Thursday, November 10, 2011
Peace Through Victory
Peace Through Victory
Posted By Steven Plaut On November 10, 2011
By now, Israel, at the urging and bullying of the world, has tried
pretty much every conceivable idea and option for achieving
tranquility and reconciliation with the Hamas, except for one. Israel
removed its army and civilian population from the Gaza Strip. In what
amounted to the first ethnic self-cleansing in history, Israel evicted
the entire Jewish presence in Gaza. The entire area was turned over
to the Palestinians, lock, stock, barrel, and Jew-free.
The result is of course known. The Hamas immediately converted all of
Gaza into a large rocket launch pad and a base for initiating
terrorist attacks against Israel. It kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad
Shalit and held him incommunicado, refusing medical treatment to him,
even though his arm was filled with shrapnel. Israel in response
provided free electricity and water to the Gazans and sent civilian
supplies into Gaza. Israel never made any serious efforts to stop the
massive tunnel smuggling into Gaza from Egypt, even when it was clear
that the main item being smuggled was weapons. These smuggled weapons
include bomb materials and sophisticated rockets that can now reach
Tel Aviv. Israel responded to the endless rocket attacks against its
own civilians by turning the other cheek. Only after 8000 rocket
strikes did it launch the half-hearted symbolic retaliation in the
"Cast Lead" campaign, withdrawing quickly after it was launched.
There is only one strategy for dealing with the Hamas that Israel has
never attempted. That untried strategy is victory. Israel has never
seriously attempted to achieve peace and tranquility with the Gaza
Palestinians by means of victory. This is somewhat strange, since it
is hard to think of any other war that did not end in peace only after
victory. Instead, the world keeps demanding that Israel respond to
Hamas provocation with an endless series of one-sided "goodwill
measures." Never mind that the only invariable effect of such Israeli
"goodwill measures" has been to trigger more Hamas terrorism. The
only "peace settlement" the Hamas is interested in is one in which
Israelis volunteer to allow themselves to be placed in Hamas-run
extermination camps for Jews.
Victory in the case of the war with the Gaza terrorists would mean
annihilating the Hamas. Interestingly, there is an increasing chorus
of voices inside Israel now calling for peace through victory. One of
these is General Dan Halutz, the controversial erstwhile chief of
staff of the Israeli army. A few days ago a Hamas rocket was fired
into Israel and struck a school building. In response, Halutz called
for a "mortal blow" to be dealt to the Hamas' civilian and "military"
leadership. Then, in a radio interview, Halutz said, "We must bring
back our deterrence vis-à-vis Gaza. It has not existed for even one
moment since Operation Cast Lead and to this day." He has been joined
by other Israeli leaders. The finance minister, Yuval Steinitz (who
is a philosophy professor at my own university when he is not busy in
public life), recently called on Israel to topple the Hamas "regime"
in Gaza if the terror continues.
The terrorist aggression by the Hamas has been carried on nonstop ever
since it seized power in Gaza. Most acts of Hamas barbarism do not
even get reported in the world media, for which dogs biting and
shooting rockets at postmen are passé. Hamas rockets land in Israeli
civilian areas almost every day. Hamas leaders continue to call
openly for Israel's obliteration and for the annihilation of Jews.
All this is surprising only for those who have no understanding of
what the Hamas really is. Anyone who has read the brochure on the
Hamas being distributed by the David Horowitz Freedom Center will know
otherwise.
It has become vogue in many circles to represent Middle East savagery
as part of some sort of "War of Civilizations." It is not. In fact,
the Middle East is simply a war by barbarism against all civilization.
It is also considered chic to represent the Middle East conflict as a
"cycle of violence," and as something fundamentally symmetrical
between Arab terrorists and Israeli soldiers. It is not.
The entire world has convinced itself that violence and terrorism in
the Middle East are the results of Israeli "occupation" over Arabs.
They are wrong. If there is one thing that has become glaringly
obvious in the past two decades it is that the main cause of terrorist
violence in the Middle East is the removal of Israeli occupation over
Arabs. The Gaza violence was not caused by Israeli occupation but by
its removal. The Hezbollah violence and threats from Lebanon were not
caused by Israeli "occupation" of Southern Lebanon but rather by its
removal.
Part of the world's problem in understanding such things about the
Middle East is that most people have no idea how small Israel really
is. Without the West Bank, Israel is at its waist about as wide as
the length of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. All of the West Bank is
smaller than the Everglades. The Arab world insists territory
controlled from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf is insufficient
for its appetites, but promises that if only Israel agrees to place
its neck in a strategic hangman's noose by turning over the West Bank
to the PLO/Hamas, then peace will prevail. And if Israel refuses to
place its neck in such an Arab noose voluntarily, then this shows that
Israeli aggression is what is behind the violence.
The caterwauling against Israel's decision to shoot back occasionally
at the terrorists is coming from those claiming that Israel was
erected on "Palestinian lands." This is like claiming that Alaska
sits on Russian lands. The Arabs briefly controlled Palestine
militarily, as the Russians briefly owned Alaska. The Jews and not
the Arabs are analogous to the native Eskimos. Israeli settlements
are about as "illegal" as are Eskimo villages in Alaska. There has
never ever in history been a Palestinian state, and there is no such
thing as a Palestinian people, any more than there is a separate Rhode
Islander people. The fact of the matter is that the West Bank and Gaza
are hardly "Palestinian lands."
Even if anyone thinks the Palestinians might have had some legitimate
claim to statehood or sovereignty, the Palestinians forfeited any such
right they might have had due to the past century of Palestinian
atrocities and terror. Just like the Sudeten Germans lost their claim
to any sort of self-determination. True, Israeli governments have
nevertheless naively and foolishly offered to allow the Palestinians
to exercise control over these territories in exchange for peace. But
Israel got war and mass murder of its civilians in exchange, not
peace, so the foolhardy Oslo "peace process" deals are now off and
should never have been implemented. Proposals to "liberate" the West
Bank and end Israeli "occupation" there are nothing more than demands
that Israel allow Gazan barbarism and terrorism to be replicated and
cloned in the West Bank, with Israeli citizens subsequently bathed in
countless thousands of rockets.
The only real way to suppress the carnage is for Israel to re-occupy
Gaza and the West Bank in full, implement open-ended military control
there and a long-term program of Denazification (based in part on the
Allied programs at the end of World War II). Israel needs to expel the
terrorists and destroy their infrastructure. It needs to get serious
about shooting terrorists. Everything else is wishful thinking and
delusion.
Palestinian "suffering"? If the Palestinians are unhappy with
Israeli anti-terror policies, retaliations, checkpoints and military
incursions, let them stop the terror and desist from murdering
Israelis, or let them move to any of the 22 Arab states. As long as
they persist in the violence, any "suffering" by Palestinians is, much
like the suffering of Germans and Japanese during World War II, their
own fault. The solution is certainly not for Israel to stop resisting
the terror, to stop fighting back, nor for Israel to desist from
trying to protect its citizens.
The endless post-Oslo Middle East violence and terror was triggered
because Israel indicated that it was on the run, exhausted, unwilling
to fight, afraid to resist, and ready to capitulate. It will end only
when Israel returns to its determination to end the terror through
military victory and force of arms. The same United States that has
understood that there is only a military option for dealing with
terror in Iraq and Afghanistan must back up such a return by Israel to
pre-Oslo sanity.
There are no non-military solutions to the problems of terrorism.
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