Terror Tunnels The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas (12 page)

This is total nonsense and an insult to those who spoke at the rally. The executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council spoke of the “suffering” of the people of Gaza and how “painful” it is “to see innocent people dying, including children.”

Barry Shrage spoke of the “tragedy” of innocent Palestinians being killed. All the speakers acknowledged the “complexity” of the issues and want to see a political solution to the conflict. Yet J Street refused to be part of this unified show of support for Israel.

J Street has whined about being excluded from the mainstream Jewish community, but it is J Street that has excluded itself from joining in community activities such as this rally. It was J Street that decided not to participate in a unity event that was jointly sponsored by the Jewish Federation and the Jewish Community Relations Council.

J Street has sought and received membership in these sponsoring organizations but then made a decision to withdraw its own sponsorship from this community-wide event, precisely at a time when unity was most needed. J Street has always insisted on a double standard. On the one hand, it wants to be part of the Jewish community’s Big Tent, but on the other hand, it refuses to allow dissenters into its own narrow, ideological tent. I know, because I have personally asked to speak to its members at its convention.

J Street has adamantly refused to allow its members to hear my centrist point of view—I support the two-state solution and oppose Israel’s settlement policies—while welcoming extremist speakers who support boycotts of Israel and who refuse to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Its own tent flap is open only on the left side, not in the center. J Street’s decision to refuse to sponsor this community-wide Stand With Israel rally during so critical a time has drawn a line in the sand. If you can’t support Israel now, how can you call yourself a pro-Israel organization? How can any member of J Street now look at themselves in the mirror and say, “I belong to a pro-Israel organization”?

I call on members of J Street who are truly pro-Israel to leave that divisive organization and to join with us who truly support Israel during times of crisis while remaining critical of some of its policies. If you are pro-Israel, you do not belong in J Street, because J Street can no longer credibly claim to be pro-Israel.

If there was ever any doubt about that, J Street’s actions in refusing to join the Stand With Israel rally should resolve them. So if you want to stand with Israel, stand up against J Street and stand with organizations that support Israel during times of crisis.

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Hamas’s Threat to Israel’s Airport Threatens a Two-State Solution

July 22, 2014

Hamas’s decision to fire rockets in the direction of Ben-Gurion Airport may well have ended any real prospect of a two-state solution. Whether the regulators and airlines that have
stopped flights to and from Israel
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are right or wrong, this stoppage cannot possibly be tolerated by a democratic country that relies so heavily on tourism and international travel. It is, of course, a war crime to target an international civilian airport, as Hamas admits it has done. Israel has every right to keep that airport open, employing all reasonable military means at its disposal. Since Hamas fires its rockets from densely populated civilian areas, there will be more Palestinian civilian deaths.

This of course is part of Hamas’s grand strategy: by targeting Israeli civilians and international air travel from its own civilian areas, Hamas leaves Israel no choice but to take military actions that risk the lives of innocent Palestinians. There will be even more innocent Palestinian deaths now, as Hamas has raised the stakes considerably for Israel. Every country in the world would do everything in its power to keep open its airports, the lifelines to its economic viability. Hamas knows this—and welcomes Israeli military action that produces more dead Palestinian civilians and hence more international criticism of Israel.

Even more importantly, Hamas’s actions in essentially closing down international air traffic into Israel considerably reduce the prospect of any two-state solution. Israel will now be more reluctant than ever to give up military control over the West Bank, which is even closer to Ben-Gurion Airport than is Gaza.

Were Israel to end its military occupation of the West Bank—as distinguished from its civilian settlements deep in the West Bank—it would risk the possibility of a Hamas takeover. That is precisely what happened when Israel ended both its civilian settlements and its military presence in Gaza. Hamas took control, fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian targets, and have now succeeded in stopping international air traffic into and out of Israel.

Israel could not accept the risk of a Hamas takeover of the West Bank and the resulting Hamas rocket attacks at its nearby airport. It may still be possible to create a two-state solution whereby Israel withdraws its civilian settlers from most of the West Bank and agrees to land swaps for areas that now contain large settlement blocks. But Israel will have to retain military control over its security borders, which extend to the Jordan River. It will also have to maintain a sufficient military presence to assure that what happened in Gaza does not happen in the West Bank. These military realities do not have to exist forever. Israel’s military presence could be reduced if the Palestinian Authority were to maintain effective control over the West Bank and prevent terrorists from using that area to send rockets and terrorists into Israel.

The new reality caused by Hamas shutting down international air travel to and from Israel would plainly justify an Israeli demand that it maintain military control over the West Bank in any two-state deal. The Israeli public would never accept a deal that did not include a continued Israeli military presence in the West Bank. They have learned the tragic lesson of Gaza, and they will not allow it to be repeated on the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority, however, is unlikely to accept such a condition, though it should. This will simply make it far more difficult for an agreement to be reached.

It was precisely one of the goals of the Hamas rocket and tunnel assaults to scuttle any two-state agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. The Hamas Charter categorically rejects the two-state solution, as does the military wing of Hamas. In this tragic respect, Hamas has already succeeded. By aiming its rockets in the direction of Ben-Gurion Airport, Hamas may well have scuttled any realistic prospects for a two-state solution. It cannot be allowed to succeed.

The international community, which has a significant stake in protecting international air traffic from terrorist rocket attacks, must support Israel’s efforts to stop these attacks—permanently. If Hamas is allowed to shut down Israel’s major airport, every terrorist group in the world will begin to target airports throughout the world. The shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over the Ukraine will be but one of many such tragedies if Hamas is allowed to succeed. An attack on the safety of Israel’s airport is an attack on the safety of all international aviation. Israel is the canary in the mine. What Hamas has done to Israeli aviation is a warning to the world. In its efforts to prevent Hamas from firing rockets at Ben-Gurion Airport, Israel is fighting for the entire civilized world against those who would shoot down civilian airliners. The world should support Israel in this noble fight, and in the process help preserve any realistic chance for a two-state solution.

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Accusing Hamas of Using Human Shields Is Not Racist

July 23, 2014

While Israel uses shelters and the Iron Dome to protect its civilians, Hamas uses its civilians to protect its rockets and its terrorists. Recently, supporters of Hamas have argued that to say that Hamas uses civilians as human shields is a manifestation of racism and an attempt to dehumanize Palestinians.

But it is Hamas’s own leaders who have long boasted of this tragic reality. Listen to Fathi Hammad, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council:

“For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry… This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahedeen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine.”

And listen to recent commentary by Magdi Khalil, an Egyptian-American, on Al-Jazeera:

Is it moral to launch missiles from hospitals, from schools, from bedrooms, from mosques, and from the roof of a church, where thousands of Gazans had found refuge? The church’s priest was interviewed on CBN and said: “From the roof of this church, Hamas members are launching missiles at Israel. We welcomed them in our church, but they began launching missiles at Israel from the roof.” Is this the moral high ground that my colleague is talking about?

Is it moral for Hamas leaders to hide in Al-Shifa Hospital, thus risking the lives of regular people? Is this the moral high ground? They are fleeing like rats, hiding behind patients in Gaza hospitals. Is it moral for Hamas leaders to hide behind these patients?

They garner sympathy over the corpses of children. This is part of the strategy of the Islamists. They consider sympathy garnered over the corpses of children to be a victory…

The whole world knows that Hamas does not care about the spirit of humanity. They do not care about the children, about their people, about the losses, about the destruction of their country, or about the number of casualties.

We are talking about a group like ISIS. What kind of honor is it if it is at the expense of children’s corpses? You don’t know the meaning of life. All you know is the meaning of death. You constitute an enterprise of destruction in the region. You are wreaking destruction in Palestine. You don’t know the meaning of life.

Go and die, brother, but don’t make others die instead. If you want to die—go and die. Let Khaled Mash’al die. Let Haniya and Al-Zahhar die. Just don’t let the children die.
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Ban-Ki Moon—who is not known for a pro-Israel bias—recently confirmed what every objective observer knows to be true: that Hamas uses hospitals and schools as shields from which to launch rocket attacks against Israeli civilians—a double war crime. Here are his words:

“We condemn the use of civilian sites—schools, hospitals, and other civilian facilities—for military purposes.”

He was referring, of course, to Hamas, since Israel does not use such civilian facilities to fire rockets. That is why more Palestinians than Israelis have died in recent weeks.

During a two-day period while dozens of Palestinians and several Israelis were killed, the media failed to report that in neighboring Syria, 700 Arabs and Muslims were killed in two days of fighting. This constitutes only a tiny fraction of the 160,000 people killed in Syria during the ongoing civil war. According to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 53,978 civilians have been killed, including 8,607 children and 5,586 women. Many if not most of these deaths were deliberate—part of calculated efforts on both sides of the conflict to maximize civilian casualties. Yet this body count has received little notice compared to the far smaller body count in Israel and Gaza. Why is this?

Is it because when Arabs and Muslims deliberately kill other Arabs and Muslims, that deserves less attention than when Israelis kill Arabs and Muslims, even in self-defense and in an effort to prevent the murder of their own civilians?

If so, this is racism pure and simple and the application of a noxious double standard. The lives of all human beings have worth, and the death of Arabs and Muslims at the hands of other Arabs and Muslims deserve as much media coverage as the deaths of Arabs and Muslims that are caused by Israel’s efforts to protect its own civilians.

The media’s exclusive focus on the death toll in Gaza—without explaining that it is largely Hamas’s fault and part of its media strategy—incites hatred and anti-Semitism around the world. It has incited violence against Jews and Jewish institutions in many cities. Much of this violence comes from radicals on the hard left and from radical Islamists. But a recent incident in Italy shows that bigoted hate can come from the mouths of intellectuals as well as the fists of rabble-rousers.

Gianni Vattimo, who has been called Italy’s most famous philosopher, recently announced that he would personally “like to shoot those bastard Zionists,” calling them “a bit worse than the Nazis.” He said he was planning to launch a fund-raising campaign to buy better rockets for Hamas so that this Jew-hating group can kill more Zionists, by which he means Jewish Israelis.

He urged European volunteers to join Hamas and fight alongside of them against Israel, as volunteers fought against Franco during the Spanish Civil War. If Vattimo is indeed Italy’s most famous philosopher, I cry for the current state of philosophy in a nation that has contributed so much to that field over the millennia.

Vattimo reminds me of the intellectual thugs—some of them eminent philosophers—who provided academic cover and justification for the fascist abuses of Hitler and Mussolini. It is interesting, and perhaps relevant, that Vattimo is a follower of Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who joined the Nazi Party and provided cover for its anti-Semitic policies.

Hamas, after all, is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Heidegger actively supported during World War II. It is also interesting that Vattimo, who vociferously supports gay rights, would have such hatred for the one country in the Middle East that accords equal rights to gays and be so supportive of Hamas which punishes gays by torture and execution.

I challenge Gianni Vattimo to go to Gaza, where he would surely be welcomed with open arms because of his support for Hamas. Once in Gaza, I challenge him to conduct a rally in support of gay rights, to hold up a sign supporting gay rights, to urge Gazans to sign a petition demanding equality for gays.