By Alan
Caruba
There are
many reasons why Hamas, a terrorist organization according to the U.S. State
Department, has increased its rocketing of Israel. And it is an increase
because Hamas has never ceased from rocketing Israel following it seizure of
Gaza from the Palestinian Authority, also known as Fatah.
Hamas is
Iran’s Palestinian proxy in the war on Israel in much the same fashion as
Hezbollah which controls Lebanon. It lost its support from Syria’s dictator who
is engaged in a civil war with Islamists who, controlling a swath of its
northern region, have now declared an Islamic State and are threatening Baghdad
in Iraq after a swift military victory in its northern and central region.
Hamas has also lost the support of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood which has been
banned there.
The rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel
have generated four conflicts since 2006 during which Israel took military
action to reduce them. Israel is only considered to be “at war” when it takes
steps to defend itself.
Hamas
knows it cannot “win” a military conflict, but as Middle East expert, Dr. Daniel Pipes, noted in the July 11 edition of National Review Online, “The holy
grail of political warfare is to win the sympathy of the global Left by
presenting oneself as underdog and victim.” The current conflict began when
three Israeli teens were kidnapped and killed. This led Israel to round up
suspects in the West Bank in the course of searching for the boys. Regrettably
an Arab youth was killed in revenge and this was followed by a rain of missiles
and rockets from Gaza.
As
Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at Israel’s Global Research in
International Affairs Center, noted, “There is a tendency to see the
Israel-Palestinian arena as somehow set apart from the rest of the Mideast
neighborhood, but this is an illusion. Firstly, in the most tangible way, the
most potent elements of the Hamas assault on Israeli cities of recent days is
made possible only by the movement’s link with Iran.”
The
primary reason Israel has not suffered the problems of Syria and Iraq has been
its defense forces. “More profoundly, in the simple and brutal logic of the
neighborhood, Israel is trying to remind Hamas of the cost of tangling with the
Jewish state,” says Spyer. “The objective of this is not to reconquer Gaza, nor
to impact on local politics, still less to impose suffering on the Palestinians
for its own sake.”
To
demonstrate how deeply rooted the hatred of Israel is in the minds and hearts
of Palestinians who have never agreed to any terms of peace, David Horowitz,
the editor of Times of Israel noted on July 8 that “Gaza could have flourished
after Israel wrenched its 8,000 civilians from the 20-plus settlements there in
2005.” Yes, it was Israel that cleared Gaza of its Jewish population to provide
a place for the Palestinians to live together!
“Gazans,”
said Horowitz, “could have built an island of democracy. Investment could have
grown, as it did in the early 1990s, when expat Palestinian investors, believing
better times were at hand, fueled a brief property boom. Gaza’s golden beaches
could have been a promising tourism draw. If Gaza had become a seemingly stable
area, Israel might even have felt sufficiently trusting of the Palestinians as
to attempt a similar unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank.”
Instead,
“hostility to Israel was so profound that Gazans couldn’t even restrain
themselves for long enough to fool us into trusting them.” Instead, in recent
weeks “Hamas is firing some of its 100,000-rocket arsenal because it has
nothing much to lose anymore—that it has lost the support of Egypt, that it
can’t get the money to pay salaries…” Hamas, the Palestinians, and the
Sunni-Shiite hostilities of the Mideast all testify to the complete inability
of its Arab population to seek peace with anyone, including each other.
As a July
9 Wall Street Journal editorial noted, “Hamas may also believe it can
repeatedly go to war against a militarily superior foe because Israel has never
exacted a fatal price. Hamas’s aggression serves its political purposes, while
Palestinian casualties serve its propaganda purposes.”
“All of
this will be condemned by the usual suspects. But Israelis will be denounced
for whatever they do, so they might as well act effectively.”
Dr. Pipes
noted that, at this point, “Worldwide condemnations of Israel have yet to pour
in. Even the Arabic media are relatively quiet. If this pattern holds, Hamas
might conclude that raining rockets on Israeli homes is not such a good idea.
Indeed, to dissuade it from initiating another assault in a few years, it needs
to lose both the military and the political wars, and lose them very badly.”
Israel
knows this and will engage in a significant military effort that includes
sending troops into Gaza in addition to air strikes.
© Alan
Caruba, 2014
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