Israel is likely to face advanced Iranian weaponry, long-range rockets, large missile silos and dozens of kilometers of
underground tunnels connecting open fields with urban centers in the event of a future conflict with Hamas in the
Gaza Strip, according to the latest Israeli assessments.
A Kassam rocket crew in Gaza [file].
Photo: Channel 2 [file]
Since Operation Cast Lead ended almost a year ago, Hamas has increased its weapons smuggling and today operates hundreds
of tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor. It has smuggled in dozens of long-range Iranian-made rockets that can reach Tel
Aviv as well as advanced anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank missiles.
Hamas is believed to have a significant number of shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles and 9M113 Konkurs, which have a
range of four kilometers and are capable of penetrating heavy armor.
In addition, Hamas is believed to have today a few thousand rockets, including several hundred with a range of 40
kilometers and several dozen with a range of between 60 and 80 km. Intelligence assessments are that Hamas smuggled the
missiles into theGaza Strip through tunnels, possibly in several components.
Iran already supplies Hamas with 122mm Katyusha rockets that are smuggled into Gaza in several pieces and then assembled
by Hamas engineers.
One of the main lessons Hamas learned from Cast Lead was the need to reinforce its defenses and as a result has invested
efforts in digging additional tunnels, which connect open fields with homes belonging to key operatives as well as command
centers.
The idea is to enable freedom of movement for the operatives between different battlefields, which it found difficult
during Israel's ground offensive inGaza earlier this year.
Hamas has also increased its use of civilian infrastructure, particularly mosques, which the terror group already used
quite extensively for storage and launching rockets during the operation. Hamas is believed to have taken control of almost
80 percent of the mosques inGaza, using them to store weapons and set up command-and-control centers.
Hamas, is "padding" itself as well by setting up its command centers in large apartment buildings. This way, it
believes, the IDF will not attack them by air, and will need to send ground forces deep into the population centers, where
it will lose its technological advantage.
In addition, Hamas is hoping to increase the effectiveness of its rocket capability during a future conflict and has
created large missile silos.
Hamas has also recently increased its efforts to dig what the IDF calls "offensive tunnels" close to the border with
Israel, which the terror group could use to infiltrate into Israel and kidnap soldiers.
These tunnels are believed to be of strategic value for Hamas, which would only use them for large-scale attacks and
high-value targets.
Here is my essay from the website of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. (SPME).
SPME is an important academic organization composed of thousands of professors who are devoted to correcting the hatred and anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism of some professors and pro-Palestinian groups that are wreaking havoc on the education of young people, or seeking academic boycotts of Israeli professors. I am trying to raise some money for them, by asking for donations for SPME when people read chapters of my online book, Second Generation Radical, which is at www.howardrotberg.ca.
For 7 years, the Palestinians in Gaza sent a constant battery of
rockets against the Israeli civilians of Sderot and Ashkelon. The
bombing had only intensified when Israel pulled out of Gaza, turning it
over to the Palestinians. Finally, after 7 years and constant requests
from the residents under attack, Israel attacked Hamas in Gaza.
One of the targets of air attacks was the Islamic University in
Gaza, which had very close ties to Hamas. Hamas, although
democratically elected in Gaza, soon consolidated power by killing or
arresting members of its rival, Fatah, and thus established a
totalitarian regime.
According to Israel, two laboratories in the university were
targeted because they served as research and development centres for
Hamas's military wing. It was stated by Israeli intelligence that the
development of explosives was done under the auspices of university
professors.
University buildings were also used for meetings of senior
Hamas officials. Hamas is classified by most Western countries as a
“Terrorist Organization”.
The Israel Defence Forces said rockets and explosives were stored in the buildings.
Israel, being a liberal democracy, has a flourishing free press,
and opposition parties, (including Arab parties) and anyone from the
media or the political opposition, can find it career-enhancing to find
any false statements from the government. Like journalists and
opposition parties here, there is plenty of fact checking for
government allegations, and a journalist who proves a politician lying
can find that digging up the facts for that purpose can make his or her
career.
That is to say, in Israel itself, there is an inherent protection against false allegations. So, what I read in the Jerusalem Post or Ha’aretz (both online in English), I tend to believe.
Nothwithstanding the conversion of a university into a weapons
laboratory to be used against Israeli civilians in Southern Israel,
some Canadian university students are up in arms about the fact that
Israel bombed a university.
Most provocatively, the student council at York University,
Canada (the York Federation of Students) at a meeting that was supposed
to deal with the almost 12 week strike at York, deferred that topic to
unanimously adopt an anti-Israel set of resolutions.
One of the recitals to the resolutions stated that “on Monday
December 29 an F-16 fighter plane bombed the Science Laboratory and
Library of the Islamic University in Gaza, just a few hours before some
of its 20,000 students were to enter the campus to conduct exams.”
One of the resolutions stated: “RESOLVED THAT the York
Federation of Students show support and solidarity with the people of
Gaza by calling upon the Canadian government to pressure the government
of Israel to adhere to its' international legal obligations to end
attacks on civilian infrastructure and to allow unimpeded access for
all Palestinians to their educational institutions”.
One wonders about this kind of selective concern. Where were the
York students when Israeli civilians were the target of Hamas sponsored
bombing of Israeli universities, restaurants, cafes, buses and other
targets where Israeli civilians gathered?
Also, don’t the York students know that the fact that Israel
bombed the university lab “hours before some of its 20,000 students
were to arrive”, is an essential difference between Israeli military
who are commanded to take all necessary steps to minimize civilian deaths, and Hamas terrorists whose very purpose is to maximize civilian deaths?
Let us take a look at just one of the horrible incidents that
took place in Israel during what became known as the “Second Intifada”
in 2001 and 2002. I was in Israel during that period, writing my book, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author (Mantua Books).
On July 31, 2002, nine people - four Israelis and five foreign
nationals - were killed and 85 injured, 14 of them seriously, when a
bomb exploded in the crowded Frank Sinatra cafeteria on the Hebrew
University Mt. Scopus campus during its lunchtime. Hamas claimed
responsibility for the attack.
The bomber left the bomb in an innocent looking bag packed with
shrapnel in the cafeteria. The purpose of the shrapnel was to kill or
maim the maximum number of people.
Though classes were not in session, students were taking exams
at the time of the blast, and the cafeteria was crowded with diners.
There were also numerous students in the building registering for
classes for the coming school year.
The cafeteria is also near the Rothberg International School,
where about 80 pupils from the US and other Western countries had
arrived to prepare for the fall semester.
Most of the injured were between the ages of 18 and 30. The
explosion gutted the cafeteria. The dead and injured included Jews and
Arabs, Israeli nationals and foreign students.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has some 23,000 student, 5000 of them being Arabs.
According to Fox News, Hamas, which carried out the largest
number of Palestinian bombings during the Second Intifada, claimed
responsibility for the bombing during a rally in Gaza City that drew
some 10,000 supporters into the streets following evening prayers in
the mosques.
"This operation today is a part of a series of operations we
will launch from everywhere in Palestine," said a masked Hamas
militant, dressed in a green military uniform.
At the request of the masked Hamas speaker, the entire crowd
knelt to pray that future Hamas attacks "would succeed against the
enemy of God."
If one checks the internet, there are photographs of wildly
cheering Palestinians waiving Hamas flags and flashing victory signs,
as they celebrated some kind of victory over a student cafeteria.
In addition, how many readers know that in February, 2008, a
Hamas rocket (one of 40 launched that day!) landed at Sapir College in
Sderot, killing 47 year old student, Roni Yihye, who was survived by
four children, and injuring a pregnant Bedouin student? How many
newspapers in the West even bothered to report it? Did the students at
York even bother to research these facts before they make Israeli
actions the single most important issue in their agenda, even more
important than a resolution of the strike preventing students from
attending classes?
Israeli government officials delayed a substantial military
intervention in Gaza during 7 years of Hamas rockets against towns like
Sderot, where studies indicate that due to the frequent rockets and
sirens requiring refuge in bomb shelters, some 75% of the children are
suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
But, once it finally acted, the Israeli government and its
public took no joy in the Gaza operation. They only took joy when their
reservist children returned from service in the War, because Israelis
worship life just as surely as the residents of Gaza, with Hamas
turning them into human shields or suicide bombers, worship death. It
is just one of the distinctions that the student council at York
University seems not to grasp.
Howard Rotberg is the author of, the novel, The Second
Catastrophe, and two books of non-fiction, his most recent being
Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land.
His literary website is www.howardrotberg.ca and his blog is http://secondgenerationradical.blogmatrix.com/
In my book, The Second Catastrophe, I wrote about Palestinian disinformation with respect to an alleged "massacre" at Jenin that did not really happen, but which was very useful as the mainstream media all around the world printed the lie as if it was fact. I showed that this was part of a pattern of deliberate lies fed to the gullible western press, and that in fact a previous lie about civilian deaths in Jenin was perpetrated previously.
The question I keep asking is why, given the documented pattern of Palestinian lies, the mainstream media, in the Gaza war, kept printing Hamas/Palestinians fabricated allegations as fact. In one horrible piece of reporting Patrick Martin of Canada's Globe & Mail, reported Hamas claims without qualification, and then qualified Israeli claims as "Israel alleges" (my emphasis). This was common.
Israel of course is a liberal democracy and any governmental misinformation will be mined with glee by opposition parties or by the free press, whose reporters, like those elsewhere in the West, can make their careers by pointing out lies by government spokesmen. Hamas of course is a totalitarian fascist organization.
Why then would western journalists give equal credence to information flowing out of both sources? One reason is the vile philosophy of moral equivalency, where journalists take the immoral position that there is no absolute truth, and a totalitarian organization should be viewed identically to a liberal democracy. This position is morally reprehensible in that it stems from a self-hatred of the western democracies and a moral position that liberal democracies are no better than fascist states.
The second reason is that there is, within certain sectors, including journalists, an animus to the Jewish state. That allows them to publish the most shoddy journalism with the most outragious factual errors, and then absolve their poor reporting when the facts do come out by blaming Israel for not letting journalists free reign in the middle of a war zone, where they could compromise military operations in a host of ways.
Here are two important articles that should have appeared in the mainstream media, but didn't, for the reasons just mentioned.
Dear readers, please write to your local papers and ask them to correct the biased reporting, and publish the truth that is now coming out.
The first article concerns the number of dead. If you look at the Toronto Sun article written by C.U.P.E.'s Sid Ryan in defence of his position that no Israeli be allowed to teach at an Ontario University without disavowing Israeli actions in Gaza, you will see that he alleges Israeli human rights abuses, in effect war crimes, where he alleges Palestinian dead of over 1000, and then he states as fact that one quarter or 250 were children. But check this out:
January 25, 2009: Palestinians have found, in their decades of
fighting Israel, that well crafted lies can be an effective weapon. The recent
22 day battle in Gaza, between Hamas and Israel, ended with the Palestinians
claiming they had lost 1,300 dead, and the Israelis admitting to 13 (including
four soldiers from friendly fire.) Now, as reporters get into Gaza, and start
asking questions, the Palestinian death toll is starting to shrink. Medical
personnel at the Palestinian hospitals say that there appeared to be no more
than about 500 dead, and most of them were young males (guys of fighting age).
Civilian dead appear to have been no more than a hundred or so.
Gaza is not the first time this has happened.
Take the 2002 battle in Jenin, in the West Bank. Jenin was a refugee camp that
had been taken over by five terrorist groups (including Hamas) and used as a
base for launching over a hundred attacks on Israelis (mostly civilians.) The
fighting went on for nine days, and even before it was over (with a crushing
defeat for the terrorists) it was being claimed that the Israelis had massacred
over a thousand Arab civilians. But once a detailed investigation was conducted,
outside experts (most of them pro-Arab) concluded that only 53 Arabs were killed
(only five could be conclusively proven to be civilians), and 23 Israelis (who
went to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties). The rest were armed
Palestinians trying to kill Israelis. Some 200 Arab terrorists also surrendered,
and a few escaped the camp.
When the Palestinians first made their claims of
an Israeli massacre, the generally anti-Israeli Western media (especially in
Europe, where anti-Semitism was awakening from its post-World War II slumber)
accepted the claims and pumped out stories of the alleged Israeli barbarity. The
Palestinians provided photo ops and trained witnesses to the alleged atrocities.
Most Western media took all this at face value. Same thing happened recently in
Gaza, although there were a few more Western, and Moslem, journalists who were
skeptical. But they had to keep it down, as the Palestinian propaganda was still
ascendant.
Back in 2002, it wasn't long before the edifice
of lies began to crumble. Aerial photos of Jenin showed the area where the
fighting took place was very small area. Efforts to identify victims kept coming
up with only a few dozen dead. Some of more strident anti-Israeli groups
insisted that this was all a clever Israeli cover-up, and that hundreds of dead
Arabs were secretly carted away and disposed of. But no one could find anyone
who knew any of these mystery dead. The same thing is happening in Gaza. And why
wouldn't it.
---------------------
Then the anti-Israel crowd, will allege war crimes against an army that is so solicitious of enemy civilians that in fact, it drops leaflets, sends text messages and emails to civilians who live close to a military target, so that they can get out of harms way. Then, they ignore the series of Hamas war crimes (legal scholars like Canada's Irwin Cotler and Harvard's Allan Dershowitz have recently explained these war crimes, including the use of women and children as "human shields").
Here is a story that should have been reported by Western journalists if they were doing their jobs properly and were not guilty of anti-Israel bias:
A CHALLENGE for many civilians in Gaza during the
three-week war with Israel was dealing with Hamas, the radical Islamic movement
that has maintained control of the strip.
Mohammed Shriteh, 30, is an ambulance driver
registered with and trained by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
His first day of work at the al-Quds neighbourhood
was January 1, the sixth day of the war.
"Mostly the war was not as fast or as chaotic as I
expected," Mr Shriteh toldThe
Age."We would co-ordinate with the
Israelis before we pick up patients, because they have all our names and our
IDs, so they would not shoot at us."
Mr Shriteh said the more immediate threat was from
Hamas, who would lure the ambulances into the heart of a battle to transport
fighters to safety. He claims Hamas made several attempts to hijack the al-Quds
Hospital's fleet of ambulances during the war.
"After the first week, at night time, there was a
call for a house in Jabaliya (a heavily built-up area north-east of Gaza City),"
he said. "I got to the house and there was lots of shooting and explosions all
around."
Because of the urgency of the call, Mr Shriteh said
there was no time to arrange his movements with the Israel Defence Forces. "I
knew the Israelis were watching me because I could see the red laser beam in the
ambulance and on me, on my body," he said.
After getting out of the
ambulance and entering the house, he found three Hamas fighters taking cover
inside. One half of the building had already
been destroyed.
"They were very scared,
and very nervous … They dropped their weapons and ordered me to get them out, to
put them in the ambulance and take them away. I refused because if the IDF sees
me doing this I am finished, I cannot pick up any more wounded
people.
"And then one of the
fighters picked up a gun and held it to my head, to force me. I still refused,
and then they allowed me to leave."
Eyad al-Bayary, 32, lost his job as a senior nurse
at Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza City, about six months ago because he is
closely identified with Fatah, the rival political movement of Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Twice last year Mr Bayary was arrested by
Hamas, and once he was jailed for six days for flying the Fatah flag above his
house in Jabaliya.
He now works part time as an English teacher at
al-Azhar University.
"After the first day of the war, I go to the
hospital to work, to help, but I was told to go away. They tell me 'you are not
needed here' and they push me away," said Mr Bayary.
Since the ceasefire was declared on January 17,
Hamas has begun to systematically take revenge on anyone believed to have
collaborated with Israel before the war.
According to rumour, a number of alleged
collaborators have already been executed, but Taher al-Noono, the Hamas
government's spokesman, toldThe
Age175 people had been arrested so
far on suspicion of collaborating.
_______________________________________
Dear readers, the sad fact of the matter is that Western journalists have become part of the Palestinian propaganda machine. The reason they do this is based on anti-Israelism. They are in may cases copying the anti-Israelism of their more "sophisticated" European colleagues.
But these European colleagues have a reason for dissing Israel. If the Israelis are the new "Nazis" rather than the liberal democratic home of the remnants of the Jewish people left after the Europeans tried to kill us all, and after the Muslims countries expelled their Jewish citizens, then the Europeans can feel less guilty about their sordid past.
Why are Canadian, American or British journalists following suit, however? It is because those journalists are adopting anti-Semitic standards, ideologies and practices. They are accepting nonsense about Jewish "vengeance" as if all Israelis were direct descendants of the hateful Shylock of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice; they are accepting that "proportionality" is a moral or military dictum meaning that after Israeli civilians have been shelled for 6 years with Israel trying everything possible short of military action to stop it, when Israel does take military action, they have their hands tied because these journalists believe the ideology that the Jews must only kill as many Hamas terrorists as the Palestinians killed Jewish civilians.
There is something very wrong here.
I have been writing about this for six years, and the mainstream media will not accept any of my articles on this topic for publication - probably because I have a "political agenda", I am "biased", I am "pro-Israel", I do not find the truth to be at the mid-point between the parties' positions, or maybe even because I am a "racist" or perhaps saddest of all, I am the guy who, having been called a "fucking Jew" could not get the police to help, the civil rights organizations to help, the Jewish organizations to help, or even the newspapers to write about it, so I, like the Jews of Israel, are no more to be believed then the Palestinians with their years of practice in fabrications.
Unfortunately, as the Judge in the Kitchener Small Claims Court ruled, that "us against them" attitude disentitles me from Canadian Justice.
We are going down faster than even I expected when I wrote The Second Catastrophe six years ago.
When the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada were met by silence from the rest of the world, and American diplomats
pressured Israel to refrain from military responses against terror, we saw how this only encouraged more terror.
When Israel finally took action, in Operation Defensive Shield, the Palestinians made up facts about massacres in Jenin and
the world rose up to condemn Israel.
This was so bizarre, and so awful, it prompted me to write a book - my novel, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel
about a Book and its Author.
Then we watched for 7 years as Israel neglected to take action to protect its citizens from rocket attacks, again because
both its supposed friends (the U.S.) and its enemies (Muslim nations and Europe) were happy to see the Palestinians incite
their citizens to hatred and self-destruction, rather than build up Gaza.
When Israel finally took action in Operation Cast Lead, the anti-Israel fury of much of the rest of the world (Canada to its
everlasting moral honour stood up for what is right), rose to a fever pitch. Journalists wrote pathetic articles of
moral equivalence between a liberal state and a terrorist organization, feeling that they should give equal credence between
statements of a fascist organization and a liberal state. The Palestinians, as I have shown, have a documented
history of giving journalist disinformation, but no matter, Hamas statements were reported as fact, while Israeli statements
were reported as "allegations" - never mind that in a liberal democracy like Israel any lies by a government official are going
to become opportunities for free journalists and opposition members to later exploit to the maximum.
I have not written as much about the Gaza War as I would have liked. Instead, I am going to post the two best
articles that I have read that give a better understanding of the "big picture". Trying to understand what is happening
by counting dead bodies and watching CNN, BBC or CBC is quite simply a "fool's game". Without context, what we think we
see is not what is actually happening. Without journalists properly trained in the study of history, I have argued
before, we are given propoganda not insight.
I think my book, The Second Catastrophe, is more relevant today than ever before, and it is still available at select
bookstores, or by emailing mantua2003@hotmail.com or through the distributor at Teresa@Brantcord.com or by calling Teresa at
Mantua at 519 759-5800. Their practice is to mail out the book and an invoice for $25 and to trust the customer to send
in a cheque later.
But here are the two most important articles you will read on the Gaza situation:
Israel's war in Gaza has been met with cries of protest around the world. They come from two sources.
Natan Sharansky.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski [file]
First, there are those who oppose any Israeli effort to defend itself, mainly because they don't believe a Jewish state
should exist at all. This is a form of anti-Semitism, and such a view should be rejected outright rather than argued
with.
Second, there are those who support Israel's existence, but believe it is wrong to wage so harsh an assault on the Gaza
Strip.
This argument takes two forms: First, that Israel's response is disproportionate and therefore wrong; and second, that
there are less violent ways to handle Hamas - through international pressure, sanctions or negotiations.
Both of these claims, as logical as they may sound, ignore the lessons of history, including Israel's recent history in
fighting terror. In the 10 years I served as a minister in Israel's security cabinet, I learned just how mistaken such
arguments can be.
Practicing restraint
On June 1, 2001, a suicide bomber attacked the entrance to the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv. Twenty-one Israelis,
mostly young people, were killed, and more than 130 wounded. It was the latest in a long string of suicide bombings that
had been launched since the start of the Second Intifada in September 2000.
The next day, I took part in a dramatic cabinet meeting to discuss our options - a Shabbat-day meeting, which only a true emergency could justify. Most of the
ministers felt decisive action had to be taken.
Military officials presented a plan for uprooting the terror infrastructure, through a complex campaign in the heart of
Palestinian cities and refugee camps. Though the attack had been carried out by Hamas, it was clear that Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat had given them a green light. We had both the right and the ability to strike back.
Throughout the meeting, though, our foreign minister kept going in and out of the room, talking to world leaders
and reporting back. His message was clear: Right now Israel enjoys the sympathy of the international community.
As long as we keep our military response to a minimum, the world will continue to be on our side, and increased
diplomatic pressure will rein in the terror, he said. But if we launch a full-scale attack on the terrorists, we risk
losing the world's support and turning Arafat from an aggressor into a victim.
Proportionate response Eventually the prime minister was convinced of this approach, and the decision was made to stick to a proportionate
response - pinpoint attacks on terror cells, special operations, arrests - and to allow diplomacy to work its magic.
Over the next nine months, Israel held its fire, and the world indeed condemned terrorism. But the attacks only
increased.
In the heart of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, suicide bombers blew up coffee shops, buses and hotels. Nightlife ground to a
halt, tourism was decimated and hotels had to release most of their workers. One of my colleagues in the government,
Rehavam Ze'evi, was gunned down by terrorists.
In the meantime, the US suffered its own terror attacks on September 11 and put intense pressure on us not to retaliate
against the Palestinians, for fear of complicating its own war on alQaida.
The situation came to a head in March 2002, when more than 130 Israelis were killed in a single month alone - most
infamously on March 27, Pessah Eve, at the Park Hotel in Netanya.
The next day, the cabinet convened - again, in an extraordinary meeting during a religious holiday. The meeting started
at 6 p.m. and lasted throughout the night.
This time, however, the government decided to launch Operation Defensive Shield - the same plan the IDF had offered the
previous year.
Worst fears In the international arena, our worst fears were
realized.
The United Nations condemned us, and the US dispatched secretary of state Colin Powell to tell us to stop the assault
immediately. The global media mounted a brutal campaign depicting us as war criminals, spreading false rumors of the
wholesale butchering of Palestinian civilians, describing the operation as the worst atrocity of modern history.
The most outrageous of these rumors was the Jenin libel, which was portrayed in a film produced largely from the fertile
imagination of its director, and then shown around the world.
It didn't matter that, in fact, Israel had taken unprecedented measures to minimize civilian casualties, including
refraining from using either aerial or artillery bombardment, putting its own soldiers at unprecedented risk; or that the
UN commission that was created to investigate Jenin was soon disbanded for lack of evidence; or that the director of the
film admitted that he had misled his audience.
Reputation destroyed
For years to come, the "Jenin massacre" was the centerpiece of the antiIsrael propaganda machine, reverberating across
Europe and on US campuses as the symbol of Israeli iniquity. Our reputation was in tatters.
Yet all this was a small price to pay for what Israel gained. Within a few weeks, Palestinian terror was rendered
ineffective, with the number of Israelis killed falling from hundreds per month to fewer than a dozen over the next year.
Life returned to Israeli streets. Tourists returned by the hundreds of thousands. The economy started moving again.
No less important, though, was the effect Defensive Shield had on the Palestinians themselves. With the terror
infrastructure removed, Palestinians could begin rebuilding their civic institutions and changing their attitude toward
violence.
Over time, Arafat's policy of promoting terror was replaced by the far more cautious approach of his successor, Mahmoud
Abbas.
West Bank rebirth In more than six years since the operation, the West Bank's economy has boomed. If there is hope in the West Bank today, it is because Israel abandoned the ideas of proportionality and diplomacy in
handling terror.
The West Bank Palestinians know this; for
this reason, they have not joined in the world's rampant condemnation of Israel in the current war. While tens of thousands
protest in Europe, West Bankers are mostly silent.
Understanding the war in Gaza means recognizing the lessons of 2002. During the three years that passed after pulling
out all troops and settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel chose to respond to Hamas's deadly, daily rocket attacks
with proportionality and diplomacy.
The result? More rockets, more missiles, more misery for Palestinians - and enough breathing space for Hamas to take
over the Gaza Strip, devastate its society, build a much more powerful arsenal than it had in 2005 and become the vanguard
of Iranian expansionism in the region.
Cancer treatment
Terrorism is a cancer that can't be cured through "proportional" treatments. It requires invasive surgery. It threatens not
only democratic states that are its target, but also - foremost - the local civilians who are forced into its fanatical
ranks, deployed as human shields, and devastated by its tyranny.
The longer one waits to treat it, the worse it gets, and the harsher the treatment required to defeat it.
In southern Lebanon, where Israel failed to defeat the terrorists in 2006, the disease has only spread: Hizbullah now
has three times the missiles it had before, and the terrorists have gained a stranglehold on the Lebanese government.
Israel is determined not to repeat this mistake in Gaza.
Just as in 2002, Israel has chosen to fight the heart of terror, in the face of worldwide denunciation, mass demonstrations, UN resolutions, and talk of crimes
against humanity. Now, as then, it is the right decision.
The operation is painful: The number of civilians hurt and killed, while far fewer than in comparable operations around the world, is still intolerably high - a reflection of the size and depth of
the terror infrastructure that has grown there over the last three years.
As in 2002, the real beneficiaries of a successful Israeli campaign will be the Palestinians themselves. Peace can be
found only when Palestinians are given the freedom to build real civic institutions, and a leadership can emerge unafraid
of telling its own citizens that violence, fanaticism and martyrdom aren't the Palestinian way.
But this can happen only once the malignancy of terror is removed from their midst. As ugly as it sounds, it is the only
source of hope for Gaza.
The writer is chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Shalem Center, a former deputy
prime minister and the author of the recently published Defending Identity: Its Indispensable
Role in Protecting Democracy. The opinions expressed are his own.
And to understand American perfidy in the Middle East, and how Bush and Condy Rice have worked to undermine Israel's
postion (an argument made in The Second Catastrophe 5 years ago), here is Caroline Glick:
Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's diplomatic spat with outgoing US Secretary of StateCondoleezza Rice has been a bonanza for strategic minded gossips.
Olmert says that Rice was "embarrassed" because she planned to vote in favor of UN Security Council Resolution 1860, which calls for an immediate cease-fire between IDF forces
and Hamas terrorists. But, Olmert brags, he wrecked her plan by getting outgoing President George W. Bush to force her to
abstain.
As far as the commentators are concerned, Olmert's puerile attack on the American secretary of state in the midst of a
war shows that the he is still the same prideful, vain, motor-mouth that Israelis have come to know and despise over the
past several years. Then, too, by responding with borderline hysteria to Olmert's statement, Rice has demonstrated, once
again, that she remains a thin-skinned whiner.
These insights make for piquant news analyses. But they miss the most important truths that the Olmert-Rice slap-down
brought to the surface. Their fight tells us two crucial things. First, it tells us that when President-elect Barack
Obama enters office next week, Israel's relations with the US will be at a low point.
The US's abstention from the vote on Resolution 1860 is a stunning statement of hostility toward Israel. As former UN
Ambassador Dore Gold wrote in The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Resolution 1860 is drafted in a manner that presumes
moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. Both Israel and Hamas - an illegal terrorist organization - must stop
fighting, it says. The resolution also draws a false moral equivalence between Hamas's illegal rocket campaign against
Israeli civilians and Israel's assertion of its right to close its borders to enemy traffic.
While Olmert presents the US's abstention in the vote as a major diplomatic victory for Israel, in truth it is a
stunning defeat. The US was a cosponsor of Resolution 1860, along with Britain. The fact that the US sponsored such an
anti-Israel resolution in the first place is a major rebuke of Israel. And the fact that Washington then allowed the
deeply adversarial and dangerous resolution to pass only compounds the failure.
The second aspect of the US abstention on Resolution 1860 that is deeply disturbing is the fact that Israel's leaders
say they were taken completely by surprise by the move. On a simplistic level, the fact that apparently until the last
moment, Israeli officials were certain that the US was planning to veto the resolution or, at a minimum force a
significant delay in voting on the measure, bespeaks a remarkable incompetence on the part of Israel's UN mission and in
particular, it bespeaks a personal incompetence on the part of Ambassador Gabriela Shalev.
What were Israel's representatives at the UN doing in the days preceding the vote? Whom were they talking to? What
messages were they communicating to their UN colleagues and back home that the government could have been blindsided by
the US action?
And while this fiasco provides just cause for recalling Shalev to Israel, the buck on this one cannot stop with
her.
Shalev is not a professional diplomat. She had no notable experience in international affairs or public diplomacy to
speak of before Livni - who insisted that she would only appoint a woman to the post - sent her to Turtle Bay. Shalev
receives her guidance on how to deal with the US from Livni. And throughout her tenure as foreign minister, Livni,
together with Olmert has insisted that Israel's relations with the US have never been better.
But this has been anything but the case. On the issues of the most urgent importance to Israel, the US has repeatedly,
and with an ever growing degree of contempt and hostility, adopted positions diametrically opposed to Israel's
interests.
FOR INSTANCE, this week The New York Times reminded us that the US has refused to sell Israel refueling planes
and bunker-buster bombs necessary to attack Iran's nuclear sites. The US has also consistently refused Israeli requests
to overfly Iraqi airspace. The Times story reports that the administration answered Israeli requests to this
effect with a hearty, "Hell no!"
And it isn't just that the Bush administration has in recent years preferred to indulge the Iraqi leadership's
kneejerk anti-Semitism over supporting Israel's need to preempt threats of national annihilation. The Bush administration
has also belittled those threats and so allowed them to grow. Rice pushed the US on the road toward accepting Iran as a
nuclear power when she opted to join the EU-3 in their feckless negotiations with the mullahs in May 2007. Her decision
was followed by the deeply mendacious US National Intelligence Estimate released in November 2007, which claimed wrongly
that Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
The US's coddling of Iran at Israel's expense has also included its preference for the Hizbullah-dominated Lebanese
government and military over Israel's national security. In the 2006 war between Hizbullah and Israel, the US forbade
Israel from attacking Lebanese government targets, and so left Israel with few good options for fighting Hizbullah to
victory. The reason the US acted in this manner is because Rice wished to prolong the fiction that the pro-Western March
14 movement was in charge of the Lebanese government when, in fact, it was subservient to Hizbullah.
When Israel became bogged down, the US forced Jerusalem to accept a cease-fire that left Hizbullah in charge of
southern Lebanon and allowed it to rebuild its arsenals and present its campaign against the Jews as a strategic victory
for the forces of jihad. After Hizbullah staged a putsch against the pro-Western forces in the Lebanese government last
May, rather than acknowledge that Hizbullah is now in full control over the government and the military, the US has showered Lebanon with money and guns.
As for the Palestinians, over the past three years, the US has been expansive, indeed obsessive in its support
for Fatah - and through it for Hamas - at Israel's expense. Rather than recognize that the Palestinian voters' decision
to elect Hamas to lead them in January 2006 constituted a rejection of the notion of a two-state solution on the part of
Palestinian society, the Bush administration judged the move as an act of civil disobedience reminiscent, in Rice's view,
of the US civil rights movement.
Far from cutting the Palestinians off, the US massively increased its assistance to the Palestinian Authority. For
the first time US taxpayers began financing the PA's budget and so, indirectly paying the salaries of both Fatah and
Hamas terrorists. Moreover, the US began a massive effort to train Fatah commandos in Jordan. With Fatah terrorists
in Gaza shooting missiles at Israel alongside their Hamas terror buddies today, it is unclear what good can come of
these US-trained Palestinian special forces.
IN THE face of all of this clear US hostility toward Israel, marked as well by the continued criminal prosecution
of former AIPAC lobbyists Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, and former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin for their
"crime" of discussing their concern about Iran's nuclear weapons program, Israel has played the role of Chicken
Little.
Israel has offered no significant protest against the US's moves. It has treated Rice and her colleagues at the
CIA as friends and trusted allies. And Livni and Olmert have repeatedly boasted that Israel's relations with the US
have never been better, when in fact they have arguably never been worse.
It is because of the government's refusal to contend with difficult truths that Israel was caught by surprise at
the Security Council last week. And due to the government's refusal to acknowledge the true state of Israel's
relations with Washington, the government has given little consideration to either how to improve them, or to how to
work around Washington's hostility.
This situation is liable to only get worse next week with the inauguration of President-elect Obama. Secretary of
State-designate Hillary Clinton pledged in her Senate confirmation hearings that the new administration will
immediately seek to engage Iran diplomatically. She also stated that the US intends to actively pursue better
relations with Iran's Arab satellite-state, Syria. Moreover, she pledged that the Obama administration will make an
immediate push to establish a Palestinian state.
Clinton's testimony makes clear that Obama's major initiatives will all involve forcing Israel to pay a price.
According to a source in close contact with Obama's transition team, the first price that Israel will be pressured to
pay will be the Golan Heights.
Obama has pledged that soon after taking office he will make a major speech in an Islamic capital to strengthen US
ties to the Muslim world. And the source asserts that Obama intends to make that speech in Damascus. Moreover, he
intends to pressure Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria as "payback" for any Syrian indication that it
will weaken its ties to Iran.
While Israel must treat the US with diplomatic deference, it must also base its policies toward the US on how the
US is actually treating Israel and not on fictions. There is no doubt that Israel would have handled the cease-fire
diplomacy at the UN and elsewhere differently if its leaders were willing to notice that official Washington views
Israel's defense of its citizens and Hamas's assaults on Israel's citizens as morally indistinguishable actions.
Certainly, Israel wouldn't have been taken by surprise by America's decision to allow Resolution 1860 to pass.
THROUGHOUT HIS tenure in office, Bush has been outspoken in his warm statements about Israel. Both his advisers
and the many people who have come to know him over the past eight years are unanimous in their belief that Bush truly
cares about Israel and views Israel as an important US ally. He recognizes that Israel and the US share the same
enemies and that our enemies seek to destroy us because we represent the same thing: freedom.
But as many of his friends and advisors have ruefully noted over the years, Bush never learned how to translate
his personal views into policy. As former Pentagon official Richard Perle wrote in an article this week in The
National Interest, Bush was undercut on the most crucial foreign policy issues he faced by the State Department
and the CIA, which either ignored his policies or openly sought to discredit them.
As Perle described Bush's presidency, "For eight years George W. Bush pulled the levers of government - sometimes
frantically - never realizing that they were disconnected from the machinery and the exertion was largely futile. As
a result, the foreign and security policies declared by the president in speeches, in public and private meetings, in
backgrounders and memoranda often had little or no effect on the activities of the sprawling bureaucracies charged
with carrying out the president's policies."
This reality has been apparent since at least the middle of 2003, and yet, Israel's leaders stubbornly refused to
acknowledge it. They preferred instead to believe that Bush would never let anything bad happen to us. As if he had
the power to stop it.
The passage of Resolution 1860 could be a blessing in disguise if Israel is capable of learning its principal
lesson: No one, not even our friends, will fight our battles for us.
caroline@carolineglick.com
Dear Readers: These two articles represent the most cogent analysis of what we are today witnessing
in Israel.
I am proud to say that my book in 2003 was in accordance with these two great minds. I am sad to say that
the organized Jewish community in Canada shunned me for my book and did not come to my defence when Canadian
"bookstore terrorists" attacked me, and Chapters Book chain turned the victim into the perpetrator.
But my story is of little importance, to Israel, except to confirm the Western ambivalence to the Jewish state and
the task it bears on behalf of the entire West as the front lines in fighting Islamist terrorism.
To those who now take to the streets shouting anti-Zionist slogans against Israel, and are now unashamed to come
out in the open with anti-Semitic slogans, you are trying to destroy all that is good and just in this world, our
precious freedoms of religion, of expression, of justice....as you glorify Islamofascists as freedom fighters against
mythical "occupations" - which, in Gaza, do not even exist, except to the extent that Israel must take steps to
control the importation of weapons to be fired on Israeli civilians.
It seems that Hate is the one product that moral midgets keep manufacturing. It is time for all of us to do
whatever it takes to demonstrate that morality is with liberal democracy and that Evil is with Islamofascism.
Cultural relativism, the excusing of hate filled, violent cultures that sacrifice their own women and children to
their hatelful agendas, must be seen as a huge evil threat to our civilization.
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