Terror Tunnels The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas (9 page)

A related weapon, now being widely used on university campuses around the world, is to challenge Israel’s legitimacy as a state—even within its pre-1967 borders. This tactic too is making it harder for Israel to make peace, because many Israelis fear that any agreement is only a tactic that will lead to further attacks on the legitimacy of the Jewish state and calls for a single binational state, which would inevitably become yet another Muslim Arab state.

To hold the Palestinian leadership responsible for the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank is not to blame the victim. The Palestinian people have indeed been victims—of their own leadership and the refusal of so many Palestinians to take yes for an answer when they have been offered an end to the occupation, and have instead chosen violence, lawfare, and rejection of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

I have long believed and written that when the Palestinian leadership wants their own state
more
than they want the end of the Jewish state, there will be a two-state solution.

The time has come for those Palestinians who seek peace to take control over their own destiny and demand that their leaders sit down, with no preconditions, and negotiate an end to the occupation and the implementation of a two-state solution. If they do not, they too will share the blame for the continuing occupation and lack of statehood.

18

Some Hard Questions about the Western European Double Standard Against Israel

March 12, 2014

As so many Western European academics, artists, and activists try to isolate Israel by imposing boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS) only against the nation-state of the Jewish people, the time has come to point an accusing finger at these accusers and to ask some hard questions about their underlying biases.

Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, who brought us the Holocaust, once again declaring war on the Jews? Why have we seen such an increase in anti-Semitism and irrationally virulent anti-Zionism in Western Europe? To answer these questions, a myth must first be exposed. That myth is the one perpetrated by the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Austrians, and many other Western Europeans: namely that the Holocaust was solely the work of German Nazis aided perhaps by some Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian collaborators. False. The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans—by Nazi sympathizers and collaborators among the French, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss, Belgians, Austrians, and other Europeans, both western and eastern.

If the French government had not deported to the death camps more Jews than their German occupiers asked for; if so many Dutch and Belgian citizens and government officials had not cooperated in the roundup of Jews; if so many Norwegians had not supported Quisling; if Swiss government officials and bankers had not exploited Jews; if Austria had not been more Nazi than the Nazis; the Holocaust would not have had so many Jewish victims.

In light of the widespread European complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, the pervasive anti-Semitism and irrationally hateful anti-Zionism that has recently surfaced throughout Western Europe should surprise no one.

“Oh no,” we hear from European apologists. “This is different. We don’t hate the Jews. We only hate their nation-state. Moreover, the Nazis were right-wing. We’re left-wing, so we can’t be anti-Semites.”

Nonsense. The hard left has a history of anti-Semitism as deep and enduring as the hard right. The line from Voltaire, to Karl Marx, to Levrenti Beria, to Robert Faurison, to today’s hard-left Israel bashers is as straight as the line from Wilhelm Mars to the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus to Hitler.

The Jews of Europe have always been crushed between the Black and the Red—victims of extremism whether it be the ultranationalism of Khmelnitsky or the ultra-anti-Semitism of Stalin.

“But some of the most strident anti-Zionists are Jews, such as Norman Finkelstein and even Israelis such as Gilad Atzmon. Surely they can’t be anti-Semites.”

Why not? Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas collaborated with the Gestapo.

Atzmon, a hard leftist, describes himself as a proud self-hating Jew and admits that his ideas derive from a notorious anti-Semite. He denies that the Holocaust is historically proven but believes that Jews may well have killed Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzo. And he thinks it’s “rational” to burn down synagogues.

Finkelstein believes in an international Jewish conspiracy that includes Steven Spielberg, Leon Uris, Eli Wiesel, and Andrew Lloyd Webber! Some of the Soviet Union’s leading anti-Semitic propagandists were Jews.

“But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians,” the European apologists insist, “and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog.”

No you’re not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks or the Assad regime? Only the Palestinians, only Israel? Why? Not because the Palestinians are more oppressed than these and other groups. Only because their alleged oppressors are Jews and the nation-state of the Jews. Would there be demonstrations and BDS campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians if they were oppressed by Jordan or Egypt? Oh, wait, the Palestinians were oppressed by Egypt and Jordan. Gaza was an open-air prison between 1948 and 1967 when Egypt was the occupying power. And remember Black September when Jordan killed more Palestinians than Israel did in a century? I don’t remember any demonstration or BDS campaigns—because there weren’t any. When Arabs occupy or kill Arabs, Europeans go ho hum. But when Israel opens a soda factory in Ma’ale Adumim, which even the Palestinian leadership acknowledges will remain part of Israel in any peace deal, Oxfam (which collaborates with anti-Israel terrorist groups) fires Scarlett Johansson for advertising a company that employs hundreds of Palestinians.

The hypocrisy of so many hard-left Western Europeans would be staggering if it were not so predictable, based on the sordid history of Western Europe’s treatment of the Jews.

Even England, which was on the right side of the war against Nazism, has a long history of anti-Semitism, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the notorious White Paper of 1939 which prevented the Jews of Europe from seeking asylum from the Nazis in British-mandated Palestine.

And Ireland, which vacillated in the war against Hitler, boasts some of the most virulent anti-Israel rhetoric.

The simple reality is that one cannot understand the current Western European left-wing war against the nation-state of the Jewish people without first acknowledging the long-term European war against the Jewish people themselves.

Theodor Herzl understood the pervasiveness and irrationality of European anti-Semitism, which led him to the conclusion that the only solution to Europe’s Jewish problem was for European Jews to leave that bastion of Jew hatred and to return to their original homeland, which is now the state of Israel.

None of this is to deny Israel’s imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, much less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups—including the Palestinians.

Nor is this to deny that many Western European individuals and some Western European countries have refused to succumb to the hatred against the Jews or their state. The Czech Republic comes to mind. But far too many Western Europeans are as irrational in their hatred toward Israel as their ancestors were in their hatred toward their Jewish neighbors. As Amos Oz once aptly observed: the walls of his grandparents’ Europe were covered with graffiti saying “Jews, go to Palestine.” Now they say, “Jews, get out of Palestine”—by which is meant Israel.

Who do these Western European bigots think they’re fooling? Only fools who want to be fooled in the interest of denying that they are manifesting new variations on their grandparents’ old biases. Any objective person with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart must see the double standard being applied to the nation-state of the Jewish people by so many of the grandchildren of those who lethally applied a double standard to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. They must be shamed into looking themselves in the mirror of morality and acknowledging their own bigotry.

PART
II

O
PERATION
P
ROTECTIVE
E
DGE

I
NTRODUCTION

Operation Protective Edge

On July 8, 2014, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge to suppress Hamas rocket and mortar fire from the Gaza Strip aimed at Israeli cities, towns, and kibbutzim.

The initial spark behind the escalation in hostilities was the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah on June 12 by Hamas-affiliated militants. Israel responded with a series of raids in the West Bank to find the children, which culminated in the arrest of most of Hamas’s leadership there. The bodies of the three teenagers were eventually recovered on June 30, but tensions only continued to rise when three Israeli criminals kidnapped and murdered a sixteen-year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. As Palestinians across the West Bank began rioting, Hamas resumed its rocket attacks on Israel in full force.

In response, on July 8 Prime Minister Netanyahu announced plans to call up forty thousand reservists and authorized the Israeli air force to hit Hamas targets across Gaza. By July 14, following days of Israeli bombardment and nearly two hundred Palestinian deaths, the Egyptian government announced a cease-fire plan backed by Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, which was accepted the following day by Israel. Hamas, however, rejected the proposal, demanding the release of its members in the West Bank and a lifting of the blockade on the Gaza Strip.

On July 16, UNRWA, the UN agency charged with supervising the distribution of aid in the Palestinian Territories, issued the first of several reports that Hamas was hiding rockets in its facilities. That night, despite nominally accepting a five-hour humanitarian cease-fire, thirteen armed Hamas operatives were intercepted as they emerged from a tunnel on the Israeli side of the border just one mile from a kibbutz, carrying abduction equipment. The following day, on July 17 Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered ground troops into Gaza arguing that the destruction of tunnels was imperative to maintaining the security of Israeli citizens.

For the next three weeks, Israeli troops maintained a presence in much of the north of the Gaza Strip including several densely populated areas such as Shuja’iyya, Beit Hanoun, and Rafah while they attempted to dismantle the Hamas network of cross-border tunnels. Hamas had deliberately located the entrances in urban areas to complicate Israeli efforts to destroy them. Hamas militants repeatedly fired on Israeli soldiers from civilian buildings, including private homes, hospitals, refugee centers, and mosques. This was the cause of most of the Palestinian civilian casualties over the course of Operation Protective Edge.

Israel implemented numerous short-term humanitarian cease-fires, most notably on July 20, July 25, July 26, and July 30, all of which it respected despite violations by Hamas and other militant groups. On July 31, both Hamas and Israel agreed to a seventy-two-hour cease-fire but only ninety minutes after its implementation on August 1 Hamas gunmen emerged from a tunnel in Rafah, killing two Israeli soldiers and apparently capturing another (that soldier was ultimately declared to have been killed, but Hamas has apparently taken his remains). Israel subsequently announced that it would not negotiate another cease-fire with Hamas until it was satisfied that the tunnels had been destroyed. By August 3, Israeli troops began to pull back, having destroyed more than thirty Hamas tunnels, and on August 5 the IDF announced that there were no Israeli forces left in Gaza. A mutually agreed seventy-two-hour cease-fire took effect that same day.

However, Hamas continued to fire rockets and mortars at Israel, killing a four-year-old Israeli child over the course of the hostilities. They have also executed numerous Palestinian civilians whom they accused of collaborating with Israel. The prospect of a permanent truce remains elusive, as Hamas has repeatedly refused to demilitarize and continues to demand that Israel lift its entire blockade of the Gaza Strip.

It is clear, therefore, that it was Hamas that started the war and that it was Hamas that refused to accept ceasefire proposals that would have ended it much sooner. According to Khalil Shikaki, a respected Palestinian political scientist, Mahmoud Abbas blamed Hamas for having “started the war.”
²⁷
Abbas has also blamed Hamas for having prolonged the war by needlessly extending the fighting.
²⁸

It is clear, therefore, that it was Hamas that started the war and that it was Hamas that refused to accept ceasefire proposals that would have ended it much sooner. According to Khalil Shikaki, a respected Palestinian political scientist, Mahmoud Abbas blamed Hamas for having “started the war.”
²⁹
Abbas has also blamed Hamas for having prolonged the war by needlessly extending the fighting.

On July 10, 2014, I began to write a series of articles about this conflict and its legal, moral, political, and diplomatic implications. The chapters that appear in this part are based, in part, on those articles.
³⁰

19

Israel Defends Entire Civilized World