article to be published shortly in the Jerusalem Post writes about what Israel needs for the war against Hamas to be successful.
–A seriously effective regime of inspection and blocking smuggling must be put into place on the Egypt-Gaza border. This means Egyptian forces helped by a force which will really act to block tunnels and stop arms from coming in, not just sit and watch the contraband go by. If more weapons get in, that will bring another war.
–Israel has the right to maintain sanctions, which means that while humanitarian and necessary goods for Gaza’s society it can keep out items that have military applications.
–Aid money to rebuild in Gaza and sustain Palestinian society must be kept out of Hamas’s hands. Not only would Hamas use such funds for military purposes, it would also steal them from being used for real relief. For example, Hamas cries there is not enough fuel but that is because it diverts gasoline from civilian purposes for its own use.
–Gilad Shalit, a hostage seized by Hamas in a cross-border raid into Israel, should be released unconditionally. It is bad enough to reward terrorists for their crimes; it is ridiculous to do so after they have been thoroughly defeated after launching an aggressive war.
David Horovitz writes of the terrible job Israel did of informing the United States of the scope of the problem.
The US Congress was already deeply concerned by the scale of the smuggling. The foreign aid bill it sent to President George W. Bush that month, unprecedentedly, conditioned $100 million of the $1.3 billion in Egyptian military aid on Cairo’s efforts to crack down on smuggling into Gaza and improve its human rights record. But the incontrovertible filmed evidence of how profoundly Egypt was failing itself, Israel and indeed Gaza by enabling Hamas to significantly bolster its military capability, evidence painstakingly compiled by the Israeli security establishment, was denied the US legislators.
On December 24, 2007, at a meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, the Likud’s Yuval Steinitz directly challenged Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on the issue, asking why her ministry had intervened to block distribution of the tape. “Israel could have scored a major victory with the US Congress, and persuaded them that Egypt is incapable of defending the border,” said Steinitz.
Livni was unmoved. Egypt’s “performance on the Gaza border is awful and problematic,” she acknowledged. “The weapons smuggling lowers the chances that pragmatic factions in Gaza and the West Bank will regain control.”
But some things are “done behind the scenes,” she declared. “Every move needs to be calculated. To take an extreme scenario, would you sever relations with Egypt over weapons smuggling?”
LIVNI’S COLLEAGUES in the security establishment were clearly not suggesting that Israel move anywhere near the extreme scenario of breaking ties with Egypt. They were, rather, desperate to raise awareness of the scale of the danger, and thus to ratchet up the pressure on Egypt to thwart it.
This does not bode well for the possibility that israel will be able to sustain its gains from Operation Cast Lead.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
