Rare consensus: slogan "land for peace" has disappeared.
We are seeing a rare consensus: The slogan “land for peace” has disappeared. The Gaza disengagement, which created a new equation - “land for rockets” - left the “peace camp” with a minimalistic objective, bordering on the primitive: “Changing security realities” – a euphemistic expression of a notion that people used to disparage: We’ll hit them so hard that they won’t dare do it again.
Along the way, the mystical belief in negotiations and agreements was also abandoned. And here’s yet another consensus: We did not embark on an operation meant to destroy Hamas. The Left says it because it views terror groups as unbeatable. The Right says it because it realizes that a defeated Hamas will be necessarily replaced by Fatah, which would enable the establishment of a Palestinian state and prompt an existential national disaster.
It isn’t worth it to pay the price of seeing Tel Aviv bombed, Jerusalem divided, and a small-scale civil war in Judea and Samaria just in order to teach the Left, the hard way, that there is no difference between Fatah and Hamas, and that what happened in Gaza will happen in Judea and Samaria. Should the pulverized Hamas survive, we’ll be spared all of this, and our Palestinian enemies shall continue to fight each other.
There’s also consensus against taking over the Strip. The Left says it because the mere mention of “occupation” causes anxiety among its ranks, while the Right says it because it knows Israel would hand over Gaza to Fatah, and this is no reason to send our soldiers into battle.
Therefore, why did we embark on the ground incursion? To take over launching sites? And how long will we hold on to them? The truth is that the objective is to kill so many of them so that they “learn the lesson.” In the failed Vietnam War they referred to it as “body count.” However, the other side can also kill, and how many of our own victims compared to their victims will count as “victory?” The answer is that not even one Israeli soldier is worth it.
One does not conquer land in order to kill, but rather, for a substantive and defined purpose. For example, to take over the northern section of the Strip, or to hold on to areas that would enable us to monitor developments in Gaza refugee camps, or to take over the Philadelphi Route and the adjacent areas.
When the northern section of the Strip was home to the Israeli communities of Nissanit, Elei Sinai, and Dugit, and when Netzarim separated Gaza from the refugee camps, and when Gush Katif was the home front of the Philadelphi Route, there were no rockets being fired at Ashdod and there were not Hizbullah-style “nature reserves” in the Strip.
Retrospectively, it’s already clear: The settlements in Gaza safeguarded Beersheba and Gedera, and by defending them the IDF defended the entire south (using much fewer forces.)
Advertisement
Now look at Judea and Samaria. There has been no second front there, and the IDF operates there as if it is a man in his own home; fortunately for Tel Aviv, there was no disengagement here. Meanwhile, the conclusion regarding the return of the Jews to their communities in Gaza is also clear, yet it cannot be stated in official media outlets as it is politically incorrect. Yet nonetheless, the time for it shall come.
Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not.
Late Saturday, thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons.
Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.
Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis -- 6,464 launched from Gaza in the past three years -- deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people.
This has two purposes. First, counting on the moral scrupulousness of Israel, Hamas figures civilian proximity might help protect at least part of its arsenal. Second, knowing that Israelis have new precision weapons that may allow them to attack nonetheless, Hamas hopes that inevitable collateral damage -- or, if it is really fortunate, an errant Israeli bomb -- will kill large numbers of its own people for which, of course, the world will blame Israel.
For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians. The religion of Jew-murder and self-martyrdom is ubiquitous. And deeply perverse, such as the Hamas TV children's program in which an adorable live-action Palestinian Mickey Mouse is beaten to death by an Israeli (then replaced by his more militant cousin, Nahoul the Bee, who vows to continue on Mickey's path to martyrdom).
At war today in Gaza, one combatant is committed to causing the most civilian pain and suffering on both sides. The other combatant is committed to saving as many lives as possible -- also on both sides. It's a recurring theme. Israel gave similar warnings to Southern Lebanese villagers before attacking Hezbollah in the Lebanon war of 2006. The Israelis did this knowing it would lose for them the element of surprise and cost the lives of their own soldiers.
That is the asymmetry of means between Hamas and Israel. But there is equal clarity regarding the asymmetry of ends. Israel has but a single objective in Gaza -- peace: the calm, open, normal relations it offered Gaza when it withdrew in 2005. Doing something never done by the Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers of Palestine, the Israelis gave the Palestinians their first sovereign territory ever in Gaza.
What ensued? This is not ancient history. Did the Palestinians begin building the state that is supposedly their great national aim? No. No roads, no industry, no courts, no civil society at all. The flourishing greenhouses that Israel left behind for the Palestinians were destroyed and abandoned. Instead, Gaza's Iranian-sponsored rulers have devoted all their resources to turning it into a terror base -- importing weapons, training terrorists, building tunnels with which to kidnap Israelis on the other side. And of course firing rockets unceasingly.
The grievance? It cannot be occupation, military control or settlers. They were all removed in September 2005. There's only one grievance and Hamas is open about it. Israel's very existence.
Nor does Hamas conceal its strategy. Provoke conflict. Wait for the inevitable civilian casualties. Bring down the world's opprobrium on Israel. Force it into an untenable cease-fire -- exactly as happened in Lebanon. Then, as in Lebanon, rearm, rebuild and mobilize for the next round. Perpetual war. Since its raison d'etre is the eradication of Israel, there are only two possible outcomes: the defeat of Hamas or the extinction of Israel.
Israel's only response is to try to do what it failed to do after the Gaza withdrawal. The unpardonable strategic error of its architect, Ariel Sharon, was not the withdrawal itself but the failure to immediately establish a deterrence regime under which no violence would be tolerated after the removal of any and all Israeli presence -- the ostensible justification for previous Palestinian attacks. Instead, Israel allowed unceasing rocket fire, implicitly acquiescing to a state of active war and indiscriminate terror.
Hamas's rejection of an extension of its often-violated six-month cease-fire (during which the rockets never stopped, just were less frequent) gave Israel a rare opportunity to establish the norm it should have insisted upon three years ago: no rockets, no mortar fire, no kidnapping, no acts of war. As the U.S. government has officially stated: a sustainable and enduring cease-fire. If this fighting ends with anything less than that, Israel will have lost yet another war. The question is whether Israel still retains the nerve -- and the moral self-assurance -- to win.
Yisrael Medad shows the absurdity in Arab/World thinking
Martin Kramer makes a great observation:-
...Christopher Hitchens [a columnist for Vanity Fair]...announces that the Khalidi family "hold[s] a celebrated house and position in the city [of Jerusalem] since approximately the time of the Crusades. I have had the honor of being invited to this very house. If Rashid chooses to state that he doesn't care to be evicted from his ancestral home in order to make way for some settler from Brooklyn who claims to have God on his side, I think he has a perfect right to say so."
Let us leave aside the typically English schoolboy enchantment with assumed Arab aristocracy (please, don't get me started). Rashid Khalidi was himself born and raised in... Brooklyn. Here is testimony from a witness: "I lived in Brooklyn and watched young Rashid and his brothers grow, even held him as an infant while listening to his father, Ismail, talk about Palestine and the diplomatic issues he dealt with." On the maternal side, Rashid's roots in Brooklyn go back a good ways: "His grandmother," he is reported to have told an audience, "who immigrated to America from Lebanon was a member of First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn." His mother and father married in that church, and he attended Sunday school there.
So were Khalidi to forgo the familiar pleasures and privileges of Columbia University for the rigors of Jerusalem, wouldn't he also be a settler from Brooklyn?
Just to clear: I myself was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens.
--
Posted By YMedad to www.myrightword.blogspot.com
