Terror Tunnels The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas (10 page)

July 10, 2014

Israel’s military action against Hamas terrorist rockets is a preview of what the entire civilized world is likely to face in the near future.

Islamic militant terrorists—whether they are called ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah—use or will be using similar tactics. They target civilians while hiding among civilians in order to induce democracies to kill civilians so that the media will show gruesome pictures of dead children and blame these deaths on the democracy, rather than the terrorists who use children and other civilians as human shields.

The democracy is then put to the tragic choice of either allowing terrorist attacks against its own civilians or taking military action that risks the lives of enemy civilians.

That is precisely the choice that Israel has had to make as hundreds of rockets are directed at its cities from densely populated civilian areas in Gaza. Israel has been very careful to try to minimize civilian casualties. They drop leaflets, make phone calls, and even send noisemaking bomblets to warn civilians to leave areas to which rockets are being fired. Mostly the civilians leave. Sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, the Israeli military does not fire at the rockets, thereby putting their own civilians at risk.

Yet some in the media describe the current situation in Gaza as a “cycle of violence.” The reality, of course, is that there is no such cycle. It is a one-way street that Hamas has driven down precisely in order to create the illusion of a cycle with equal blame on both sides.

There is no comparison—legally, morally, diplomatically, or by any other criteria—between what Hamas is doing and how Israel is responding. Hamas is willfully and deliberately committing a double war crime by targeting Israeli civilians and using Palestinian civilians as human shields. The deliberate targeting of civilians, as Hamas admits—indeed boasts—it is doing, is a clear war crime. Hamas has specifically aimed its lethal rockets at Beersheba, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. This is a war crime.

Moreover, it is firing these rockets from hospitals, schools, and houses in densely populated areas in order to cause Israel to kill Palestinian civilians. This too is a war crime.

I have called this Hamas’s “dead baby strategy.” It deliberately puts Israel to the tragic choice of attacking the rockets and killing some children who are used as human shields, or refraining from attacking the rockets and thereby placing their own children at risk.

Israel has generally chosen the option of refraining from attacking legitimate military targets, but when any human shields are inadvertently killed or injured, Hamas stands ready to cynically parade the dead civilians in front of television cameras, which transmit these gruesome pictures around the world with captions blaming Israel.

Hamas has also adamantly refused to build bomb shelters for its civilian population. It has built shelters but has limited access to them to Hamas terrorists. This is precisely the opposite of what Israel does—building shelters for its civilians and placing its soldiers in harm’s way.

Most recently Hamas has forced or encouraged civilians to stand on the rooftops of military targets so as to prevent Israel from attacking these entirely appropriate targets. Indeed a lawsuit is now being brought in Israel, against the Israeli military, urging it to ignore these human shields and to attack the military targets.

The argument is that unless the military targets are attacked, Israeli civilians will die, and a democracy has the obligation to prefer the lives of its own civilians over the lives of enemy civilians. Thus far the Israeli military has refrained from attacking military targets that are protected by human shields.

Nor was there any symmetry between the kidnapping and brutal murder of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas operatives and the equally despicable killing of an Arab teenager by a handful of Israeli individuals.

The Hamas-inspired kidnapping was part of a long-term Hamas policy. Hamas has built dozens of tunnels between Gaza and Israel for the sole purpose of kidnapping and/or killing Israeli civilians. I have been inside one such tunnel, whose exit was just yards away from an Israeli kindergarten with dozens of children. The killing of the three Israeli teenagers was a result of Hamas’s policy, regardless of whether the specific decision to kill the youths was or wasn’t made at the top levels of the Hamas leadership.

The killing of the Palestinian youth, to the contrary, was clearly against the wishes of the Israeli government, the Israeli people, and Israeli policy. It was the act of deranged extremists—an act that hurt Israel terribly both internally and externally. Yet many in the international media insist on comparing these two very different atrocities.

The entire civilized world should be standing behind Israel as it defends itself against war crimes, because what Israel is doing is precisely what every democracy would do if faced with similar threats to its civilian population. That so many continue to support—or remain silent about—those who commit these war crimes tells us something deeply disturbing about their values and prejudices.

The world must come to realize that the major conflict today is between Islamic extremists—such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Hamas—who will stop at nothing to achieve their theological-political-military goals, and democracies that must fight these extremists while complying with the rule of law. Israel should be praised for leading the way.

20

The Current Conflict between Israel and Hamas Shatters Myths

July 10, 2014

The current warfare between Hamas and Israel shatters two myths that have been accepted as gospel by many in the international community and the media.

Myth 1: The primary cause of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is the occupation of the West Bank and Israel’s settlement policy.

Reality: The reality is that Hamas’s rocket attacks against Israeli cities and civilian targets have little to do with Israel’s occupation and settlement policy on the West Bank. Even if Israel were to make peace with the Palestinian Authority, the rocket attacks from Gaza would not stop. These Hamas attacks are incited by the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, Syria, and others opposed to the very concept of the nation-state for the Jewish people. The best proof of this reality is that these attacks began as soon as Israel ended its occupation of Gaza and uprooted all the civilian settlements from that area. Israel left behind agricultural hothouses and other equipment that the residents of Gaza could have used to build a decent society.

Moreover, there was no siege of Gaza at that time. Gaza was free to become a Singapore on the Mediterranean. Instead, Hamas engaged in a coup d’état, murdering many members of the PA, seizing control of all of Gaza, and turning it into a militant theocracy. It used the material left behind by the Israelis not to feed its citizens but to build rockets with which to attack Israeli civilians. It was only after these rocket attacks that Israel began a siege of Gaza designed to prevent the importation of rockets and material used to build terrorist kidnap tunnels.

There are good reasons why Israel should change its settlement policy in the West Bank and try harder to achieve peace with the PA.

But even if that were to be accomplished, the rockets from Gaza would continue and Israel would have to take the kind of military steps any democracy would take to protect its civilians from lethal aggression.

Myth 2: Mahmoud Abbas is part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Reality: Mahmoud Abbas has become part of the problem. He has publicly supported Hamas in its war crimes against Israeli civilians and has characterized Israel’s self-defense actions as “genocide” against all of the Palestinian people. I have met Abbas and found him to be a decent man who genuinely wants a peaceful solution to the conflict, but he is not a man of courage who is prepared to stand up and tell the Palestinian people the truth about the current conflict. His willingness to join together with Hamas in a governmental partnership demonstrates both his weakness and his willingness to be complicit with evil. He speaks out of two sides of his mouth, one side when he speaks in English to Western media and diplomats, and the other when he speaks in Arabic to the Palestinian street, which he knows contains many supporters of Hamas. His public support for Hamas has made it far more difficult for Israel to arrive at a negotiated solution with the PA. It has also made it more difficult for Hamas to stop the rocket barrage and agree to a cease-fire.

21

Israel Must Maintain Its Weapons Siege of Gaza

July 14, 2014

Whenever the current conflict in Gaza ends, and whatever the terms of any cease-fire, Israel will have to maintain its weapons siege against Gaza.

The current conflict plainly revealed how inadequate the previous siege was. Thousands upon thousands of rockets, including long-range ones capable of hitting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and the West Bank, found their way into Gaza despite the siege that Israel began after the rocket fire that accompanied Israel’s decision to end its military occupation of Gaza. Some of these rockets came from Iran, others from Syria, while still others were assembled in Gaza from material brought in from the outside.
³¹
These rockets place Israeli civilian lives in jeopardy, even if the Iron Dome has shown success in thwarting most of them.

There can be absolutely no doubt that a military blockade designed to prevent the importation of lethal aggressive weapons is entirely lawful under international law. Even a UN commission, not known for its partiality toward Israel, agreed that the naval blockade was entirely lawful.
³²
Our own State Department concluded that such a blockade was lawful when the United States quarantined Cuba in a successful effort to keep the former Soviet Union from shipping nuclear missiles to its shores.

Any future quarantine should exclude food, medicine, and other necessities of life that do not pose a direct threat to Israeli security. But there must be a total quarantine on the importation of rockets and rocket parts. This includes the shutting down of the many smuggling tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, or at the very least, some reliable inspection of what is allowed to go through those tunnels. It obviously also includes a shutting down of
all
of the terrorist tunnels that now exist or are being built between Gaza and Israel proper. The only purpose of these tunnels is to allow Hamas to kidnap and/or kill Israelis and to bring them or their bodies back to Gaza to hold them in exchange for Hamas prisoners.

No country is required to accept such lethal threats to its citizens. The only other possible alternative to an enhanced military siege is for there to be
reliable
inspectors throughout Gaza whose job it is to prevent the rearming of Hamas. It is unlikely that Hamas would agree to any such inspectors. The experience in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has armed to the teeth right in front of United Nations inspectors, demonstrates how difficult this task would be even if Hamas agreed to some monitoring.

Israel made a serious mistake in ending the
military
occupation of Gaza. It was right to end the settlement project, which did not serve to enhance Israel’s security. There is an enormous difference—in law, in morality, and in practicality—between a
military occupation
and
civilian settlements
. Under the laws of war, a military occupation may continue until the enemy has put down its arms and the risk to the other side has been eliminated or at least significantly diminished. Those conditions were not met when Israel ended its military occupation of Gaza back in 2005. Israel should have maintained a sufficient military force in Gaza to assure that thousands of rockets could not be built or fired from hostile territory.

It is probably too late now, and too costly, for Israel to reoccupy the Gaza Strip. A far less restrictive alternative is to enhance the military siege while eliminating any humanitarian siege. This will not be easy to accomplish, but it is far better than maintaining the current status quo whereby Hamas fires rockets at Israel, is attacked, achieves a cease-fire, rearms, attacks Israel again, and is attacked in turn. An ounce of weapons siege is worth a pound of rocket fire and air attacks.

Any siege of Gaza, even if it is limited to a weapons siege, will have a negative impact on the million and a half civilians who live in that densely populated area. But if the siege is limited to weapons, the impact will be far less than the inevitable deaths and injuries caused by Hamas firing rockets into Israel and Israel retaliating. Although the blame for these civilian deaths falls squarely on the shoulders of Hamas, because it is Hamas that fires its rockets from densely populated areas, it is the Palestinian civilians who pay the heavy price. They pay this heavy price because Hamas deliberately refuses to build shelters for its civilians. They do build shelters and tunnels to protect their terrorists, those who fire the rockets and other combatants. Hamas could easily fire its rockets from the many spacious areas outside of Gaza City. It could build military bases from which to wage warfare. But instead it has chosen this dead baby strategy, whereby it encourages or compels civilians to become human shields, precisely in order to display the dead babies, women, and disabled whom they know will be killed when Israel attacks their rockets.

A weapons siege imposes a heavy toll on the civilian population, but the toll would not be nearly as heavy as that imposed by the current Hamas strategy. The great tragedy is that Israel, like any democracy, is put to three tragic choices:

1. It could tolerate thousands of rockets being aimed at its civilians in the hope that the Iron Dome will prevent deaths and injuries;
   
2. It can respond to these rocket attacks by proportionate and targeted military strikes, as it is now doing; or
   
3. It can prevent the rearming of Hamas by a narrowly limited weapons siege.