Terror Tunnels The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas
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Authors: Alan Dershowitz
Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel’s Just War Against Hamas
Copyright © 2014 by Alan Dershowitz
Many chapters in this book were originally written and published as op-eds in various publications. Where this is the case, the date of original publication is given below the chapter title.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. For information, please contact RosettaBooks at [email protected], or by mail at One Exchange Plaza, Suite 2002, 55 Broadway, New York, NY 10006.
First edition published 2014 by RosettaBooks
Cover design by Peter Clark. Cover photo by Ziv Koren / Polaris.
ISBN EPUB edition: 9780795344282
www.RosettaBooks.com
This book is dedicated to all the innocent victims of Hamas’s dead baby strategy—Palestinians and Israelis alike. It is also dedicated to the brave Israeli soldiers who gave their lives in an effort to protect these civilians.
C
ONTENTS
1
Operation Protective Edge—The Historical Context
2
The Case Against the
Goldstone Report
—and Why It Still Matters
3
Finally, A Hamas Leader Admits that Israel Killed Mostly Combatants in Gaza
4
Goldstone Needs to Recant in Light of the New Evidence
5
How Goldstone is Making Peace More Difficult
6
The Phony War Crimes Accusation Against Israel
7
The Case Against “Universal Jurisdiction”
8
If Israel Killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, Did It Have the Right To?
9
Israel’s Actions in Intercepting the Turkish Flotilla Were Entirely Lawful though Perhaps Unwise
10
Why Israel Must Remain Strong
11
Hamas—Not Israel—Killed BBC Reporter’s Baby
12
UN Palestine Vote Poses Major Threats for Israel
13
A Settlement Freeze Can Advance Israeli-Palestinian Peace
14
Mideast Peace Talks Should Resume
15
Terrorists Win with Israel Prisoner Swap
16
Israel’s Right to Self-Defense Against Hamas
17
The Palestinian Leadership is Responsible for the Continuing Israeli Occupation of the West Bank
18
Some Hard Questions about the Western European Double Standard Against Israel
Introduction: Operation Protective Edge
19
Israel Defends Entire Civilized World
20
The Current Conflict between Israel and Hamas Shatters Myths
21
Israel Must Maintain Its Weapons Siege of Gaza
22
Media Death Count Encourages Hamas to Use Human Shields
23
Netanyahu, the Reluctant Warrior
24
Gazans’ Real Enemy Is Hamas, Not Israel
25
Why Doesn’t J Street Support Israel?
26
Hamas’s Threat to Israel’s Airport Threatens a Two-State Solution
27
Accusing Hamas of Using Human Shields Is Not Racist
28
UN Probe of Israel Will Only Encourage Hamas War Crimes
29
The “Occupation of Gaza” Canard
30
Qatar and Other American “Allies” Are among the Villains in Gaza
31
Hamas Uses Cease-Fire to Kidnap
32
What Should Israel Do? What Would the United States Do?
34
Hamas Exaggerates Civilian Deaths
35
Supporting Hamas Is Anti-Semitic
36
Did Israel Have the Right to Destroy Hamas Terror Tunnels?
37
ISIS is to America as Hamas is to Israel
38
No One Should Be Surprised at Isis’s Brutality because the World Rewards Terrorism
39
Ten Reasons Why BDS Is Immoral and Hinders Peace
40
Debate between Alan Dershowitz and John Dugard
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was originally stimulated by my visit to a Hamas terror tunnel that was arranged by my dear friend and go-to guy in Israel, Danny Grossman. I was accompanied by two other dear friends, Tom Ashe and Dr. Michael Miller, who, along with their spouses, Joanne and Alisa, helped me develop this book. My wonderful wife, Carolyn, who also accompanied me to the tunnel, provided her usual support, encouragement, and insight. Our tunnel visit was enabled and personally guided by “R,” a high ranking figure in the Israel Security Agency, which quietly fights for Israel’s defense around the clock. I also acknowledge the assistance of Sarah Neely, Nicholas Maisel, Stella Frank, my son Elon, and the gang from “the porch.”
I
NTRODUCTION
On June 13, 2014, the commander of the southern region for the Israel Security Agency (ISA), together with the commander of the Gaza Division of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), took me into a Hamas tunnel that had recently been discovered by a Bedouin tracker who serves in the IDF. The tunnel was a concrete bunker that extended several miles from its entrance in the Gaza Strip to its exit near an Israeli kibbutz kindergarten.
The tunnel had one purpose: to allow Hamas death squads to kill and kidnap Israelis. The commander told me that Israeli intelligence had identified more than two dozen additional tunnel entrances in the Gaza Strip. They had been identified by the large amounts of earth being removed to dig them. Although Israeli intelligence knew where these entrances were, they could not order an attack from the air, because they were built into civilian structures such as mosques, schools, hospitals, and private homes. Nor could Israel identify their underground routes from Gaza into Israel, or their intended exit points in Israel. Israeli scientists and military experts had spent millions of dollars in an effort to develop technologies that could find the underground routes and intended exits for tunnels that were as deep as a hundred feet beneath the earth, but they had not succeeded in finding a complete solution to this problem.
1
The planned exits from these tunnels in Israel were also a Hamas secret, hidden deep in the ground and incapable of being discovered by Israel until the Hamas fighters emerged. At that point it would be too late to prevent the death squads from doing their damage.
I was taken into the tunnel and saw the technological innovations: tracks on which small trains could transport kidnapped Israelis back to Gaza; telephone and electrical lines; crevices beneath schools and other civilian targets that could hold explosives; and smaller offshoot tunnels leading from the main tube to numerous exit points from which fighters could simultaneously emerge from different places.
As soon as I went down into the tunnel, I realized that Israel would have no choice but to take military action to destroy them. Israel had a technological response—though imperfect—to Hamas rockets. Its Iron Dome was capable of destroying approximately 85 percent of Hamas rockets fired at its population centers.
2
Moreover, it could attack rocket launchers from the air with sophisticated, GPS-guided bombs. But it had no complete technological answer to these terror tunnels. Subsequently, the media reported that Hamas may have been planning a Rosh Hashanah massacre during which hundreds of Hamas terrorists would simultaneously emerge from dozens of tunnels and slaughter hundreds, if not thousands, of Israeli civilians and soldiers.
3
If this report were true, as many in Israel believed it was, the Rosh Hashanah massacre would have been the equivalent of a hundred 9/11s in the United States. Even if it was an exaggeration, the tunnels certainly provided Hamas with the capability of wreaking havoc on Israeli citizens. There were other reports as well of planned attacks through the tunnels. As one resident of Sderot put it: “We used to look up to the sky in fear, but now we are looking down at the ground.”
4
To me, the only questions were
when
Israel would act,
how
it would act,
whether
it would be successful, and
what
the consequences would be. Could any nation tolerate this kind of threat to its citizens? Has any nation in history ever allowed tunnels to be dug under its border which would permit death squads to operate against its people?
I discussed these issues with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a dinner in his home several days after my visit to the tunnel, and it became clear that the Israeli government had been concerned about the security threats posed by these terror tunnels ever since the tunnels were used to kidnap the young soldier Gilad Shalit and kill two of his compatriots.
Ironically, it was while we were in the tunnel that we learned that three Israeli high school students had been kidnapped. Their kidnapping, which Hamas subsequently acknowledged was done by its operatives, and their murder, was the beginning of what turned into Operation Protective Edge, which ended with the destruction of most of the tunnels. This book is about that operation and why Israel was justified—legally, morally, diplomatically, and politically—in responding to the dangers posed by the tunnels and the rocket attacks that preceded and followed their discovery. It is also about why so many in the media, academia, the international community, and the general public seem to blind themselves to the dangers posed by Hamas and blame Israel for actions
they would demand their own governments take
, were they faced with comparable threats.
Indeed, the United States is now leading a coalition of nations in an effort to destroy ISIS, employing many of the same military tactics for which some of these nations blamed Israel.
I believe that the “blame Israel” reaction has serious consequences, not only for Israel but for the people of Gaza, and for the democratic world in general. Blaming Israel only encourages Hamas to repeat its “dead baby strategy” and other terrorist groups to emulate it. This strategy, which has worked effectively, operates as follows: Hamas attacks Israel either by rockets or through tunnels, thereby forcing Israel to respond, as any democracy would do, to protect its citizens. Because Hamas fires its rockets and digs its tunnels from densely populated civilian areas, rather than from the many open areas of the Gaza Strip, the inevitable result is that a significant number of Palestinian civilians are killed. Hamas encourages this result, because it knows the media will focus more on the
photographs
of dead babies than on the
cause
of their death: namely, the decision by Hamas to use these babies and other civilians as human shields. Hamas quickly produces the dead babies to be shown around the world, while at the same time preventing the media from showing its rocket launchers and tunnels in densely populated areas. The world is outraged at the dead civilians and blames Israel for killing them. This only encourages Hamas to repeat its dead baby strategy following short cease-fires, during which they rearm and regroup.
In 2009, I published a short book entitled
The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza
. Very little has changed since that time, except that Hamas has built many more tunnels, and that the reach and sophistication of its rockets has increased.
I am writing this book to warn the world that unless Hamas’s dead baby strategy is denounced and stopped—by the international community, the media, the academy, and good people of all religions, ethnicities, and nationalities—it will be coming “to a theater near you.” Hamas repeatedly employs this despicable and unlawful strategy because
it works
! It works because despite the material losses Hamas suffers in its repeated military encounters with Israel, it always
wins
the public relations war, the legal war, the academic war, and the war for the naïve hearts, if not the wise minds, of young people. And if it is indeed winning these wars—if its dead baby strategy is working—why not repeat it every few years? That’s why cease-fires between Israel and Hamas always mean that Israel “ceases” and Hamas “fires”—perhaps not immediately, while it regroups and rearms, but inevitably. And if it works for Hamas, why shouldn’t other terrorist groups, like ISIS
5
and Boko Haram, adapt this strategy to their nefarious goals, as Hezbollah has already done?
