ISRAEL IS RESILIENT BUT WATCHFUL
Yossi Klein Halevi
Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2011
The ambulance sirens began sounding and didn’t seem to end. The terrorist attack on March 23 that killed one person and wounded 30 was the first bus bombing in Jerusalem since 2005. And it happened just as missiles from Gaza began falling on Israeli cities and towns for the first time since the Gaza War of 2009. Suddenly it was as if the normal life we’d since managed to re-inhabit was an illusion.…
After a brutal decade that began with the collapse of the peace process in September 2000, and which brought four years of suicide bombings, eight years of missile attacks, two wars, and at least two failed attempts at peacemaking, the Israeli public is resilient and sober. As terrorism and rocket attacks return to Israeli cities, and the Arab world reels, those are precisely the qualities Israelis need to cope.
The precondition for containing terrorism is national unity, and on security matters at least, the nation is cohesive. In responding to attacks on civilian Israel, the government has the support of nearly every party. Knesset members of the opposition Kadima party are demanding that the government respond even more firmly—the left pressing the right to be resolute.
Yet so far the government’s response has been restrained—and rightly so. Another Israeli-Hamas confrontation is perhaps inevitable, but not now. As the Arab world finally begins to face itself, Israel must avoid focusing the region’s attention on the Palestinian conflict. The upheavals have proven that what preoccupies the Arab peoples aren’t Israel’s actions but Arab failures. The dictators want to deflect their people’s rage back onto Israel. Moammar Gadhafi, for instance, has urged Palestinians to board ships and descend on Israel’s coast.
This is also not the time for far-reaching political initiatives. With the open question of whether Israel’s peace with Egypt will survive the fall of Hosni Mubarak, Israelis are reassessing the wisdom of land-for-peace agreements with dictators. What is the point, many here wonder, of exchanging the Golan Heights for a dubious peace with a Baathist regime [in Syria] run by the hated Allawite minority?
Israelis are asking a similar question about Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is widely resented by Palestinians as corrupt and represents at best only part of his people. Why negotiate a land for peace agreement with an unelected, one-party government?… In a time of regional change, Israelis are even more reluctant to risk irreversible strategic concessions for a deal that may well lack popular legitimacy.…
Israelis these days are preparing for Passover. The Passover seder is called a night of watching, in remembrance of the Israelites who were prepared at a moment’s notice to flee Egypt and enter the unknown. This year Passover has particular resonance. For Israelis, living in a Middle East veering between freedom and even greater repression, it is a time of active watching.
(Mr. Halevi is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem
and a contributing editor at the New Republic.)
ANOTHER ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR IS INEVITABLE
Barry Rubin
Jerusalem Post, March 27, 2011
I’m going to make a prediction here that, unfortunately, I’m sure is going to come true.… The Egyptian revolution will make another Israel-Hamas war inevitable, with a lot more of an international mess. And I’ll go a step further: An incompetent and mistaken US policy makes such a conflict even more certain.
Why? First, Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, is a revolutionary Islamist movement which genuinely views itself as directed by God, considers Jews to be subhuman, believes that a willingness to court suicide and welcome death will ensure victory and is certain that it is going to destroy Israel and then transform Palestinian society into an Islamic Garden of Eden. The well-being and even physical survival of the people it rules is of little importance to it.
Given this, there are only two ways to stop Hamas from waging war on Israel. The shorter-term solution is deterrence through strength. The defeat Hamas suffered in the 2008-2009 war forced it to retrench and become cautious for a while. The only longer-term solution is the overthrow of the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip, with the maximum possible destruction of the organization.
Events in Egypt, and US policy, have destroyed the shorter-term option, and made the longer-term one impossible. With better weapons, Hamas will go to war. It’s only a matter of time. Second, the Egyptian revolution removed a regime that defined the national interest as having an anti-Hamas policy. The Mubarak government did not maintain sanctions and an (albeit imperfect) blockade of [Gaza] for Israel’s benefit. It did so because it saw revolutionary Islamism as the main threat to the nation. This was not, as current US officials would have it, some cynically manipulated mirage to justify dictatorship.…
The Mubarak government saw Hamas as part of a broader, Iran-led strategic threat. A new government, whether radical nationalist, Islamist or “liberal democratic,” will have the opposite view. The Muslim Brotherhood views Hamas as its closest ally and wants it to overthrow the Palestinian Authority as well as destroy Israel. The nationalists support Hamas as part of the larger Arab struggle against Israel. The “liberal democrats” do so because they know this is a very popular position with Egyptians, and therefore to oppose it would reduce their already tiny base of support.
And so Hamas knows it now has an ally [in Egypt] rather than an enemy at its back.
Moreover, there is no incentive in Egypt—or among its nationalist and Islamist-sympathetic officers—to [continue to] block arms smuggling into the Gaza Strip. Hamas [will] thus [be] greatly strengthened and made more confident, and hence arrogant. It is more able to fire mortars and launch rockets and cross-border attacks, and far more eager to do so.
As for US policy, while supporting some sanctions on Hamas and refusing to engage with it, the US government has not supported overthrowing the Gaza regime, though any serious assessment of US interests shows this should be a priority—part of the war against Iranian hegemony in the region, revolutionary Islamism, terrorism and instability.…
But there is no appreciation for these points in Washington today. What makes matters worse is the Obama administration’s demand—after about a half-dozen Islamist militants were killed on a ship after they attacked IDF soldiers—to [reduce the] sanctions [imposed on Hamas]. Thus, the Obama administration…ensured that there would be a genocidal, revolutionary Islamist, subversion- spreading, anti-American, brutally repressive, anti-Christian, misogynist Iranian client on the Mediterranean.…
US support for a transformation of Egypt, with no idea where that will lead, has helped turn that nation into a Hamas ally. The Obama administration has also supplied one more reason why revolutionary Islamists feel the future belongs to them, America is finished in the region and why they should be even more aggressive.
What we are seeing now is Hamas getting new weapons and escalating its use of terrorism. In addition, we are not even seeing significant international action or even criticism of this behavior. On the contrary, the more terrorism Hamas commits, the more Israel is criticized in the Western media.
Terrorism works; aggression goes unpunished.… It’s only a matter of time until Hamas once again launches a larger-scale assault on Israel. At that point, Israel will have to respond with a major counterattack on the Gaza Strip.
Will Egypt remain neutral? Will its government stop the Muslim Brotherhood and its sympathizers, or rush arms, money and even armed Egyptian volunteers into the Gaza Strip? Will the West blame Israel for the violence? Will the US take any productive action?
This crisis is inevitable, though it might take a couple of years. Yet nobody outside Israel sees—or wants to see—what’s coming.
(Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center.)
UNDERSTANDING THE 3RD TERROR WAR
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, March 25, 2011
What are we to make of the fact that no one has taken credit for [last week’s] bombing in Jerusalem?
[The] bombing was not a stand-alone event. It was part and parcel of the new Palestinian terror war that is just coming into view. As Israel considers how to contend with the emerging onslaught, it is important to notice how it differs from its predecessors.…
For the public, the new tactics are not interesting.… Israelis understand that we are entering a new period of unremitting fear, where we understand that we are in danger no matter where we are. Whether we’re in bed asleep, or our way to work or school, or sitting down on a park bench or at a restaurant, whether we’re in Rishon Lezion, Sderot, Jerusalem, Itamar or Beersheba, we are in the Palestinians’ crosshairs. All of us are “settlers.” All of us are in danger.…
The new Palestinian terror war is first and foremost a political war. Like its two predecessors, which began in 1987 and 2000, the new terror war’s primary purpose is not to murder Jews. Killing is just an added perk. The new war’s primary purpose is to weaken Israel politically in order to bring about its eventual collapse. And it is in this political context that the various terror armies’ refusal to take responsibility for [the] attack in Jerusalem…is noteworthy.…
In the two previous terror wars, the terror groups had two motivations for taking credit for their attacks. The first reason was to expand their popularity. In Palestinian society, the more Jews you kill, the more popular you are. The main reason Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections was that the Palestinians believed Hamas terror was responsible for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005.… The second reason the various groups have always been quick to take credit for attacks is that they wanted to show their state sponsors that they were putting their arms, training and financial support to good use.… Over the past several decades, Iran, Syria and Hezbollah have spent hundreds of millions of dollars arming, training and financing Palestinian terror cells.…
The fact that today neither Hamas nor Fatah is interested in taking credit for the bombing in Jerusalem or for the massacre of the Fogel family is a signal that something fundamental is changing in the political dynamic between the two factions.…
For both Fatah and Hamas, the most important target audience is Europe. But before we discuss how the Palestinians’ assessment of Europe is connected to their move to obfuscate organizational responsibility for terrorism, it is necessary to consider the concrete political goal of their new terror war.
Fatah is in the midst of a global campaign to build international support for a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence in September. From Israel’s perspective, the campaign is threatening for two reasons. First, a unilaterally declared Palestinian state will be in a de facto state of war with Israel. Second, if the Palestinians secure international recognition for their “state” in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the move will place 500,000 Jews who live in these areas in the international crosshairs.
Much of the discussion about this goal has centered on whether or not US President Barack Obama will veto a UN Security Council resolution endorsing such a declaration. And based on Obama’s behavior to date, the Palestinians have good reason to believe that he may support their move. But in truth, the discussion about how the US will respond to the planned Palestinian declaration is largely beside the point. The point of the threatened declaration is not to get a UN Security Council resolution supporting it. The point is to get the EU to enact further sanctions against Israel.
And this brings us back to the new policy of not taking credit for attacks on Israel, and to the decision to launch a new terror war in general. On the face of it, at such a sensitive time for the Palestinians diplomatically, it would seem that they would want to keep their traditional good cop-Fatah, bad cop-Hamas routine going and have Hamas take the credit for the recent attacks. Indeed, it would seem that the Palestinians would want to hold off on attacks altogether until after they declare independence.
The fact that Fatah and Hamas have neither waited until after September to attack nor sought to differentiate themselves from one another as the attacks coalesce into a new terror campaign indicates strongly that the Palestinians no longer feel they need to pretend to oppose terror to maintain European support for their war against Israel. The Palestinians assess that Europe is swiftly moving toward the point where it no longer needs to pretend to be fair to Israel. The British, French and German votes in favor of the Palestinians’ anti-Israel Security Council resolution last month were the latest sign that the key European governments have adopted openly hostile policies toward Israel.
More importantly, these policies are not the consequence of Palestinian lobbying efforts, and so Israel cannot hope to change them through counter-lobbying efforts. Europe’s abandonment of even the guise of fairness toward Israel is the product of domestic political realities in Europe itself. Between the rapidly expanding political power of Europe’s Muslim communities and the virulently anti-Israel positions nearly universally adopted by the European media, European governments are compelled to adopt ever more hostile positions toward Israel to appease their Israel-hating publics and Muslim communities.…
After the people of Europe have been brainwashed by their media and intimidated by the Muslim communities, they have developed a Pavlovian response regarding Israel whereby every mention of Israel makes them hate it more. It doesn’t matter if the story is about the massacre of Israeli children or the bombing of synagogues and nursery schools. They know that Israel is the guilty party and expect the governments to punish it.
What the Palestinian silence on who committed what atrocity tells us is that in this new terror war, the Palestinians believe they cannot lose. With Europe in tow, Fatah and Hamas feel free to join their forces and advance both militarily and politically.
OBAMA PLANTED SEEDS OF FAILURE
David SuissaHuffington Post, March 30, 2011
A couple of years ago, I wrote an open letter to President Obama applauding his commitment to peace in the Middle East, but warning that he should be prepared to fail. My reasoning was that he was following Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result.
In critiquing his approach, I used the metaphor of trying to plant a flower into desert sand. No matter how hard you try to force it, if the earth isn’t right, nothing will grow.
This flower—a sapling would be a more apt metaphor—represents peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. For nearly two decades, this little tree has been paraded around the world as the “key to peace in the Middle East.” Accordingly, no issue has captivated globetrotting diplomats quite like this one.
Among all diplomats, perhaps the one who has spent the most time on this issue has been Dennis Ross, the point man on the peace process for three U.S. presidents, including the current administration. Several years ago, Ross said something to me at a charity event that stuck with me: His biggest regret was that they didn’t enforce the anti-incitement clause in the Oslo agreement.
Ross was revealing a painful truth about the peace process—you can’t have peace without education. You can haggle over borders all day long, but if the people living within those borders are poisoned with hate and are not prepared for compromise, no leader will sign on to an “end of conflict” agreement.
You can make a good case that, had the Palestinian Authority spent the last two decades educating their people for peace, they’d have their own state by now and we’d be talking today about common projects, not Qassam rockets.
But of course they didn’t promote peace. Instead, they promoted the well-worn script of Arab dictators who need to build street cred with the masses: Demonize the Jews and the Zionist entity. Is it any wonder that Palestinian leaders, from Arafat to Abbas, have found it so difficult to say yes to Israeli peace offers? How could they compromise with an enemy they helped to demonize? What would they say to their people? Sorry, we lied to you—the Jews really do have a claim to this land? It’s true, they’ve had a presence in Jerusalem for more than 3,000 years? If Israel is willing to withdraw settlements for the sake of peace, we should also be willing to compromise on the right of return? Let’s be nice with them so they will help us build a great country?
What is so shocking about those simple words is that we have never heard them spoken by any Palestinian leader, in English or in Arabic. Yet those words were the crucial missing ingredients to nourish the tree of peace. They needed to be spoken not occasionally at interfaith meetings, but consistently and persuasively in Palestinian schools, media, summer camps and mosques.
But who ever dared pressure Palestinian leaders to speak those words? Peace groups? A global community that kept pouring billions into Palestinian coffers while reinforcing their narrative of exclusive victimhood? The United States, which never gave Palestinians any incentive to stop glorifying terrorism and start teaching peace?
When Obama the peacemaker finally had his chance, instead of promoting peace, he promoted the tired old trope of putting pressure on Israel to make more unilateral concessions. Instead of launching, for example, a breakthrough peace-education campaign to convey to Palestinians that peace was worth [making] compromises…he came up with a new excuse for Palestinians to stay away from peace talks: A Jewish construction freeze as a precondition to those talks.
By the time he realized his blunder, it was too late. He had already lost both sides.… Obama planted seeds all right, but instead of seeds of peace, they were seeds of failure.
