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Israel quite properly moved quickly to quash reports that in response to worsening ties with Turkey, it planned to start helping the PKK. Jerusalem has tried for years to persuade the world there’s no such thing as a “good” terrorist organization, and adopting a pet terrorist group of its own would completely destroy this argument. Moreover, Turkey would justifiably consider it an act of war, just as Israel does when other countries arm Hamas or Hezbollah, and the last thing Israel needs is for its cold war with Turkey to degenerate into a hot war.
But there’s no reason whatsoever for Israel not to launch a diplomatic campaign on behalf of the Kurds, focusing on both their justified demand for independence and Ankara’s gross human rights violations against Kurds in both Turkey and Iraq (where Turkey frequently bombs Kurdish areas). It should also start lobbying for international recognition of the Armenian genocide, and urge American Jewish organizations to do so as well.
For years, the alliance with Turkey confronted Israel with an uncomfortable choice between morality and realpolitik. It was always problematic for a country founded by survivors of history’s worst genocide to tacitly acquiesce in denying another people’s genocide, especially since the world’s indifference to the Armenian genocide is thought to have encouraged Hitler’s (correct) belief that he could massacre Jews with impunity. It was also problematic for a country founded on a stateless, persecuted people’s yearning for a home of their own to tacitly acquiesce in the suppression of another stateless, persecuted people’s identical yearning -especially after Israel began supporting the Palestinians’ demand for statehood, which is incomparably less justified than that of the Kurds. (Unlike Kurds, Palestinians are ethnically and linguistically indistinguishable from their Arab neighbors, and have suffered far less: For instance, they were never barred from using their own language, as Turkey’s Kurds were, and many fewer have been killed). One can question whether Jerusalem was right to have made these compromises, but successive governments all concluded that given Israel’s nasty neighborhood, the benefits of the Turkish alliance were too great to forgo.
Now, however, this alliance is dead, and it is unlikely ever to revive: Ankara’s state-sponsored anti-Semitism (see here, here, or here, for instance) is indoctrinating young Turks to loathe Israel, while the Turkish opposition’s main gripe against the government’s Israel policy seems to be that it isn’t anti-Israel enough. After a UN inquiry largely exculpated Israel’s raid on last year’s flotilla to Gaza, for instance, the opposition lambasted the government for enabling such a “pro-Israeli” report and for not suspending all trade with Israel.
So, for the first time in decades, morality and realpolitik align rather than conflict: By doing what is right on the Kurdish and Armenian issues, not only would Israel not lose anything, but it would bolster its own deterrence by showing Turkey cannot wage diplomatic warfare against it with impunity. In short, it’s a win-win situation. All that’s needed is for Israel’s government to finally face the fact the Turkish alliance is history.
With the Palestinian Authority having formally launched its bid for UN recognition as a state yesterday, perhaps other countries ought to start thinking about what kind of state would come into being if they vote “yes.” Here’s a hint: It will be neither democratic nor peaceful.
With regard to democracy, consider just a few of the events of the last three months: The PA once again proved itself incapable of holding even local elections, canceling a scheduled vote for the fourth time in two years; on the national level, PA President Mahmoud Abbas is now in the 81st month of a 48-month term. It banned journalists from reporting the human rights abuses documented by an official PA body, the Independent Commission for Human Rights, which found that both the PA and Hamas (which govern the West Bank and Gaza, respectively) were guilty of torture and arbitrary detentions. It arrested a Palestinian professor who publicly criticized his university for failure to comply with a court order. It pulled a popular satirical television show from its state-owned TV channel because the show lampooned the PA’s security forces and civil service. (Don’t satirical TV shows usually lampoon their own governments?) Its official media blacklisted Palestinian union leaders who accused the PA of refusing to clamp down on corruption. It’s not exactly a shining picture of freedom of expression, regular elections and other pillars of the democratic order, is it?
As for the PA’s peacefulness, consider a few more events of the last three months: A Palestinian cabinet minister accused Israel of being the world’s “major harvesting and trading center” for organs, and specifically of harvesting organs from “the bodies of dead Palestinian martyrs”; the PA government neither denounced nor dissociated itself from this classic blood libel. A leading member of Abbas’s “moderate” Fatah party, one of Abbas’s close associates, declared that Fatah never has and never will recognize Israel.
The state-run television channel repeatedly glorified suicide bombers who murdered Israeli civilians (here and here, for instance). A PA community center run by a senior member of Abbas’s party taught schoolchildren that pre-1967 Israel is stolen Palestinian land, and their mission is to reclaim it someday; Abbas himself declared pre-1967 Israel to be occupied Palestinian territory just this week.
State-run television vowed the Palestinians would bulldoze the Western Wall plaza – where thousands of Jews from all over the world pray daily – if and when they gain control of East Jerusalem. It’s not exactly a shining picture of readiness to live alongside Israel in peace and security, is it?
One wouldn’t expect the UN’s many undemocratic states to care about Palestinian democracy, or its many anti-Israel members to care about whether “Palestine” lives in peace with Israel. But numerous countries in Europe, South America, Africa and Asia are proud democracies that genuinely seek Middle East peace. Isn’t it about time for those countries to think about what kind of state “Palestine” would be before they raise their hands to vote it into existence?
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is routinely lauded as a “moderate” and a peace-seeker, because unlike Hamas, he generally refrains from openly calling for Israel’s destruction. But anyone who believes he doesn’t share this goal should pay close attention to what he told a group of journalists and Israeli intellectuals on Monday. Amid all the soothing bromides about continued security cooperation and the importance of negotiations was one highly revealing sentence: When the Palestinians seek UN recognition as a state later this month, “We are going to complain that as Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years.”
For anyone who needs reminding, Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza began 44 years ago, in 1967. What happened 63 years ago was Israel’s establishment – in the pre-1967 borders. In other words, as far as Abbas is concerned, the problem isn’t Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank, it’s Israel’s very existence: Even pre-1967 Israel constitutes an “occupation.”
Nor is this position uncommon among Palestinians: A Pew Global Attitudes poll in 2007 found that fully 77 percent of Palestinians think “Palestinians’ rights cannot be taken care of if Israel exists.”
The charitable might say Abbas was simply referring to the Palestinians’ 63 years without a state: At the same time Israel was established, in 1948, Jordan and Egypt occupied the West Bank and Gaza, respectively. But in reality, there has never been an independent Palestinian state; Palestinians have always lived under someone else’s rule. Before 1948 came the 31-year British occupation; before that came the 400-year Turkish occupation; before that came various Arab caliphates that ruled “Palestine” from Damascus; and so forth.
In short, 63 years doesn’t mark the start of Palestinian life under occupation -unless you think Israel’s very existence, and only that, constitutes an occupation. And in fact, that’s precisely what Palestinians do think. That’s why the PLO was founded in 1964, three years before Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza, with the explicit goal of eradicating pre-1967 Israel; that’s why Palestinians never demanded an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza during the 19 years when Jordan and Egypt controlled these areas; that’s why Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan in 1947 and every subsequent offer of statehood; that’s why Palestinians still demand millions of “refugees” be relocated to Israel under any peace agreement, thereby eliminating the Jewish state demographically (see here, here, here, for instance); that’s why the PA systematically denies the truth of Judaism’s historical ties to this land; and that’s why Abbas still refuses to grant that a “Jewish” state – as opposed to an “Israel” that could be Palestinian-majority via an influx of refugees – has any right to exist.
Abbas, of course, is faithfully reflecting his people’s views – the views of that majority who think “Palestinians’ rights cannot be taken care of if Israel exists,” who see a two-state solution as a mere stepping-stone toward Israel’s eradication. And as long as that remains true, any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian peace is a pipe dream.
The deteriorating Egyptian-Israeli relationship has produced an interesting side effect: For the first time in 30 years, Israelis are seriously questioning the
wisdom of “land for peace.” Even veteran land-for-peace advocates like former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief David Makovsky now acknowledge war with Egypt is no longer unthinkable. Recognition is growing that Egypt’s nonstop demands to boost its forces in Sinai threaten the Israeli-Egyptian treaty’s main achievement: the demilitarization of Sinai, which ensured Egypt could never attack Israel by surprise.
Hence Elliot Jager, another erstwhile land-for-peace advocate (and former senior Jerusalem Post editor), warned in Jewish Ideas Daily today that “If the treaty with Egypt must be gutted in order to save it, something may be terribly wrong with the underlying land-for-peace approach.” Guy Bechor, a regular columnist for the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth, bluntly declared the land-for-peace formula “dead” last week. Even Akiva Eldar of Haaretz, a diehard leftist who still wants an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, admitted despairingly after last month’s cross-border terror attacks from Sinai that “When the border between Israel and Egypt is open to murderers, it’s harder to condemn Israel’s leaders for refusing to utter the words ‘negotiation on the basis of the ’67 borders.'”
As Bechor noted, the land-for-peace approach has several inherent problems. First, it encourages the Arabs to view peace as a concession Israel must pay for rather than something of value to them. Second, it trades an easily-reversed asset (peace) for an almost irreversible one (land), which undermines deterrence: The Arabs can abrogate their side of the bargain without fear of losing the quid pro quo they received. I’d also add a third: It encourages war by making aggression cost-free. After all, the land in question was captured in a defensive war against three Arab states in 1967; agreeing to return every last inch – as Israel did in Sinai and Gaza and is now expected to do in the West Bank – thus sends the message Arabs risk no permanent territorial losses by attacking Israel.
All these evils are obviously compounded when territory is given to people who loathe Israel (as both Egyptians and Palestinians do). Many Westerners seem to think this hostility would disappear if Israel would just “end the occupation.” Prize-winning reporter Anthony Shadid, for instance, asserted in the New York Times last month Egypt’s current hostility stems from “deep popular resentment over the plight of Palestinians,” thus implying it would vanish were this plight alleviated.
There’s only one problem with this theory: As a 2007 Pew Global Attitudes poll found, fully 80 percent of Egyptians think “Palestinians’ rights cannot be taken care of if Israel exists.” In short, their problem isn’t Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank, it’s Israel’s very existence. And 77 percent of Palestinians say the same.
It’s too late to reverse the withdrawal from Sinai, but it’s not too late to avoid repeating the same mistake in the West Bank. Thus, if Egypt’s new hostility awakens Israel to this danger in time, it will prove to have a silver lining.
As Michael has noted, the UN inquiry into Israel’s raid on last year’s Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza largely exculpated Israel. Yet the fact an otherwise balanced report found it necessary to accuse Israel of “excessive and unreasonable” force says a lot about the warped fashion in which the West now views any use of force.
After all, as the report itself acknowledged, Israeli soldiers “faced significant, organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers when they boarded the Mavi Marmara requiring them to use force for their own protection. Three soldiers were captured, mistreated, and placed at risk by those passengers. Several others were wounded.”
Specifically, the first 14 soldiers to land on the ship were attacked by dozens of passengers “armed with iron bars, staves, chains, and slingshots, and there is some indication that they also used knives.” Passengers later seized some of the soldiers’ guns, and two soldiers were shot; while it isn’t certain they were shot by passengers, “there is some reason to believe” they were, and certainly, the soldiers thought so at the time.
Nevertheless, the report declared the “loss of life and injuries resulting from the [soldiers’] use of force” to be “unacceptable,” insisting there was “no satisfactory explanation” for “any of the nine deaths,” and particularly for the fact “most of the deceased were shot multiple times.”
This begs an obvious question: How were the soldiers supposed to subdue this much larger group of heavily armed opponents, whom the report itself admits posed a threat to their own lives, without causing any injuries or deaths? The report provides no answer, because in reality, it’s simply not possible.
Moreover, as any soldier knows, a wounded opponent can still kill. Shoot a man in the leg, for instance, and he can still kill you with his iron bar, stave, chain, knife or gun. The Israelis also had no way of knowing what other weaponry passengers might have – whether, for instance, some might have wired themselves with explosives, as Islamic fanatics (which by this point the soldiers knew they were facing) often do. Under such circumstances, no soldier worth his salt shoots once and hopes for the best; he keeps shooting until he’s sure his opponent is out of action. In a fight of this kind, the unpleasant truth is shooting someone multiple times is often a necessary precaution to make sure your opponent doesn’t kill you first.
Granted, the soldiers might never have been in this situation had the raid not been so poorly planned and executed. But once they were attacked in a way that required them “to use force for their own protection,” nothing they did was “excessive and unreasonable”; they did what was necessary under the circumstances to protect themselves.
Thus the report’s implication is that injuring or killing another is never acceptable, even in self-defense; it’s always “excessive and unreasonable.” But if soldiers on a legitimate mission – which the report says enforcing the Gaza blockade was – can’t use lethal force even to save their own lives, then something is badly wrong with the West’s attitude toward the use of military force.
For Israelis, the findings of the UN inquiry into last year’s Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza contained little news; the Palmer Report largely echoed the conclusions of Israel’s own Turkel Committee probe: The naval blockade of Gaza was legal; Turkey should have done more to stop the flotilla; Israeli soldiers were brutally attacked by flotilla “activists” and had to use force in self-defense; the interception’s poor planning and execution led to unnecessary deaths. But the reactions from both Ankara and Washington have been highly instructive.
First, if anyone still harbored the illusion that the Israeli-Turkish relationship was salvageable, Ankara’s response to the report ought to disabuse them of this notion. What Turkey’s response makes clear is that Ankara never had the slightest interest in repairing its relationship with Jerusalem; what it wanted was to further blacken Israel’s international image, undermine Israel’s vital security interests and humiliate Israel by forcing it to come crawling. And given the UN’s anti-Israel record, Ankara understandably counted on the Palmer Report to do all three: blacken Israel’s image by finding it criminally culpable in the flotilla deaths; undermine its security interests by ruling the Gaza blockade illegal, thereby pressuring Israel to end it; and demand that Israel apologize to Turkey for the incident.
But when the report failed to do any of the above, Turkey flatly refused to accept its conclusions. Instead, it announced that it will pursue all the above goals by other means: It will try to secure indictments against Israeli officers and politicians in any court willing to take the case; it will appeal the Gaza blockade to a different UN forum, the International Court of Justice, which – given the precedent of the ICJ’s ruling on the security fence – would likely accept Turkey’s contention regarding its illegality; it will offer future flotillas to Gaza a Turkish naval escort, on the theory that Israel would have to let these flotillas through rather than risk war with Turkey, thereby effectively ending the blockade; and it will rescind these and other hostile measures only if Israel renders them unnecessary by surrendering unconditionally – i.e., by admitting culpability for the deaths, apologizing and ending the blockade.
In so doing, Turkey has made its position too clear for even the rosiest of rose-tinted glasses to disguise: It has irrevocably joined the >anti-Israel camp, and seeks only to undermine Israel in any waypossible.
But the Obama Administration’s reaction has been no less instructive. Start with the fact that US President Barack Obama worked a miracle I would have sworn was impossible: creating a UN-sponsored inquiry on Israel that produced reasonably fair and balanced conclusions. Add in the fact that Obama has been struggling to convince American Jews of his pro-Israel bona fides, and this would seem to be a golden opportunity to trumpet a pro-Israel achievement. All he would have to do is back the committee he himself established and demand that Turkey accept its conclusions (as Israel has) instead of escalating the conflict via its threatened legal and military moves. Instead, the administration is still demanding that Israel apologize to Turkey, even though the Palmer Report pointedly avoided demanding any such thing: It said merely that Israel should express regret and offer compensation to the bereaved families – both steps Israel has repeatedly offered to take, but that Turkey rejected as insufficient, insisting nothing less than an apology (i.e., an admission of culpability) would do.
Moreover, Washington has yet to utter a word of criticism of Ankara over its refusal to accept the report’s conclusions and its crude anti-Israel threats. Even Germany’s normally anti-Israel foreign minister – who himself deemed the Gaza blockade “unacceptable” less than a year ago – managed to say that Turkey should take the report’s conclusions “seriously” and avoid “aggravating the situation.” Yet the Obama administration has been silent.
The inescapable conclusion is that Obama’s goal in establishing the Palmer Commission was in fact identical to Turkey’s: He wanted a report that would incriminate Israel and thereby pressure it to capitulate to Turkey’s demands. And since, under heavy pressure from Obama, Israel agreed to cooperate with the commission – in contrast to its usual practice of boycotting UN inquiries because the UN is hopelessly biased against it – the administration would have had strong grounds for demanding that Israel accept the report’s conclusions even had they been unfavorable.
Yet since Turkey also cooperated, the administration has equally strong grounds for demanding that it accept the report’s conclusions. The thunderous silence Washington has maintained instead speaks louder than words: This wasn’t the outcome we wanted, and now we don’t quite know what to do to achieve the desired Israeli capitulation beyond continuing our behind-the-scenes pressure for an Israeli apology.
I’ve argued elsewhere that apologizing to Turkey would undermine Israel’s interests twice over, given that Turkey under the Islamist AKP party has clearly made a strategic choice to end the alliance. Fortunately, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu seems to understand that an apology would be counterproductive. But he’s still reiterating the tired mantra that Israel wants to “improve relations with Turkey.”
Instead, Israel should be leveraging the Palmer Report – and Turkey’s rejection of it – to prove to the world that Turkey under the AKP is no longer force for regional stability; it has become a fomenter of conflict, and must be treated as such. Granted, it would be helpful to have Washington’s backing in this endeavor, but as the Obama administration’s response to the report makes clear, that won’t happen: In this spat (as in most others), Obama is backing Israel’s enemy.
Nevertheless, Israel must do its best to press this point on its own. The Palmer Report is a golden opportunity to force the world to face up to the reality that Turkey has changed. Jerusalem must not waste it by continuing the empty pretense that Ankara is still the valued ally of yesteryear
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
One of the most troubling reports to emerge following the August 18 terror attacks near Eilat was that the government had ordered the army to significantly bolster its deployment along the southern border over a year ago, but the army simply disregarded the order.Some years ago, the government created an independent National Security Council to break the Israel Defense Forces’ monopoly over security assessments. The NSC’s role was to evaluate all available information and prepare its own assessments, so that the government need not blindly accept the IDF’s conclusions: It could compare IDF assessments and recommendations with those of the NSC and then choose a course of action.
Last year, the NSC recommended significantly boosting the IDF’s deployment along the southern border until construction of a planned new border fence was finished. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak subsequently approved this recommendation. But according to a report in Haaretz last week, then-Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi never implemented this decision: Instead of a significant increase, he authorized only small, temporary increases in response to specific intelligence warnings. In short, if Haaretz‘s report is true, he deliberately disobeyed the elected government’s orders.
One can understand why Ashkenazi might have disliked the government’s order: Back then, the main threat from Sinai was the flow of illegal migrants; a veteran soldier would naturally prioritize the conventional military threat posed by Israel’s northern neighbors. But once the elected government has decided, it’s the army’s job to obey to the best of its ability. That Ashkenazi instead simply ignored the order is shocking.
The excuse offered by the IDF Spokesman Office does nothing to mitigate the offense. As quoted in the Haaretz report, it contended that the NSC gives the army “various recommendations,” all of which are “examined and implemented in light of the situation assessment.” But once the government has approved an NSC proposal, it’s no longer just a “recommendation” to be implemented or not at the army’s discretion; it’s an order that must be obeyed. That the IDF seems not to understand this distinction is, again, shocking.
Nor did the situation change after Benny Gantz replaced Ashkenazi at the IDF’s helm on February 14. Since Gantz was a last-minute replacement hauled out of retirement to take the job after the legal establishment nixed the government’s first choice, he wasn’t granted an orderly transition period; his appointment was approved a mere day before he took office. Nevertheless, he cannot credibly plead ignorance of last year’s order, because he served as deputy chief of staff from October 2009 through November 2010. As such, he presumably knew about both the government’s decision and Ashkenazi’s failure to implement it. Yet he made no move to rectify the omission.
This, if possible, is even more troubling, because it shows not only contempt for the government’s authority, but poor judgment. Gantz took office three days after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned, and Mubarak’s fall produced a rapid deterioration in the security situation in Sinai. Over the last seven months, for instance, five successive attacks on the Egyptian-Israeli natural gas pipeline have kept it shut almost continuously; that compares to zero attacks in the previous three years. No military genius was required to realize that the same security vacuum that produced the pipeline attacks could produce cross-border terror attacks; I wrote as much back in May, and I have no military experience whatsoever. But Gantz, the 44-year veteran, evidently couldn’t see it: He ordered deployment along the southern border beefed up only after the Eilat attacks.
Ironically, the one officer who evidently did take the Sinai threat seriously was the man the government wanted as chief of staff: Yoav Galant. According to the Haaretz report, the last significant boost in the IDF’s deployment along the southern border occurred four years ago, when Galant, as GOC Southern Command, allocated more resources to this border from within his own command.
There’s obviously no guarantee that Galant would have beefed up the border further had his appointment gone through. Nor would an increased troop presence necessarily have prevented the negative outcome of the Eilat attacks: the loss of both Israeli and Egyptian lives and the consequent diplomatic crisis with Egypt. But war with Egypt would clearly be disastrous, and it ought to be equally clear, as I wrote both in May and last week, that enough such border incidents could eventually spark one. Hence trying to prevent such incidents should be top priority.
And as it turns out, the government actually did try: It decided over a year ago to boost deployment along the southern border, and it chose a new chief of staff who took the Sinai problem seriously.
But a coterie of unelected officials thwarted its efforts. Two successive chiefs of staff reportedly ignored its deployment order, while the state comptroller, attorney general and Supreme Court joined forces to nix its preferred choice to succeed Ashkenazi – and did so, incidentally, over alleged offenses far less serious than rank insubordination. That left the government scrambling for a last-minute replacement whom the legal mandarins would deem acceptable. And on this score, Gantz qualified.
The outcome obviously raises serious questions about Israel’s security. But it raises even more serious questions about Israel’s democracy. No country can call itself a democracy if its military is not subordinate to the elected civilian government. But in Israel, it turns out, the elected government has no control over the army: It can neither force a recalcitrant chief of staff to do its bidding nor replace him with a successor of its own choosing.
So is Israel in fact still a democracy? Or is it governed by an unelected junta of legal and military officials hiding behind the façade of democratic government? It’s hard to say precisely where the tipping point lies, but the trend is clear: For far too long, the unelected officials have been expanding their power at the expense of the elected ones. And unless the elected government starts fighting back, Israel can kiss its democracy good-bye.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
Today’s terror attack in Tel Aviv was unusual in that it originated in the West Bank, where a continuous, proactive Israel Defense Forces presence has virtually eradicated terror. In contrast, Israel suffers daily terrorism from Gaza, which the IDF left six years ago, and repeated “cease-fires” never actually cease the fire: This weekend, for instance, three rockets hit southern Israel despite the “cease-fire” announced last week by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees.
During the last six years, Gazan terrorists have fired more than 7,000 rockets and mortars at Israel. That successive Israeli governments have allowed this terror to continue is an abdication of any government’s primary responsibility: ensuring its citizens’ security. But it has also had devastating strategic consequences.
As former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer noted, it acclimated the world to the idea rocket fire on Israel is perfectly acceptable, with the result that when Israel finally did strike back in 2008, it suffered universal condemnation, culminating in the infamous Goldstone Report. As Haaretz Palestinian affairs correspondent Avi Issacharoff noted, it has convinced the terrorists Israel fears them, emboldening them to escalate their terror. As Rabbi Eric Yoffie noted, it undermines the raison d’etre of a Jewish state, which is to protect Jews. And you needn’t be “right-wing” to reach these conclusions; all of the above are outspoken liberal doves.
Now, as I’ve written elsewhere, the terrorist enclave in Gaza also threatens Israel’s peace with Egypt. This month’s terror attacks near Eilat, perpetrated by Gazans who traversed the Sinai to attack across the Egyptian-Israeli border, sparked a major diplomatic crisis with Cairo when several Egyptian soldiers were killed in the cross-fire; this success will surely prompt the terrorists to try to repeat it. And if enough Israelis and Egyptians are killed along their mutual border, an Egyptian-Israeli war could erupt.
For all these reasons, eliminating the Gazan terrorist enclave is imperative. But this can’t be done via a short-term operation like 2008’s; only a long-term IDF presence in Gaza will do.
The claim “there’s no military solution to rocket fire” is patently absurd. During those same years when Gazan terrorists fired more than 7,000 missiles at Israel, not a single rocket was fired from the West Bank. So unless you believe that West Bank terrorists, unlike their Gazan counterparts, never wanted to launch rockets, the obvious conclusion is the IDF’s continuous, proactive presence has thus far prevented West Bank terrorists from acquiring rocket-launching capabilities.
The diplomatic arguments against such a move are far more serious: The international outcry would be enormous. But continued delay will only further embolden the terrorists, further accustom the world to the idea terrorists are entitled to shoot rockets at Israel with impunity, and make war with Egypt more likely. Indeed, the Eilat attacks put the diplomatic consequences of inaction on stark display: Though Israel had precise intelligence about the attacks, its government rejected a Shin Bet security service recommendation to thwart them via a preventive strike on Gaza, fearing Egypt’s anger. In consequence, the attacks went ahead and several Egyptians were killed – outraging Egyptian public opinion far more than a strike on Gaza would have.
Gaza’s terrorist regime must be destroyed. Israel can no longer afford any other outcome.
The diplomatic imbroglio with Egypt sparked by Thursday’s terror attack near Eilat makes one thing crystal clear: The price of Israel’s decision to tolerate a terrorist quasi-state on its southern border has just gotten a lot higher. Before, terror from Gaza merely threatened the lives and peace of residents of the south. Now, it also threatens Israel’s peace with Egypt – and devastating though Palestinian rocket attacks are, war with Egypt would be a whole lot worse.
Since the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, terrorists have enjoyed free rein in Sinai. As former ambassador to Egypt Zvi Mazel noted, even retired Egyptian generals have begun raising the alarm about this situation. But you don’t have to be a general to see that the problem exists; it’s patently obvious.
Over the last six months, for instance, five separate attacks on the Egyptian-Israeli natural gas pipeline have kept it almost permanently shut, thereby depriving Israel of gas and Egypt of badly needed foreign currency. This compares to zero successful attacks in the three years between the pipeline’s 2008 opening and the start of Egypt’s revolution in January 2011. Even worse, Thursday’s cross-border attack took place in broad daylight, right in front of an Egyptian army outpost, without the soldiers lifting a finger to stop it. The Egyptian border policemen on patrol whom Israeli troops allegedly killed in their effort to repulse the terrorists were also clearly at the scene; otherwise, they wouldn’t have been in the line of fire. Yet they, too, did nothing to stop it from happening.
I’ve argued elsewhere that this may be deliberate policy on Cairo’s part. But from Israel’s perspective, it doesn’t really matter whether the upsurge of terror in Sinai is due to deliberate policy or simple incompetence: Either way, it poses a grave threat.
Unlike the pipeline attacks, to which Israel can and should respond merely by finding a new gas supplier, terror attacks on its own territory and citizens necessitate military action to repel them. Hence every such attack could potentially spark clashes with Egyptian troops along the border, just as last Thursday’s did: Distinguishing terrorists from Egyptian soldiers will always be difficult in the heat of battle, even if the terrorists don’t complicate matters by wearing what eyewitnesses described as Egyptian army uniforms.
And this is where Gaza comes in – because it’s only the Palestinian terror organizations in Gaza that actually have an interest in such cross-border attacks. The Sinai Bedouin who perpetrated most of the other attacks of the last six months may not love Israel, but their primary target is the regime in Cairo. That’s precisely why all their attacks targeted symbols of Egypt’s central government, such as the pipeline (which also supplies Jordan) and the El-Arish police station, rather than targets inside Israel.
Thursday’s attack, in contrast, was perpetrated by Palestinians who crossed into Sinai from Hamas-run Gaza via the smuggling tunnels. And they have every incentive to keep perpetrating such attacks, because this one succeeded beyond their wildest dreams: It killed and wounded many Israelis; it created a diplomatic crisis between Israel and Egypt; and it doesn’t appear to have endangered Hamas’s own relationship with Egypt in the slightest.
That last is critical, because Hamas is highly dependent on Cairo: Not only is Egypt Gaza’s gateway to the world, but Hamas’s current patron, the Assad regime in Syria, may not survive, and Cairo has been demonstrating interest in taking over the job (see, for instance, its lifting of the Egyptian blockade on Gaza, or the rampant increase it has allowed in arms smuggling from Sinai into Gaza). Hence had Egypt objected to the Palestinians staging a cross-border attack on Israel from its territory, Hamas might well think twice about permitting another one.
But so far, Cairo hasn’t uttered a peep about the Palestinians’ use of its territory to attack Israel. Instead, it has directed all its ire at Israel – not only for erroneously killing its soldiers, but for daring to shoot back at terrorists who were firing over the border from Sinai, for launching retaliatory airstrikes on the terrorists’ leaders in Gaza (further evidence that it’s auditioning for the role of Hamas’s new patron), and even for stating the obvious out loud: It was furious over Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s statement that Egypt is “losing its grip” on Sinai. When coupled with the weekend’s anti-Israel demonstrations in Egypt and the calls by Egyptian presidential contenders for suspending or even abrogating relations with Israel, all this sends a clear message: Hamas can continue allowing Gazan terrorists to attack Israel via Sinai without any danger to its own relationship with Cairo.
Hence Israel now faces a stark choice: Either it gets rid of the terrorist enclave in Gaza, or it will suffer more and more cross-border attacks from Sinai that will cause more and more inadvertent Egyptian casualties, with devastating consequences for Israeli-Egyptian peace.
Clearly, all-out war on Hamas in Gaza would have also serious negative consequences: Israeli casualties, massive international condemnation and, given Cairo’s new role as Hamas’s patron, quite possibly even the severance of Egypt’s relations with Israel.
But while Egypt might sever relations over Gaza, it won’t go to war over it. In contrast, continued cross-border fighting between Israel and Egypt, with a growing body count on both sides, really could spark an Israeli-Egyptian war.
And if Israel must fight, war with Hamas is far better than war with Egypt. Not only would the latter be far more devastating, but Israel has nothing to gain from fighting Egypt. War with Hamas, in contrast, at least offers the prospect of a strategic benefit to offset its costs: finally abolishing the terrorist enclave on Israel’s border.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.
As Jonathan noted yesterday, Hamas-run Gaza provides a grim warning of what an independent Palestinian state might look like. But the picture presented by Israel’s alleged “peace partner,” the Palestinian Authority, isn’t a whole lot better, as its response to last Thursday’s cross-border raid near Eilat makes clear. That attack killed eight Israelis and wounded 30 on sovereign, pre-1967 Israeli territory. Yet the PA’s response was to condemn not the assailants, but Israel.
On Saturday, PA President Mahmoud Abbas sought an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss “halting Israeli aggression” in Gaza. Not a word about halting the anti-Israeli aggression that sparked Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes. Indeed, the PA didn’t even acknowledge that aggression’s existence. Instead, as the Jerusalem Post reported, “PA officials claimed that Israel was stepping up its attacks on the Gaza Strip in a bid to thwart the September statehood bid and avoid the internal economic and social crisis.”
Mohammed Subh, the PA envoy to the Arab League, for instance, charged that “Israel is preparing for war to distract attention from the Palestinian Authority’s plan for September [its bid for UN recognition as a state] … We were expecting Israel to intensify tensions in the region as we approached the September deadline.” Nimer Hammad, a senior adviser to Abbas, offered an alternative theory: “The Israeli government is trying, through this new aggression, to avoid internal pressure because of the demonstrations,” referring to the recent socioeconomic protests.
Not a single Palestinian official acknowledged the truth: that Israel was responding to a vicious cross-border attack. And about the attack itself, the PA hadn’t a word to say. This, as Israeli government officials told the Jerusalem Post, is a new low: Even Yasser Arafat would issue pro forma condemnations of terror attacks (albeit only in English); the “peace-seeking” Abbas dispensed even with this.
But that’s not so surprising, given that Abbas has continued Arafat’s tradition of inciting terror. Earlier this month, for instance, Palestinian Media Watch reported on a new Ramadan special, innocuously titled “The Best Mothers,” now airing on the PA’s government-run TV station. Already, it has featured the mothers of two terrorist “martyrs” – a bomb-maker and a female suicide bomber. In both cases, these “best mothers” lauded the terrorist activities that killed their offspring.
So here we have the face of Israel’s “peace partner”: It actively incites terror, refuses to condemn it, and seeks to prevent Israel from exercising its right of self-defense against it. In short, it facilitates terror in every way possible short of actively perpetrating it – or in other words, in every way possible while the Israel Defense Forces still maintain security control over its territory – and would likely ramp up its activities if the brake provided by the IDF’s presence were removed.
Abbas can get away with this because the world persists in seeing him as a “peace seeker” and ignores all evidence to the contrary. But it’s high time for Israel and its friends to stop cooperating with his charade.