Terror Tunnels The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas (17 page)

Moreover, the only way to ensure their destruction was for ground troops to go from tunnel to tunnel and to blow them up one by one. This inevitably risked civilian casualties. Had Hamas built the entrance to the tunnels in the many open areas of the Gaza Strip, away from the most densely populated urban centers, the number of civilian casualties would have been considerably reduced.

Hamas thus made a calculated decision to put the Israeli government to a difficult choice: either allow the tunnels to remain, thus risking the lives of thousands of Israeli civilians; or send ground troops into densely populated areas to destroy the tunnels, thus risking the lives of Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers. Every democracy in the world would choose the latter option if faced with this tragic and cruel choice. That is why the laws of war authorized Israel to do what it had to do to destroy the tunnels.

To be sure, the law of proportionality also required Israel to take reasonable steps, consistent with its military needs, to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, even when attacking legitimate military targets. The key word here is “reasonable,” and Israel has gone well beyond what other countries have done in analogous situations. They issued warnings by leaflet, phone, and other means—warnings that Hamas countermanded in its efforts to keep civilians in harm’s way and continue to have them serve as human shields to protect their terror tunnels.

Israel did not issue warnings when it needed to act quickly to save its own soldiers from ambushes and other serious risks. Israel thus tried to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, while Hamas tried to increase both Palestinian and Israeli civilian casualties.

The Israeli government is conducting several investigations as to whether any of its soldiers violated its carefully designed rules of engagement that were drafted by lawyers familiar with international law. If they did not, then there is no valid legal or moral case against Israel. If they did and are prosecuted by Israeli authorities—either military or civilian—then the rules of the International Criminal Court would preclude it from bringing charges against any Israelis.

The right of Israel to target these terrorist tunnels is thus central to any analysis of the legal consequences of civilian deaths in Gaza. Yet a recent report by a group of self-described legal experts that accused Israel of war crimes did not even mention the tunnels.

This report, deceptively entitled “Joint Declaration by International Law Experts on Israel’s Gaza Offensive,”
⁵¹
also deliberately ignored the facts that Hamas combatants do not wear uniforms, repeatedly fired rockets and mortars from densely populated civilian areas, and stored weapons and ammunition in and around mosques, schools, and designated refugee centers—all in violation of the laws of war.

Legally, the report misrepresents a crucial dimension of International Law by claiming that Israel violated the principle of distinction by targeting civilian buildings, without mentioning that a civilian structure becomes a legitimate military target when it is used for military purposes.

More serious is the accusation that Israel committed the war crime of collective punishment by deliberately attacking the civilian population. Again, this is a blatant mischaracterization, both of Israel’s actions which were preventive rather than punitive in nature, and a willful misappropriation of a term defined in the context of mass executions during World War II.

Hamas knows that in the modern media environment it profits from the deaths of Palestinian civilians, so much so that it repeatedly refused cease-fire offers proposed both by Israel and international mediators. The vast majority of Palestinian deaths came after Hamas refused to accept these cease-fires.

The title of the report is doubly deceptive because very few of its signatories are recognized experts in international law. Those who are—such as Richard Falk, John Dugard, and Peter Weiss—have notorious reputations as anti-Zionist zealots. The very fact that they labeled Israeli defensive actions as offensive demonstrates their bias.

No self-respecting lawyer would ever file a brief making the kind of unsubstantiated factual and legal claims made by this report. Were a lawyer to file a brief that did not mention the most salient facts that undercut its conclusion—here the tunnels and use of human shields—that lawyer would be disciplined, perhaps even disbarred. This report is a disgrace to the legal profession and to the academic institutions—such as Boston University, Georgetown, and UCLA—whose names are highlighted for identification purposes. Its biased authors should be called to account for this unprofessional and unethical document, and no credibility should be accorded it by fair-minded people concerned for the truth.

Nor should people of good will pay any attention to Bishop Desmond Tutu’s most recent screed, accusing Israel of conducting a “disproportionally brutal” military attack and “indiscriminate killing” in Gaza. Tutu also deliberately fails to mention the terrorist terror tunnels, as if by ignoring them, they would stop posing a lethal threat to thousands of Israeli citizens.

Those who condemn Israel’s recent military actions have an obligation to answer the following questions: Did Israel have the right to try to prevent those terror tunnels from being used to murder and kidnap its citizens? If so, how could Israel have accomplished that with substantially fewer casualties?

37

ISIS is to America as Hamas is to Israel

August 21, 2014

President Barack Obama has rightfully condemned the ISIS beheading of American James Foley in the strongest terms. This is what he said:

There has to be a common effort to extract this cancer so it does not spread. There has to be a clear rejection of these kind of nihilistic ideologies. One thing we can all agree on is a group like (ISIS) has no place in the 21st century. Friends and allies around the world, we share a common security, a set of values opposite of what we saw yesterday. We will continue to confront this hateful terrorism and replace it with a sense of hope and stability.
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At the same time that President Obama has called for an all-out war against the “cancer” of ISIS, he has regarded Hamas as having an easily curable disease, urging Israel to accept that terrorist group, whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction, as part of a Palestinian unity government. I cannot imagine him urging Iraq, or any other Arab country, to accept ISIS as part of a unity government.

Former President Jimmy Carter and Bishop Desmond Tutu have gone even further, urging the international community to recognize the legitimacy of Hamas as a political party and to grant it diplomatic recognition. It is hard to imagine them demanding that the same legitimate status be accorded ISIS.

Why then the double standard regarding ISIS and Hamas? Is it because ISIS is less brutal and violent than Hamas? It’s hard to make that case. Hamas has probably killed at least as many civilians—through its suicide bombs, its murder of Palestinian Authority members, its rocket attacks and its terror tunnels—than ISIS has done. If not for Israel’s Iron Dome and the Israeli Defense Forces, Hamas would have killed even more innocent civilians. Indeed its charter calls for the killing of all Jews anywhere in the world, regardless of where they live or which “rock” they are hiding behind. If Hamas had its way, it would kill at least as many people as ISIS would.

Is it the
manner
by which ISIS kills? Beheading is of course a visibly grotesque means of killing, but dead is dead and murder is murder. And it matters little to the victim’s family whether the death was caused by beheading, by hanging, or by a bullet in the back of a head. Indeed most of ISIS’s victims have been shot rather than beheaded, while Hamas terrorists have slaughtered innocent babies in their beds, teenagers on the way home from school, women shopping, Jews praying, and students eating pizza.

Is it because ISIS murdered an American? Hamas has murdered numerous Americans and citizens of other countries. They too are indiscriminate in who they kill.

Is it because ISIS has specifically threatened to bring its terrorism to American shores, while Hamas focuses its terrorism in Israel? The Hamas Charter does not limit its murderous intentions to one country. Like ISIS it calls for a worldwide caliphate, brought about by violent jihad.

Everything we rightly fear and despise from ISIS we should fear and despise from Hamas. Just as we would never grant legitimacy to ISIS, we should not grant legitimacy to Hamas—at the very least until it rescinds its charter and renounces violence. Unfortunately that is about as likely as America rescinding its constitution. Violence, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism are the sine qua non of Hamas’s mission.

Just as ISIS must be defeated militarily and destroyed as a terrorist army, so too must Hamas be responded to militarily and its rockets and tunnels destroyed.

It is widely, and in my view mistakenly, argued by many academics and diplomats that there can never be a military solution to terrorism in general or to the demands of Hamas in particular. This conventional wisdom ignores the lessons of history. Chamberlain thought there could be a diplomatic solution to Hitler’s demands. Churchill disagreed. History proved Churchill correct. Nazi Fascists and Japanese militarists had to be defeated militarily before a diplomatic resolution could be achieved.

So too with ISIS and Hamas. They must first be defeated militarily, and only then might they consider accepting reasonable diplomatic and political compromises. Another similarity between ISIS and Hamas is that if these terrorist groups were to lay down their arms, there might be peace, whereas if their enemies were to lay down
their
arms, there would be genocide.

A wonderful cartoon illustrates this: at one end of the table is Hamas demanding “Death to all Jews.” At the other end is Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu. In the middle sits the mediator, who turns to Netanyahu and asks: “Could you at least meet him halfway?”

No democratic nation can accept its own destruction. We cannot compromise—come halfway—with terrorists who demand the deaths of all who stand in the way of their demand for a Sunni caliphate, whether these terrorists call themselves ISIS or Hamas. Both are, in the words of President Obama, “cancers” that must be extracted before they spread. Both are equally malignant. Both must be defeated on the battlefield, in the court of public opinion, and in the courts of law. There can be no compromise with bigotry, terrorism, or the demand for a caliphate. Before Hamas or ISIS can be considered legitimate political partners, they must give up their violent quest for a worldwide Islamic caliphate.

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE

On 5 September, 2004, President Barak Obama announced that a coalition of American allies would seek to “dismantle,” “degrade,” and “destroy” ISIS:

You initially push them back, you systematically degrade their capabilities, you narrow their scope of action, you slowly shrink the space, the territory that they control, you take out their leadership, and, over time, they are not able to conduct the same kinds of terrorist attacks that they once could.
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This sounds quite similar to the military approach taken by Israel against Hamas, which poses a far greater threat to neighboring Israel than ISIS poses to faraway America. Indeed on 8 September 2014, Reuters reported that the United States has been seeking intelligence support from Israel to assist in its campaign against ISIS.
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Yet Israel is accused by many of war crimes for taking the same actions as the United States and its allies.

38

No One Should Be Surprised at ISIS’s Brutality because the World Rewards Terrorism

September 4, 2014

The international community seems to have been caught off guard by the brutality of ISIS. The beheading of two Americans, the murder of many Christians and Muslims, and the widespread support for these brutal killers has taken the world by surprise. But we should have anticipated this, because for the last half century, the international community has rewarded precisely the kind of behavior by ISIS we now condemn. In brief, terrorism has proved to be a successful tactic. It works. That’s why ISIS engages in it. That’s why al-Qaeda engages in it. That’s why Boko Haram engages in it. That’s why the Taliban engages in it. And that’s why Hamas engages in it.

Compare the visibility and success of groups that employ terrorism as the main tactic for responding to their grievances, with comparably aggrieved groups that reject terrorism. Hamas is more popular than ever among Palestinians following their kidnapping and murder of three Israeli schoolchildren, their brutal slaughter of the Fogel family, and their deployment of rockets and tunnels against civilians from civilian areas. The same is true of Hezbollah.

Now comes ISIS which is quickly becoming the terrorist group of choice for disaffected radicals, because their brutality is now in the headlines.

Contrast these successes with the failure of the Tibetan people to achieve much attention or progress in their quest to end an occupation even longer than the one Israel is accused of maintaining. The world demands statehood for the Palestinians, while allowing the Kurds to remain stateless despite treaty obligations and other promises. Why? Is it because the Tibetans and Kurds have rarely engaged in terrorism, whereas the Palestinians have specialized in it since the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the early 1960s—and even before that?

Success begets emulation, and the success of terrorist organizations is spreading quickly. No one should be surprised.

ISIS has already achieved success as a result of their brutal terrorist acts. Millions of dollars have been paid to them as ransom for hostages. They have used this money to recruit more members. Now other Muslim terrorist groups want to join forces with them, because they have shown that within the world of brutal terrorism, they stand out for their unmitigated and televised brutality.