Terror Tunnels The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas (11 page)

The last of these alternatives is the least worst choice.

22

Media Death Count Encourages Hamas to Use Human Shields

July 15, 2014

The media loves to count the dead bodies on each side of a conflict. It’s much easier to count than to explain. Hamas knows this. That’s why they employ what I call the dead baby strategy.

Hamas’s strategy since Israel left Gaza in 2005 has been exactly the same. The media response has been exactly the same. And Hamas will continue to employ a strategy that causes many Palestinian civilians to die as long as the media keeps up its thoughtless body count.

Hamas could easily reduce the death and injury toll among its civilians by simply allowing them to go underground into tunnels and shelters that abound throughout Gaza. But Hamas has a deliberate policy of refusing to allow civilians to enter the tunnels or shelters. They reserve these places of refuge for their fighters and commanders, which explains why so few Hamas fighters have been killed. If Hamas were to reverse its policy and allow civilians into the shelters while requiring its fighters to stay above ground, the ratio of civilians to fighters killed would dramatically change. That is why in each of the wars between Hamas and Israel there have been more Palestinian than Israeli civilian deaths and injuries. It is part of Hamas’s dead baby strategy, and it works because the media facilitates it.

The media also emphasizes the fact that thus far no Israelis have been killed by Hamas rocket fire.
³³
Indeed some media and international organizations seem implicitly to be condemning Israel for protecting the lives of its own citizens, by repeatedly pointing out that none have died while Palestinian deaths have reached nearly two hundred. The reason there have been no Israeli deaths so far is because Israel spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to protect its civilians while Hamas spends its resources deliberately exposing its civilians to the risks of Israeli counterattacks. Israel has built shelters all throughout the country and has spent a fortune on the Iron Dome system. The results have been impressive, though many Israelis suffer from trauma, shock, and the inevitable long-term consequences of being exposed to constant rocket fire.

How many times have you heard, seen, or read the body counts: nearly two hundred Palestinians dead, no Israelis dead. This is usually accompanied by an accusation that Israel is violating the international law requirement of “proportionality.” This is a misuse of the term, which has a precise meaning in international law that reflects a broader morality. Under international law, a nation has the right to attack military targets. Period! It doesn’t matter whether the rockets coming from these launchers have as yet succeeded in their task of killing civilians. There can be no doubt under international law that rocket launchers, and the fighters who employ them, are legitimate military targets. Israel is therefore entitled to attack these targets, even if no Israeli civilians have been killed, so long as it can do so without causing disproportionate civilian casualties.

This rule was not addressed to an enemy that deliberately uses human shields to protect its military targets and combatants against legitimate attacks. Proportionality is not judged by the number of civilians actually killed by Hamas rockets, but rather by the risks posed to Israelis. These risks have been diminished but not eliminated by the Iron Dome system. They have also been considerably diminished by Israel’s counterattacks on the missile launchers and those who employ them. Without these counterattacks, it is highly likely that more Hamas missiles would have made it through the Iron Dome system, which has been approximately 85 percent effective.
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Israel has every right under the rules of proportionality to attack these military targets, so long as they take reasonable efforts to reduce civilian casualties. They have done so by leafleting, by calling, and by other methods of warning civilians to leave target areas. Hamas leaders, on the other hand, have urged, and sometimes compelled, their civilians to remain in harm’s way as human shields.

The media, by emphasizing the comparative body counts without providing the reasons for the disparity, play into the hands of Hamas and encourage that terrorist organization to continue to pursue its dead baby strategy. So the next time those in the media promote a body count without explanation, they should point a finger at themselves for contributing to this deadly count.

23

Netanyahu, the Reluctant Warrior

July 20, 2014

Benjamin Netanyahu has said that the primary goal of the current ground incursion into Gaza is to destroy the terror tunnels that endanger Israel’s security.

It requires boots on the ground to get to these tunnels and to shut them down. Nor does Israel yet have the technical capacity to determine the route of the tunnels and their exit points since they are deep underground and not subject to detection from the air.

The event that immediately provoked this ground incursion was the discovery by Israel of yet another tunnel—in addition to the one I was in during June of 2014—whose exit was near a civilian kibbutz. This discovery almost came too late to prevent a mass casualty disaster. The terrorists had already emerged from the tunnel with grenade launchers, bazookas, machine guns and other weapons capable of mass murder (
http://www.haaretz.com/news/video/1.605650
). Several of the terrorists were killed while others apparently escaped back through the tunnel before the Israelis could disable it.

This attempted mass casualty attack was planned and implemented while Israel and Egypt were trying to arrange a cease-fire. Israeli intelligence estimates that there are dozens of other terror tunnels that they still cannot find although they know where some of the entrance points in Gaza are located. It is these tunnels that are the primary object of Israel’s risky ground incursion.

There are other tunnels as well on the west side of Gaza, underneath its border with Egypt. These are the smuggling tunnels through which Hamas imports the rockets that it uses to terrorize Israeli civilians. It also uses these tunnels to enrich its leaders, who take a percentage of the profits earned by the commerce that goes through these tunnels on a daily basis. These smuggling tunnels too pose a direct threat to Israel’s security and are a secondary object of Israel’s ground incursion.

The end result of Israel’s military operation should be twofold: First, to stop the security threat currently posed by Hamas terrorism—rocket fire, kidnappings, and terrorist incursions into Israel—by shutting down the tunnels and imposing a strict quarantine against the importation of rockets and against the exportation of terrorists through tunnels; and second, to restore the flow of innocent commerce into Gaza so that its citizens can live lives as normal as possible while they remain under the thumb of the violent theocracy and kleptocracy of Hamas.

The Israeli government did not want to send troops into Gaza. Its leaders well understand the risks to their own soldiers as well as to Palestinian civilians. But they also understand the risks to Israeli civilians of allowing these terrorist tunnels to continue to operate underneath its border. The decision to send in troops was a difficult one, made on the basis of a calculation of the risks of action versus the risks of inaction.

Shortly after I went into the tunnel underneath the Gaza-Israel border, I had a private dinner with Prime Minister Netanyahu. It was clear to me how reluctant Netanyahu was to send troops into Gaza. He had never before committed ground troops into an enemy war zone. As is well known, his own brother was killed defending Israel against terrorism. He knows the price of action as well as inaction. He is a reluctant warrior, but Hamas forced his hand by repeatedly turning down negotiated cease-fires and continuing to fire rockets at Israeli cities and to send terrorists into Israeli kibbutzim. No democracy would have acted differently in the face of such dangers.

24

Gazans’ Real Enemy Is Hamas, Not Israel

July 20, 2014

When Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, it left behind farm equipment and other material capable of feeding the population. Donor countries promised support, financial and political, if Gaza would live up to its potential as a Singapore on the Mediterranean. But instead the leaders of Gaza enriched themselves and used the remaining resources to build rockets instead of ploughshares. They fired these rockets at Israeli civilians and devised a strategy of using their own innocent civilians as human shields against Israel’s anticipated responses to the rocket fire. Only after Hamas started firing rockets at Israeli civilians did Israel impose a painful blockade against Gaza that contributed to the area’s poor economic situation.

The Hamas human shield strategy—in combination with its refusal to allow its civilians to seek shelter in Gaza’s many tunnels, which are reserved for Hamas terrorists and commanders—has resulted in what appears to be a disproportionate ratio of civilians to combatants among Gazan casualties. Although the international media blames this unfortunate ratio on Israel, the civilian population of Gaza knows the truth: that Hamas deliberately seeks to increase the number of civilian casualties by not providing them shelter, while seeking to decrease the number of terrorist casualties by providing them the safety of tunnels and other secure areas.

Following the publication of the
Goldstone Report
in 2009, which catalogued the high proportion of civilians to combatant deaths among Gazans, loud complaints were heard from many ordinary citizens of Gaza: Why do you protect Hamas fighters while exposing civilians? Hamas responded by claiming—quite ironically—that many of those counted as civilians by the
Goldstone Report
, especially among the police, were actually Hamas combatants.

Whatever the facts turn out to be during the present encounter, more and more Gazans are beginning to understand how ill served they have been by Hamas. And now media reports are documenting the extraordinary wealth accumulated by Hamas leaders at the expense of ordinary Gazans. As one report put it: “With multi-million-dollar land deals, luxury villas and black-market fuel from Egypt, Gaza’s rulers made billions while the rest of the population struggled with 38 per cent poverty and 40 per cent unemployment.”
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The report went on to detail the newly acquired wealth of specific Hamas leaders, strongly suggesting that this violent theocracy has also become a criminal kleptocracy at the expense of the people of Gaza.

During a recent radio interview, I was asked what I would do if I were a resident of Gaza, suffering from unemployment and Israeli rocket counterattacks. My answer was simple: I would try to overthrow the Hamas regime and make a deal with Israel under which Gaza would give up its rockets in exchange for a Marshall Plan that would feed and normalize its residents. Such a plan would require international inspection of imports and the end of the tunnel economy that has enriched Hamas leaders and allowed the importation of lethal rockets. The present Hamas leadership is unlikely to accept any plan that takes away its money and weapons, but if the people of Gaza were to demand change—a real “Gaza spring”—anything is possible.

Many years ago Golda Meir engaged in hyperbolic overgeneralization when she said that peace would come “when Palestinians love their children more than they hate Israel.” Most Palestinians love their children. Many do hate Israel because they have been taught to hate for generations. But more and more of them are coming to realize that the real enemy is not Israel, which left the Gaza Strip in 2005 and offered to leave most of the West Bank in 2000, 2001, and 2008. The real enemies of the Palestinians are those Hamas leaders who do love Palestinian children less than they hate Israel. That’s why they are prepared to use these children as human sacrifices in their efforts to destroy the nation-state of the Jewish people.

There will be peace between Israel and the Palestinians only when the Palestinians overthrow or vote out the violent theocrats and kleptocrats of Hamas—or when Hamas can be induced by the citizens of Gaza to change its destructive policies. The alternative will be a Gaza in which civilians continue to pay the heavy price for Hamas’s hatred of Israel and contempt for its own citizens.

25

Why Doesn’t J Street Support Israel?

July 21, 2014

Any pretense that J Street is a pro-Israel organization has been destroyed by that organization’s refusal to participate in a solidarity rally for Israel during the recent crisis in Gaza.

The Boston Jewish Federation worked hard to create a rally that included all elements of its diverse community. Its goal was to send a single and simple message: at a time when so many in the world are united against Israel’s efforts at defending itself from Hamas rockets and terrorist tunnels, the Boston Jewish community stands in solidarity with the nation-state of the Jewish people. In order to assure that this message of unity was sent, no signs were permitted except for the unity message that was intended to be sent. That message was: Stand With Israel. Simple and straightforward.

Speakers were limited to those who were part of the broad Jewish consensus including rabbis, political and business leaders, and the highly regarded head of the federation, Barry Shrage, whose commitment to peace and the two-state solution is well known.

Initially J Street agreed to be a cosponsor of this unity event, but then—presumably after receiving pressure from its hard-left constituency, which is always looking to bash Israel and never to support it—J Street was forced to withdraw its sponsorship. The phony excuse it offered was that the rally offered “no voice for [J Street] concerns about the loss of human life on both sides” and no recognition of the “complexity” of the issues or the need for a “political solution.”