Peace Process
It’s rare for Israel’s left and right flanks to agree on anything. But last week, the party leaders of left-wing Meretz and right-wing Otzma LeYisrael were in full accord: Both declared that Hamas cannot be deterred.
Aryeh Eldad of Otzma LeYisrael devoted an entire op-ed to asserting that fanatic Jew-haters aren’t deterrable, so “The hope that our tremendous military power will deter our enemies … must be revised.” Zahava Gal-On of Meretz espoused the same conclusion for opposite reasons: Only diplomacy can solve problems, she opined, so force can’t deter Hamas; “Deterrence is an illusion held by the attacker, but it has no basis in the behavior of the attacked.”
Yet while Hamas is certainly undeterred right now, Israel has deterred other enemies in the past. Thus instead of dismissing deterrence as unworkable, it’s worth asking what conditions produced past successes and whether and how they could be reproduced against Hamas.
A good starting point is Eldad’s lament that even Israel’s “greatest victory ever,” the 1967 Six-Day War, didn’t prevent Egypt and Syria from launching the War of Attrition “just days after the fighting ended” or the Yom Kippur War six years later. “If a decisive defeat such as the Six-Day War did not deter them, what would?” he demanded.
The answer, as Eldad should know, is the Yom Kippur War. In its first 25 years of existence, Israel fought four full-scale conventional wars. But in the 40 years since 1973, no Arab country has launched or even seriously threatened Israel with a conventional war. And that isn’t because they suddenly stopped hating Israel. It’s because Egypt, Syria and Jordan all became convinced that a) they couldn’t beat it and b) trying would exact a painful price.
The Six-Day War alone couldn’t do this because despite losing sizable chunks of territory, Arab countries could still persuade themselves it was a fluke: It might have ended very differently if Israel, facing three armies massed on its borders, hadn’t launched a preemptive strike on Egypt’s air force. In 1973, in contrast, Egypt and Syria achieved complete surprise: Attacking on the holiest day of the Jewish year, they inflicted heavy casualties and forced Israel into retreat. Yet the war still ended with Israeli troops threatening both Cairo and Damascus. And the fact that the Arabs lost even under optimal opening conditions finally convinced them that Israel couldn’t be beaten.
No less important, however, was the territorial price these wars exacted. The world didn’t pressure Israel into returning the territory captured in 1967; UN Security Council Resolution 242 was explicitly worded to let Israel keep some of this territory and return the rest only in exchange for full peace. Nor did the Arab aggression in 1973 produce Israeli concessions. Only by becoming the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel did Egypt finally recover the Sinai. These, then, are the components of successful deterrence: The enemy must be convinced both that it cannot win and that fighting will exact a price. And neither is currently true of Hamas. Partly, this is the “international community’s” fault. It’s Israel, not Hamas, that’s being condemned worldwide for a war Hamas started. It’s Israel, not Hamas, that’s being threatened with boycotts and indictment in international courts. And it’s Israel, not Hamas, from which the world is demanding concessions: The West has been pressuring Israel to end the Gaza blockade, which is Hamas’s key demand, in exchange for nothing but a vague “international monitoring mechanism” that won’t prevent Hamas from rearming, while relegating Israel’s demand that Hamas disarm to the distant future of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. All this leads Hamas to conclude that aggression will reap gains while costing it nothing it cares about. After all, it doesn’t care how much Gaza’s civilians suffer; indeed, from its perspective, the more, the better, since civilian suffering increases international pressure on Israel.
But Israel’s own behavior is equally to blame for Hamas’s conclusion. As examples, consider the following two news items. Last Friday, a prominent newspaper’s military analyst declared that quiet won’t return “as long as Hamas feels beaten and humiliated,” so “If Israel wants quiet from Hamas, it needs to give it that ‘something’ that will allow it to tell the battered people of Gaza that the war was worth it.” The far-left Haaretz? No, that’s Yoav Limor of the “right-wing” Israel Hayom. Eleven days earlier, another prominent newspaper’s military analyst warned that further fighting is almost inevitable, because Israel “has not been displaying any determination in the cease-fire negotiations, but instead is conveying a desire to be done with all this Gaza stuff and return to routine,” while “the Israel Defense Forces reduced its troops around Gaza too quickly, so Hamas doesn’t feel any real threat that Israel will reenter the Strip.” Some right-wing rag? No, that’s Amos Harel of Haaretz. Limor’s article exemplifies one major problem: Even on the center-right, many opinion leaders – including key ministers – favor buying (temporary) quiet with diplomatic concessions. Consequently, the government reportedly offered numerous concessions during the failed cease-fire talks. Harel’s article reflects the second major problem: When even the left perceives a “right-wing” government as palpably desperate to end the fighting, Hamas doesn’t feel its vital interests – survival and control of Gaza – are under any threat. Thus for Hamas, attacking Israel is a triple win: no substantial costs, a real prospect of gains, and greater global hatred of Israel as a bonus. And as long as that remains true, deterring it will indeed be impossible.
Israel can’t do much about the world’s response, but the other two elements are entirely in its control. Not only could it refuse to reward Hamas’s aggression, but it could make Hamas pay a territorial price – for instance, by reoccupying parts of Gaza near the border. That would show Hamas that aggression entails real costs, while also vastly enhancing the South’s security, since most mortars and short-range rockets are fired from these areas.
It might fail, but it’s worth a try. Because the alternatives to deterring Hamas are far more costly: either destroy it completely, or live forever at its nonexistent mercy.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Though the fighting in Gaza shows no sign of ending, much of the world is already focusing on the next step–pouring billions of international aid dollars, for the umpteenth time, into repairing the damages caused by Hamas’s aggression. Germany, France, and Britain are working on a UN Security Council resolution dictating the terms of a cease-fire and reconstruction, while UN special envoy Robert Serry briefed the council on Gaza’s reconstruction needs earlier this week. All the international players agree that some form of international monitoring is needed to keep Hamas from diverting reconstruction aid into rebuilding its war machine. But that raises the question of who can provide this monitoring.
Serry, who apparently inhabits a parallel universe, blithely asserted that the UN has successfully monitored projects in Gaza in the past and can do so today as well. This, of course, is the same UN that was shocked to discover Hamas rockets stored in three UNRWA schools in Gaza–and then promptly handed the rockets back to Hamas. It’s the same UN that allowed Hamas to booby-trap a UN clinic, resulting in its destruction when Hamas blew it up to kill nearby Israeli soldiers. It’s the same UN whose Gaza teacher’s union–i.e., the people who educate students at UNRWA schools–is run by Hamas, which controls all 11 seats on the union’s board, and whose “educators” include prominent members of Hamas’s military wing. And it’s the same UN whose own auditor recently released a damning report on the UN Development Program’s procurement in Gaza.
Inter alia, this report found that contract employees performed “core” procurement tasks that only regular staffers are supposed to perform, including for “significant” construction projects; that the UN wasn’t “monitoring and recording actual work” performed by contract employees handling “core” functions; that at least $8 million in construction spending was falsely recorded at far lower prices, thereby shielding it from scrutiny by higher-level officials who must approve major outlays; that many payments and receipts weren’t recorded; and that UNDP didn’t use an electronic fund transfer system that would let it monitor bank transactions and detect those “not made by UNDP.” In short, contrary to Serry’s assertion that “UN construction materials were not used for the [Hamas] tunnels,” the UN has no clue what was happening at its construction programs in Gaza.
Thus believing the UN could effectively monitor Gaza’s reconstruction is like believing cats can guard cream. Yet the main alternative–entrusting this task to the Palestinian Authority, bolstered by some unspecified “international monitoring and verification mission,” as the EU-3 proposes–is equally unrealistic.
Writing in The New Republic this week, Alexander Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky made a thoughtful case for the PA alternative, despite acknowledging that the PA is “monumentally corrupt.” And in principle, I agree with them. The fact that education, health, welfare, and development are currently largely handled by UNRWA encourages dysfunctional Palestinian government; Palestinian leaders can get away with being corrupt, irresponsible, and even diverting massive resources into rockets and tunnels precisely because the international community takes care of providing basic services to the public. Thus it’s long past time to defund UNRWA and force Palestinian governments–whether the PA or Hamas–to take responsibility for their own people.
But as veteran reporter Khaled Abu Toameh wrote this week, the idea that PA President Mahmoud Abbas can reassume control of Gaza now is ridiculous. First, he can’t afford to be seen as returning to Gaza “aboard an Israeli tank.” Second, Hamas remains the dominant military power in Gaza; Abbas’s forces are incapable of doing anything Hamas opposes, and even trying would be dangerous: Over the past month, Hamas has shot dozens of members of Abbas’s Fatah party just for daring to leave their homes. In other words, the PA can neither stop Hamas from firing rockets nor prevent it from diverting reconstruction aid. So all its return to Gaza would do is free Hamas of responsibility for day-to-day governance and allow it to focus all its energies on preparing for the next war.
In short, no international monitoring system can keep Hamas from rebuilding its war machine as long as it remains the dominant force in Gaza. And since the international community is vehemently opposed to letting Israel wage the kind of military operation needed to destroy Hamas, that means the billions it will soon spend to rebuild Gaza will be as wasted as all the previous billions were: All the gleaming new buildings will be destroyed again in another few years, when the next war erupts.
Originally published in Commentary
One of the enduring myths of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is that much of the West supports the Palestinians out of natural sympathy for the underdog. Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford’s Hoover Institution effectively demolished that myth last week, pointing out that if sympathy for the underdog were really driving the massive pro-Palestinian demonstrations sweeping the West, one would expect to see equally massive demonstrations in support of occupied Tibet, the undoubted underdog against superpower China, or embattled Ukraine, the equally undoubted underdog against superpower Russia. In reality, he argued, anti-Israel sentiment flourishes not because Israel is Goliath, but because it is David:
Israel is inordinately condemned for what it supposedly does because its friends are few, its population is tiny, and its adversaries beyond Gaza numerous, dangerous and often powerful.
Or to put it more bluntly, condemning Israel entails no costs and frequently provides benefits, whereas supporting it could invite retaliation from its numerous enemies. So just as Western countries are reluctant to push China on Tibet for fear that China will retaliate by barring access to the world’s largest market, or to push Russia too hard on Ukraine because Russia is a major natural gas producer with no qualms about cutting off supplies to its political opponents, they often find it easier to push Israel than to push its enemies.
Take, for instance, the cases of Qatar and Turkey, currently Hamas’s two main patrons. Qatar is Hamas’s leading financier, giving it hundreds of millions of dollars per year to build its rocket arsenal and tunnel network; it hosts Hamas leader Khaled Meshal; it reportedly torpedoed an emerging Hamas-Israel cease-fire deal by threatening to kick Meshal out if he signed; and according to former Israeli Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin, about a third of all cement imported to Gaza for Qatari-sponsored projects was instead diverted to Hamas’s tunnel network–presumably with Doha’s willing cooperation, since EU-managed projects suffered no similar diversions.
Turkey also gives Hamas hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and hosts about a dozen senior Hamas officials, including Saleh Arouri–who, over the past week, has both admitted to being behind the kidnapping of three Israeli teens in June and been accused by Israel’s Shin Bet security service of organizing a massive terror network in the West Bank tasked with starting a third intifada and overthrowing the Palestinian Authority. Israel has arrested some 90 members of this network and confiscated weapons and funds; the PA took the accusation seriously enough to launch its own investigation.
In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that without the support Hamas receives from Turkey and Qatar, it could never have built the war machine that enabled it to start this summer’s war, and thus the death and destruction the world is now decrying in Gaza would never have happened.
Since both America and the European Union have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, one might expect this flagrant support for Hamas to prompt sanctions on Qatar and Turkey as state sponsors of terrorism. But Qatar is the world’s largest natural gas exporter and richest country, as well as home to the main U.S. air force base in the Middle East, while Turkey is a NATO member and major emerging economy. So in fact, far from sanctioning Qatar and Turkey, both America and Europe consider them key partners. In short, it’s simply easier for the West to condemn Israel’s response to Hamas attacks and pressure it to accede to Hamas demands than it would be to condemn and penalize Turkish and Qatari support for Hamas.
Clearly, Israel has many strengths, including a thriving economy, a relatively powerful army, and strong American support. But as Hanson noted, it’s still a tiny country with few friends and many enemies, and anti-Israel protesters intuitively sense this. So don’t be fooled by their pretensions to “moral indignation” against Israel’s “oppression of the underdog.” They’re just doing what mobs have done since time immemorial: targeting a victim they see as fundamentally vulnerable.
Originally published in Commentary
Writing in the Washington Post last Friday, Natan Sharansky argued that Western nations are quite right to hold Israel to a higher standard than its nondemocratic neighbors; the problem is that they hold Israel to a higher standard than they hold themselves. Many Westerners would doubtless deny doing so. But for proof, just compare the recent war in Gaza to the Iraq War.
According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009, of the victims of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq whose age and gender could be determined, 46 percent were women and 39 percent were children. The study, based on data from Iraq Body Count, covered the period from March 2003 to March 2008, but specifically excluded airstrikes carried out during periods of intense fighting, such as the initial U.S. invasion and the 2004 battle of Fallujah. In other words, it excluded those periods when fire was likely to be heaviest and most indiscriminate due to the need to protect troops at risk.
By contrast, according to statistics published by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 12 percent of all Palestinians killed in Gaza were women and 23 percent were children (239 women and 459 children out of 1,976 fatalities). Thus even if OCHA’s numbers are accurate, the percentages of women and children killed in Gaza were far lower than the percentages killed in U.S. airstrikes in Iraq. Yet one would expect them to be higher, for at least three reasons.
First, unlike the NEJM study, OCHA’s figures cover the entire war, including periods of intense fighting when soldiers’ lives were at risk. In other words, they include the battles involving the heaviest fire, which NEJM’s study excluded. Second, the NEJM figures referred only to airstrikes, which utilize precision weapons; OCHA’s figures also include people killed by non-precision weaponry such as artillery fire. Third, though the claim that Gaza is one of the world’s mostly densely populated places is nonsense, almost all the fighting took place in dense urban areas: Since Hamas’s strategy depends on massive civilian casualties, it locates its rocket launchers and tunnels mainly in such areas. In contrast, U.S. airstrikes in Iraq weren’t limited to dense urban areas.
In short, even if OCHA’s figures are credible, Israel comes off well by comparison with coalition forces in Iraq. But in fact, they aren’t. First, OCHA doesn’t say whether any of these “children” were combatants, though it’s hardly unheard of for 16- or 17-year-old Palestinians to bear arms. More importantly, however, it doesn’t say how many of these women and children were actually killed by Hamas rather than Israel.
As I’ve noted before, almost a sixth of all Palestinian rockets launched at Israel–475 out of 3,137–actually landed in Gaza, where, given the lack of either Iron Dome or civilian bomb shelters, they would have been far more lethal than they were in Israel. In one documented case alone, a misfired Hamas rocket killed 10 people in a park, including eight children.
Moreover, as I’ve also noted, Hamas’s practice of booby-trapping and storing rockets in houses, mosques, and clinics means that many Israeli strikes inadvertently set off massive secondary explosions. In other words, many Palestinian “victims of Israeli attacks” were likely killed not by the Israeli strike itself, but by secondary explosions caused by Hamas’s own bombs.
Americans rightly expect the world to understand that when U.S. airstrikes decimate a Yemeni wedding party or kill civilians in Iraq, it isn’t because the U.S. is bloodthirsty, but because mistakes happen in wartime, especially when fighting terrorists who don’t wear uniforms and operate from amid civilian populations. But Israel is entitled to that same understanding.
Instead, the White House, Pentagon, and State Department have all accused Israel in the harshest terms of doing too little to prevent civilian casualties. Given that Israel’s record on this score, as the NEJM study shows, is even better than America’s, that is the height of hypocrisy.
Originally published in Commentary
My vote for most outrageous remark of the war goes to an unnamed senior IDF officer who pooh-poohed southern residents’ anger at seeing rocket fire from Gaza resume just two days after the army said they could safely go home.
What makes this outrageous isn’t just the content, but the speaker: A senior officer of the army charged with protecting Israel against external threats has essentially declared that tens of thousands of Israelis have no right to expect such protection. Instead, they must continue living with daily rocket and mortar fire, playing Russian roulette with their families’ lives and watching their children develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
True, southern residents “did not leave” despite being “fired on for years,” but even heroes have breaking points. Southerners heroically endured for nine years in the belief that eventually, the government and army would restore security. The latest war shattered that belief.
Then came the discovery that the tunnel network was far more extensive than the IDF had thought. This intelligence failure left southerners with little confidence in the army’s assertion that all tunnels have now been destroyed, a concern they have voiced repeatedly.
The result of all this is that residents of southern communities are now openly questioning whether they should stay. During the war, these communities turned into ghost towns, and a poll published last week found that 20% of residents are considering making this exodus permanent.
“The residents of the area are exhausted,” added another. “We’re frustrated that no long-term, strong, stable solution has been reached. That’s why the residents want to leave the community – because of lack of confidence in the government, whose role is to provide us with security.”
Last Thursday, when 10,000 people – mainly southerners – demonstrated in Tel Aviv to demand that the government finally restore their security, Eshkol Regional Council head Haim Yellin put the issue in a nutshell: “A sovereign state must protect the security of its residents, even if they live in the periphery,” he declared.
Of course, the IDF isn’t primarily to blame for the senior officer’s attitude: The army of a democratic state is supposed to execute the government’s policies, and his remarks faithfully reflected the policies of three successive prime ministers: Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Binyamin Netanyahu.
Ordinary Israelis do seem to grasp the magnitude of the southern threat: In one poll last month, fully 87% of respondents opposed a cease-fire, saying the war should continue until Hamas is defeated. Unfortunately, our political and military leadership has demonstrated no similar understanding. And that means both must be replaced by people who do – before it’s too late.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
With the fighting in Gaza seemingly winding down, stories are starting to trickle out about Gaza residents’ unhappiness with Hamas for starting a new war every few years. The Associated Press devoted its “big story” to the topic yesterday; the Washington Post ran a similar story on August 12. Seemingly, that’s an encouraging development. But closer analysis leaves little ground for optimism.
First, the criticism was primarily over tactics: People objected to Hamas launching rockets from their backyards or thought it should have accepted a cease-fire earlier. But as the Washington Post noted, there was virtually no disagreement over strategy: “Most Palestinians, even Hamas’s biggest detractors, say they back the current war against Israel, believing it is the only way to achieve the short-term Palestinian demands of lifting the Israeli and Egyptian economic blockades of Gaza and opening the strip’s border crossings.”
In other words, Palestinians still haven’t grasped the simple fact that the blockade was imposed in response to the nonstop rocket fire on Israel from Gaza, and its primary goal is to limit Hamas’ ability to import war materiel. They have evidently forgotten that when Israel first withdrew from Gaza in mid-2005, a U.S.-brokered agreement arranged for the border crossings to open under Palestinian Authority and European supervision; only two years and thousands of rockets later, after Hamas booted the PA out of Gaza in mid-2007, did both Israel and Egypt institute stringent restrictions at the crossings. Thus instead of concluding that the best way to get Israel to end the blockade would be to stop shooting at it, Palestinians still think the best way to end the blockade is to bombard Israel with even more rockets.
Even worse, however, is that both Washington and Europe seem hell-bent on proving them right. One might have thought the discovery that Hamas diverted enormous quantities of imported cement – enough, as one Israeli officer noted, to build “two hospitals, 20 clinics, 20 schools, and 100 kindergartens” – into building tunnels to attack Israel would have led the West to realize that Israel’s insistence on regulating construction imports had some merit. Instead, Western leaders are pressing Israel to agree to significant concessions during the Cairo cease-fire talks. On July 27, for instance, a White House readout of a call between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Obama had demanded a cease-fire “that both allows Palestinians in Gaza to lead normal lives and addresses Gaza’s long-term development and economic needs,” while relegating Israel’s demand for Gaza’s disarmament to an ever-elusive “lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” – i.e., the far-distant future.
In short, the West has been pressuring Israel to show Gaza residents that Hamas’ strategy works, and that a war every few years really will force it into concessions. And Israel has begun capitulating to this pressure, having reportedly agreed to several steps to ease the blockade, though not yet to removing it totally.
Even without this, the chances of Gaza residents revolting against Hamas were slim, given the organization’s reign of terror. As one Gazan critical of Hamas bluntly told Haaretz last week, “One mustn’t express an opinion about the war. They’ll make you trouble if you say anything. I speak my mind, but others, if they say what they think, they’ll say they’re collaborators, or they’ll beat them or even kill them.” AP similarly warned that “Under Hamas rule, it’s rare and dangerous to share even as much as a hint of criticism of the government with outsiders”; indeed, few Hamas critics quoted in any of the articles were willing to be identified by name.
But if Hamas had nothing to show for its endless wars, even cowed Gazans might someday decide they’d had enough. Instead, Hamas seems likely to return from Cairo with Israeli concessions that will force even its critics to shut up and admit that its strategy works. It’s hard to imagine a better way to ensure that the countdown to the next Israel-Hamas war will be short.
Originally published in Commentary
Even back in the middle of last week, when it still seemed as if Hamas might actually have ceased its fire, only a minority of Israelis thought Israel had won the war. In three different polls, sizable majorities – ranging from 59 percent to 78 percent – termed the war at best a draw, and perhaps even an Israeli defeat; only 21% to 41% deemed it an Israeli victory. Thus, one would expect Israelis to be angry at the prime minister who presided over this fiasco. Instead, Binyamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war was approved by 59% of respondents in one poll and a whopping 77% in another.
Analysts as diverse as the centrist Shmuel Rosner and the left-wing Haaretz’s Yossi Verter explained this anomaly as reflecting a recognition that defeating Hamas isn’t possible, so a tie was the best that could be achieved. Yet that explanation doesn’t jibe with another poll finding: A majority of Israelis wanted to continue the operation rather than ending it. That makes no sense if they actually thought the operation had achieved the maximum possible; who in Israel would want IDF soldiers to continue dying in Gaza for nothing? Indeed, respondents even told pollsters which additional goals they wanted achieved: eliminating Hamas’s rocket capabilities, topping Gaza’s Hamas government, targeting Hamas leaders.
Thus a more plausible explanation stems from the epiphany produced by one of the war’s defining moments: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s July 25 cease-fire proposal. This proposal, which incorporated most of Hamas’ demands but none of Israel’s, was rejected by Israel’s entire political spectrum in an unprecedented display of unanimity.
Four days later, a Channel 1 television report reinforced this epiphany: It described an angry phone call in which U.S. President Barack Obama demanded that Netanyahu declare an immediate, unilateral cease-fire and then let Turkey and Qatar negotiate a more permanent truce. When Netanyahu protested that Qatar and Turkey aren’t honest brokers, but Hamas’s main patrons, Obama replied that he trusts them, and Israel is in no position to choose its mediators.
Both men’s spokespeople denied the report, but many Israelis found it credible, because the message it sent was identical to that sent by Kerry’s cease-fire proposal: In this war, Washington was effectively siding with Hamas against Israel. That Israelis indeed reached this conclusion is evident from another shocking poll finding: By a margin of more than 2-1 (65% to 29%), Israelis don’t “trust the U.S. in the negotiations with Hamas.” By contrast, they do trust Egypt, by almost the same margin (66% to 23%). In 27 years in Israel, I can’t remember another time when Israelis trusted any country more than America, much less an Arab one. After all, the U.S. has long been Israel’s staunchest friend and ally – and still is, where the American public and Congress are concerned.
But in late July, Israelis were forced to face the unpleasant truth that Obama is not – and that consequently, for the first time since the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Israel was fighting a war in which the White House actively backed its enemies. Certainly, other U.S. presidents have opposed Israeli military operations and tried to limit their achievements. But Obama sought an actual Israeli defeat: a deal that would satisfy Hamas’s demands instead of Israel’s.
Once having recognized this, Israelis also recognized that Netanyahu may have done the most anyone could have in a nearly impossible situation. True, he was visibly loath to take any military action against Hamas at all, and once pushed into it, he seemed to have no effective military plan; merely destroying 32 tunnels is a pathetic accomplishment for a month-long battle against a terrorist group with only a fraction of IDF’s firepower and manpower. Thus under other circumstances, Israelis would have criticized him for wasting a golden opportunity to defeat Hamas. After all, they remember quite well that the IDF defeated terror in the West Bank just a decade ago, so while they understand that defeating Hamas would be harder and entail more casualties, they don’t buy the argument that it’s impossible.
But with the White House on Hamas’s side, the lengthy war necessary to actually defeat Hamas simply wasn’t an option. Even extracting enough leeway for the limited task of destroying the tunnels required consummate diplomatic skill. So despite deploring the war’s meager military achievements, Israelis gave Netanyahu full credit for his adroit handling of its diplomatic side – credit he will retain as long as he refrains from accepting a bad cease-fire deal that lets Hamas rearm and rebuild its tunnels.
This, ironically, is the exact opposite of what Obama intended, as evidenced by his New York Times interview last week. In that interview, Obama declared that given Israel’s military capabilities, he doesn’t “worry about Israel’s survival.” But he does worry about Netanyahu having too much public support, because if the prime minister “doesn’t feel some internal pressure,” he’ll be “too strong” to be forced into making the massive concessions to the Palestinians Obama wants. In other words, Obama isn’tbothered by the prospect of an empowered Hamas capable of launching even more rockets and building even more cross-border attack tunnels; what bothers him is the prospect of an empowered Netanyahu.
Thus to Obama, siding with Hamas against Israel must have seemed like a twofer: It would advance his goal of rapprochement with Hamas’s long-time patron, Iran, while also weakening Netanyahu. After all, prime ministers who preside over unsuccessful wars usually lose public support. But as usual, Obama completely misunderstood the Israeli public. A classic example is the serial fights he picked with Netanyahu over construction in Jerusalem: He hoped Israelis would blame their premier for endangering the precious U.S. alliance, but by attacking a core Israeli interest, he instead forced even the left to rally behind Netanyahu. And now, he has done it again by siding with Hamas against Israel.
For he thereby gave Netanyahu the only possible legitimate excuse for what would otherwise be an inexcusable failure to finally eliminate Hamas’ ability to terrorize Israel.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Okay, it’s official: Even the BBC now admits the UN has been essentially collaborating with a terrorist organization to libel Israel. Of course, the venerable British broadcaster doesn’t say so explicitly; it even assures its readers that UN officials aren’t to blame for the misinformation they’ve been propagating. But it’s hard to reach any other conclusion after reading this analysis of Gaza’s casualty figures by the station’s head of statistics, Anthony Reuben.
As Reuben notes, the figures on Palestinian casualties cited by most news organizations come from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. As of August 6, this agency was reporting 1,843 Palestinian fatalities, including at least 1,354 civilians; 279 hadn’t yet been identified. Thus civilians ostensibly comprise at least 73 percent of total fatalities, and since the UN excludes unidentified casualties from its calculations, it usually cites an even higher figure–currently 86 percent.
But as Reuben writes, “if the Israeli attacks have been ‘indiscriminate’, as the UN Human Rights Council says, it is hard to work out why they have killed so many more civilian men than women.” Quoting a New York Times analysis, he noted that men aged 20-29, who are the most likely to be combatants, are “also the most overrepresented in the death toll,” comprising 9 percent of Gazans but 34 percent of identified fatalities. In contrast, “women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71 percent of the population and 33 percent of the known-age casualties.”
So Reuben asked the high commissioner’s office how it explains this statistical anomaly. Here’s the mind-boggling response: “Matthias Behnk, from OHCHR, told BBC News that the organisation would not want to speculate about why there had been so many adult male casualties.”
In other words, confronted with a glaring statistical anomaly, the UN opted “not to speculate” about whether this cast doubt on the credibility of its claim that over 80 percent of fatalities were civilians. Instead, it kept right on feeding that number to journalists–most of whom promptly regurgitated it with no questions asked.
The statistical anomaly is compounded by other known facts: Terrorists don’t usually fight in uniform, so they arrive at the morgue in civilian clothing; the Hamas Interior Ministry explicitly ordered Gazans to identify all casualties as “innocent civilians” even if they aren’t; and Hamas has a history of mislabeling militants as civilian casualties: It did so during the 2009 war in Gaza as well, only admitting years later that, just as Israel claimed, most of the dead were militants rather than civilians. All this provides further grounds for suspecting that many male combat-age “civilians” were actually militants, and thus for caution about declaring them civilians. But the UN evinced no such qualms.
Finally, there’s the minor detail that some civilian casualties were caused by Hamas’s own misfired rockets. We know for certain about some such cases; for instance, an Italian journalist confirmed (after leaving Gaza) that one Palestinian rocket killed 10 Palestinians, including eight children, in a park in al-Shati. But there are undoubtedly many more that we don’t yet know about, because according to IDF data, almost a sixth of all Palestinian rockets launched–475 out of 3,137–landed in Gaza rather than Israel. That statistic is highly credible, because the Iron Dome system tracks every rocket’s trajectory to determine whether it needs intercepting, and couldn’t have achieved the success it did if its trajectory tracking system weren’t extremely accurate. And since Gaza has neither Iron Dome nor bomb shelters, Hamas rockets would be far more lethal there than they were in Israel. Yet the UN unhesitatingly blames Israel for all Palestinian casualties.
Reuben insists the UN shouldn’t be blamed for its misleading data, since “their statistics are accompanied by caveats and described as preliminary and subject to revision.” But that’s ridiculous. If the UN had doubts about the data’s veracity, it should have told the media it “would not want to speculate” about the civilian-to-combatant ratio. Instead, it opted to publish wildly exaggerated civilian casualty counts as unqualified fact while declining “to speculate” about the glaring statistical anomalies in its data.
In short, it collaborated wittingly and willingly with Hamas’s strategy to smear Israel by accusing it of massacring civilians. And most of the world’s media unhesitatingly played along.
Originally published in Commentary
Last week, I thought something I never dreamed I could think: that perhaps I owe former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon an apology. Not that I’ve altered my conviction that he bears direct, personal responsibility for every rocket fired from Gaza over the last nine years, every cross-border tunnel, every soldier killed there, every bit of damage done to Israel’s global standing by the periodic wars with Gaza and even many Palestinian casualties of these wars; all are the bitter fruit of the unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza that he conceived, bulldozed through the Knesset and finally implemented in August 2005. Yet if an apology is owed – and I’m still not sure it is – it’s not despite his responsibility for these evils, but because of it. Here’s why:
During the second intifada, then-IDF chief of staff (and now defense minister) Moshe Ya’alon used to talk about the need to “sear the Palestinians’ consciousness” – to make the intifada so costly for them that they would never again resort to violence. The Gaza pullout now looks uncannily like a similar exercise in consciousness-searing. But it wasn’t the Palestinians’ consciousness Sharon seared; it was our own.
Sharon understood his countrymen. He understood that many Israelis desperately wanted to believe peace with the Palestinians was possible despite all evidence to the contrary. He understood that Israelis’ desire to be loved by the world made the country far more vulnerable to international pressure than economic or strategic considerations alone could ever do. He understood Israelis’ demographic fears – that absent a two-state solution, a single Palestinian-majority state could someday replace a Jewish state. And he saw how, even as the intifada still raged in autumn 2003, the mere fact that Israeli casualties had dropped markedly since its peak in early 2002 sufficed to enable these other considerations to regain their sway. Consequently, various schemes to cede land to the Palestinians were already making a public comeback.
Sharon also understood one other thing: Important as control of Gaza was to Israel’s security, it paled beside the importance of the West Bank. Gaza primarily threatened Israel’s sparsely populated south. The West Bank threatened not only Israel’s major population centers, but also its industrial and commercial base, its main international airport and its seat of government.
Sharon assuredly didn’t belittle Gaza’s importance. He was an army officer during the 1950s, when Palestinian terrorists used Gaza as a base for staging bloody attacks inside Israel, and after Israel captured it in 1967, he spearheaded construction of the Gaza settlements precisely to ensure it would remain Israeli and never revert to being a Palestinian terror base. That’s why the unilateral withdrawal plan he unveiled in December 2003 was so shocking: It contradicted the fundamental security doctrine to which he had hitherto devoted his life.
Nor was he naïve enough that he could possibly have believed the rosy promises he sold the Israeli public about the pullout: that it would promote peace with the Palestinians, enhance Israel’s security, give Israel international legitimacy to fight Palestinian terror and buy American support for retaining parts of the West Bank. Indeed, the exact opposite occurred: The unilateral pullout bolstered Hamas, which rode to victory in the Palestinian parliamentary election in 2006 partly by claiming credit for driving Israel out of Gaza; it drastically decreased Israel’s security, resulting in 16,500 rockets and mortars fired at Israel from Gaza since the withdrawal and more soldiers dying there since the pullout than before; it severely eroded international support for Israeli counterterrorism measures, because once Hamas could entrench its rockets, tunnels and booby-trapped buildings amid Gaza’s civilian population, military operations against it necessarily caused far more Palestinian casualties than they did pre-withdrawal; and US promises of support for Israeli retention of parts of the West Bank evaporated the minute a new American president took office.
All this seemed to leave only the most cynical of explanations for Sharon’s about-face: He sacrificed Gaza, its 8,000 settlers and Israel’s security solely to ensure his own reelection and/or the end of the criminal investigations against him. At best, perhaps he convinced himself that since he was (truly) head and shoulders above all his possible successors, his reelection would benefit Israel enough to compensate for this sacrifice.
I still can’t rule this explanation out. As the fantasies he peddled about the disengagement show, he was plenty cynical enough (and megalomaniac enough) to make it plausible.
But I now think there’s an alternative explanation: Seeing that even the second intifada hadn’t sufficed to cure Israelis of their susceptibility to territorial concessions, he concluded that unless he did something drastic, Israel would someday quit the West Bank. So he sacrificed the less-important Gaza to teach his countrymen a lesson they couldn’t possibly disregard. He bequeathed us a metastasizing horror in Gaza to ensure that Israelis never, ever made that same mistake in the West Bank.
For Sharon also understood one final thing about Israelis: Much as they crave the world’s love, once a critical mass of them is convinced that something is vital to their country’s survival, they are capable of defying the entire world to secure it.
The Gaza experiment’s deadly results may finally have convinced that critical mass of Israelis. Outside the radical left, not many would be willing to risk a repeat in the West Bank right now. And while nothing else that’s happened justifies the disengagement, averting a far more dangerous withdrawal from the West Bank actually might.
Except for one minor problem: The success of the operation doesn’t matter if the patient dies. And it’s not yet clear Israel can survive the success of Sharon’s operation. It’s not clear it can survive the security consequences – which, for the first time since 1948, have turned Israeli communities within the Green Line into ghost towns – and it’s not clear it can survive the cumulative toll on its international legitimacy that repeated applications of Hamas’ wildly successful “dead baby strategy” are exacting.
That’s why I haven’t yet decided whether Sharon actually deserves that apology. I’m waiting to see whether anyone finds a cure for his operation’s deadly side effects.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
There has been a lot of talk lately about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. What has gone curiously unmentioned by all the great humanitarians from the UN and “human rights” groups, however, is the degree to which this crisis was deliberately fomented by Hamas: Aside from starting the war to begin with, Hamas has done its level best to deprive Gazans of everything from food to medical care to housing, despite Israel’s best efforts to provide them.
Take, for instance, the widely reported shortages of medicines and various other essentials. Many of these products are imported, and since Egypt has largely closed its border, Gaza has only one conduit for these vital imports: the Kerem Shalom crossing into Israel. Thus if Gaza’s Hamas government had any concern whatsoever for its citizens, ensuring that this crossing was kept open and could function at maximum efficiency would be a top priority.
Instead, Hamas and other terrorist groups subjected Kerem Shalom to relentless rocket and mortar fire throughout the 29-day conflict, thereby ensuring that the job of getting cargo through was constantly interrupted as crossing workers raced for cover. Hamas also launched at least three tunnel attacks near Kerem Shalom, each of which shut the crossing down for hours.
Despite this, Israeli staffers risked their lives to keep the crossing open and managed to send through 1,491 truckloads of food, 220 truckloads of other humanitarian supplies, and 106 truckloads of medical supplies. But the numbers would certainly have been higher had the nonstop attacks not kept disrupting operations. On August 1, for instance, a shipment comprising 91 truckloads of aid had to be aborted on when Hamas violated a humanitarian cease-fire by launching a massive attack near Kerem Shalom.
Then there’s the shortage of medical care, as Gaza’s hospitals were reportedly overwhelmed by the influx of Palestinian casualties. To relieve this pressure, Israel allowed some Palestinians into Israel for treatment and also set up a field hospital on the Gaza border. But throughout the war, the field hospital stood almost empty–which Israel says is because Hamas deliberately kept Palestinians from using it.
Many pundits dismiss this claim, insisting there were simply no Palestinians who wanted to go there. That, however, is highly implausible. Gazans routinely seek treatment in Israel because it offers better medical care than Gaza does; as one Gazan said in 2012, “It is obvious that people come to Israel for medical treatment, regardless of the political conflict.” Even Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh sends his family to Israel for treatment; over the past two years, Israel has treated both his granddaughter and his sister’s husband. So while some Palestinians undoubtedly objected to accepting help from the enemy, it’s hard to believe there weren’t also Palestinians who simply wanted the best possible care for their loved ones, and would gladly have accepted it from Israel had they not feared retaliation from a group with no qualms about shooting dissenters.
It’s also worth noting that “humanitarian” organizations in Gaza actively contributed to this particular problem. UNRWA and the Red Cross did refer a few patients to the Israeli field hospital. But you have to wonder why they opted to refer most patients to Gaza’s Shifa Hospital and then make videos about how difficult conditions there were instead of easing the burden on Shifa by referring more patients to the Israeli hospital.
Then, of course, there’s the dire electricity shortage–also courtesy in part of Hamas, which destroyed two power lines carrying electricity from Israel to Gaza and subsequently prevented their repair by shelling the area nonstop.
Finally, there’s the massive destruction of houses in Gaza, which has left thousands of families homeless. That, too, was largely courtesy of Hamas: It booby-trapped houses and other civilian buildings, like a UNRWA clinic, on a massive scale and also used such buildings to store rockets and explosives.
Sometimes, it blew up these buildings itself in an effort to kill Israeli soldiers. Other times, the buildings blew up when relatively light Israeli ammunition like mortar shells–which aren’t powerful enough to destroy a building on their own–caused the booby traps or stored rockets to detonate. As Prof. Gregory Rose aptly noted, Hamas effectively turned all of Gaza into one big suicide bomb. In one neighborhood, for instance, 19 out of 28 houses were either booby-trapped, storing rockets, or concealing a tunnel entrance, thereby ensuring their destruction.
Now, the organization is gleefully watching the world blame Israel for the humanitarian crisis Hamas itself created. And that gives it every incentive to repeat these tactics in the future.
Originally published in Commentary