FULL ARTICLES

“ISRAELI JEWS, ARE BEGINNING TO FEEL MUCH THE WAY THEIR PARENTS DID IN THOSE APOCALYPTIC DAYS”

Why Israel Feels Threatened
By Benny Morris
The New York Times (Op-Ed page)
December 30, 2008

Li-On, Israel -- MANY Israelis feel that the walls – and history – are closing in on their 60-year-old state, much as they felt in early June 1967, just before Israel launched the Six-Day War and destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies in Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

More than 40 years ago, the Egyptians had driven a United Nations peacekeeping force from the Sinai-Israel border, had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and air traffic and had deployed the equivalent of seven armored and infantry divisions on Israel’s doorstep. Egypt had signed a series of military pacts with Syria and Jordan and placed troops in the West Bank. Arab radio stations blared messages about the coming destruction of Israel.

Israelis, or rather, Israeli Jews, are beginning to feel much the way their parents did in those apocalyptic days. Israel is a much more powerful and prosperous state today. In 1967 there were only some 2 million Jews in the country – today there are about 5.5 million – and the military did not have nuclear weapons. But the bulk of the population looks to the future with deep foreboding.

The foreboding has two general sources and four specific causes. The general problems are simple. First, the Arab and wider Islamic worlds, despite Israeli hopes since 1948 and notwithstanding the peace treaties signed by Egypt and Jordan in 1979 and 1994, have never truly accepted the legitimacy of Israel’s creation and continue to oppose its existence.

Second, public opinion in the West (and in democracies, governments can’t be far behind) is gradually reducing its support for Israel as the West looks askance at the Jewish state’s treatment of its Palestinian neighbors and wards. The Holocaust is increasingly becoming a faint and ineffectual memory and the Arab states are increasingly powerful and assertive.

More specifically, Israel faces a combination of dire threats. To the east, Iran is frantically advancing its nuclear project, which most Israelis and most of the world’s intelligence agencies believe is designed to produce nuclear weapons. This, coupled with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s public threats to destroy Israel – and his denials of the Holocaust and of any homosexuality in Iran, which underscore his irrationality – has Israel’s political and military leaders on tenterhooks.

To the north, the Lebanese fundamentalist organization Hizbullah, which also vows to destroy Israel and functions as an Iranian proxy, has thoroughly rearmed since its war with Israel in 2006. According to Israeli intelligence estimates, Hizbullah now has an arsenal of 30,000 to 40,000 Russian-made rockets, supplied by Syria and Iran – twice the number it possessed in 2006. Some of the rockets can reach Tel Aviv and Dimona, where Israel’s nuclear production facility is located. If there is war between Israel and Iran, Hizbullah can be expected to join in. (It may well join in the renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict, too.)

To the south, Israel faces the Islamist Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza Strip and whose charter promises to destroy Israel and bring every inch of Palestine under Islamic rule and law. Hamas today has an army of thousands. It also has a large arsenal of rockets – home-made Qassams and Russian-made, Iranian-financed Katyushas and Grads smuggled, with the Egyptians largely turning a blind eye, through tunnels from Sinai.

Last June, Israel and Hamas agreed to a six-month truce. This unsteady calm was periodically violated by armed factions in Gaza that lobbed rockets into Israel’s border settlements. Israel responded by periodically suspending shipments of supplies into Gaza.

In November and early December, Hamas stepped up the rocket attacks and then, unilaterally, formally announced the end of the truce. The Israeli public and government then gave Defense Minister Ehud Barak a free hand. Israel’s highly efficient air assault on Hamas, which began on Saturday, was his first move. Most of Hamas’s security and governmental compounds were turned into rubble and several hundred Hamas fighters were killed.

But the attack will not solve the basic problem posed by a Gaza Strip populated by 1.5 million impoverished, desperate Palestinians who are ruled by a fanatic regime and are tightly hemmed in by fences and by border crossings controlled by Israel and Egypt.

An enormous Israeli ground operation aimed at conquering the Gaza Strip and destroying Hamas would probably bog down in the alleyways of refugee camps before achieving its goal. (And even if these goals were somehow achieved, renewed and indefinite Israeli rule over Gaza would prove unpalatable to all concerned.)

More likely are small, limited armored incursions, intended to curtail missile launches and kill Hamas fighters. But these are also unlikely to bring the organization to heel — though they may exercise sufficient pressure eventually to achieve, with the mediation of Turkey or Egypt, a renewed temporary truce. That seems to be the most that can be hoped for, though a renewal of rocket attacks on southern Israel, once Hamas recovers, is as certain as day follows night.

The fourth immediate threat to Israel’s existence is internal. It is posed by the country’s Arab minority. Over the past two decades, Israel’s 1.3 million Arab citizens have been radicalized, with many openly avowing a Palestinian identity and embracing Palestinian national aims. Their spokesmen say that their loyalty lies with their people rather than with their state, Israel. Many of the community’s leaders, who benefit from Israeli democracy, more or less publicly supported Hizbullah in 2006 and continue to call for “autonomy” (of one sort or another) and for the dissolution of the Jewish state.

Demography, if not Arab victory in battle, offers the recipe for such a dissolution. The birth rates for Israeli Arabs are among the highest in the world, with 4 or 5 children per family (as opposed to the 2 or 3 children per family among Israeli Jews).

If present trends persist, Arabs could constitute the majority of Israel’s citizens by 2040 or 2050. Already, within five to 10 years, Palestinians (Israeli Arabs coupled with those who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip) will form the majority population of Palestine (the land lying between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean).

Friction between Israeli Arabs and Jews is already a cogent political factor. In 2000, at the start of the second intifada, thousands of Arab youngsters, in sympathy with their brethren in the territories, rioted along Israel’s major highways and in Israel’s ethnically mixed cities.

The past fortnight has seen a recurrence, albeit on a smaller scale, of such rioting. Down the road, Israel’s Jews fear more violence and terrorism by Israeli Arabs. Most Jews see the Arab minority as a potential fifth column.

What is common to these specific threats is their unconventionality. Between 1948 and 1982 Israel coped relatively well with the threat from conventional Arab armies. Indeed, it repeatedly trounced them. But Iran’s nuclear threat, the rise of organizations like Hamas and Hizbullah that operate from across international borders and from the midst of dense civilian populations, and Israeli Arabs’ growing disaffection with the state and their identification with its enemies, offer a completely different set of challenges. And they are challenges that Israel’s leaders and public, bound by Western democratic and liberal norms of behavior, appear to find particularly difficult to counter.

Israel’s sense of the walls closing in on it has this past week led to one violent reaction. Given the new realities, it would not be surprising if more powerful explosions were to follow.

 

“A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY”

Israel must defend its citizens
By Amos Oz
Corriere della Sera
December 30, 2008

(Translated from Italian)

The systematic bombing of the citizens in Israel’s towns and cities is a war crime and a crime against humanity. The State of Israel must defend its citizens. It is obvious to everyone that the Israeli government does not wish to enter Gaza; the government would rather continue the ceasefire that Hamas violated and finally revoked. But the suffering of the citizens surrounding Gaza cannot go on.

The reluctance to enter Gaza stems not from indecisiveness but from well knowing that Hamas is actually eager to cause Israel to embark on a military operation: If dozens or even hundreds of Palestinian civilians, women and children are killed in an Israeli action, radicalism would gain strength in Gaza, Abu Mazen’s rule in the West Bank might collapse, and Hamas extremists could replace him.

The Arab world will rally together around the atrocious sights that Al-Jazeera will air from Gaza, and the world court of public opinion will rush to accuse Israel of war crimes. This is the same court of public opinion that remains unmoved by the systematic bombing of population centers in Israel.

Massive pressure will be exerted on Israel to restrain itself. No such pressure will be placed on Hamas because there is no one to pressure them, and there is almost nothing left with which to pressure them. Israel is a country; Hamas is a gang.

What remains for us to do? The best thing for Israel is to achieve a total ceasefire in exchange for alleviating the blockade of Gaza. If Hamas insists on refusing the ceasefire and continues bombing Israeli citizens, we must take care lest the military action play into Hamas’ hands. Hamas’ calculation is simple, cynical and evil: If innocent Israelis are killed – good. If innocent Palestinians are killed – even better. Israel must act wisely against this stance, and not out of the heat of the moment

 

“THE ATTACKS ON ISRAELI CITIZENS HAVE LITTLE TO DO WITH WHAT ISRAEL DOES OR DOES NOT DO”

Israel, Hamas, and moral idiocy
Much of the world’s response is a false moral equivalence that simply encourages the terrorists.
By Alan M. Dershowitz
Christian Science Monitor
December 31, 2008

Cambridge, Mass. - Israel’s decision to take military action against Hamas rocket attacks targeting its civilian population has been long in coming. I vividly recall a visit my wife and I took to the Israeli city of Sderot on March 20 of this year. Over the past four years, Palestinian terrorists – in particular, Hamas and Islamic Jihad – have fired more than 2,000 rockets at this civilian area, which is home to mostly poor and working-class people.

The rockets are designed exclusively to maximize civilian deaths, and some have barely missed schoolyards, kindergartens, hospitals, and school buses. But others hit their targets, killing more than a dozen civilians since 2001, including in February 2008 a father of four who had been studying at the local university. These anticivilian rockets have also injured and traumatized countless children.

The residents of Sderot were demanding that their nation take action to protect them. But Israel’s postoccupation military options were limited, since Hamas deliberately fires its deadly rockets from densely populated urban areas, and the Israeli army has a strict policy of trying to avoid civilian casualties.

The firing of rockets at civilians from densely populated civilian areas is the newest tactic in the war between terrorists who love death and democracies that love life. The terrorists have learned how to exploit the morality of democracies against those who do not want to kill civilians, even enemy civilians.

The attacks on Israeli citizens have little to do with what Israel does or does not do. They have everything to do with an ideology that despises – and openly seeks to destroy – the Jewish state. Consider that rocket attacks increased substantially after Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, and they accelerated further after Hamas seized control last year.

In the past months, a shaky cease-fire, organized by Egypt, was in effect. Hamas agreed to stop the rockets and Israel agreed to stop taking military action against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. The cease-fire itself was morally dubious and legally asymmetrical.

Israel, in effect, was saying to Hamas: If you stop engaging in the war crime of targeting our innocent civilians, we will stop engaging in the entirely lawful military acts of targeting your terrorists. Under the cease-fire, Israel reserved the right to engage in self-defense actions such as attacking terrorists who were in the course of firing rockets at its civilians.

Just before the hostilities began, Israel reopened a checkpoint to allow humanitarian aid to reenter Gaza. It had closed the point of entry after it had been targeted by Gazan rockets. Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, also issued a stern, final warning to Hamas that unless it stopped the rockets, there would be a full-scale military response. The Hamas rockets continued and Israel kept its word, implementing a carefully prepared targeted air attack against Hamas targets.

On Sunday, I spoke to the air force general, now retired, who worked on the planning of the attack. He told me of the intelligence and planning that had gone into preparing for the contingency that the military option might become necessary. The Israeli air force had pinpointed with precision the exact locations of Hamas structures in an effort to minimize civilian casualties.

Even Hamas sources have acknowledged that the vast majority of those killed have been Hamas terrorists, though some civilian casualties are inevitable when, as BBC’s Rushdi Abou Alouf – who is certainly not pro-Israel – reported, “The Hamas security compounds are in the middle of the city.” Indeed, his home balcony was just 20 meters away from a compound he saw bombed.

There have been three types of international response to the Israeli military actions against the Hamas rockets. Not surprisingly, Iran, Hamas, and other knee-jerk Israeli-bashers have argued that the Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli civilians are entirely legitimate and that the Israeli counterattacks are war crimes.

Equally unsurprising is the response of the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, and others who, at least when it comes to Israel, see a moral and legal equivalence between terrorists who target civilians and a democracy that responds by targeting the terrorists.

And finally, there is the United States and a few other nations that place the blame squarely on Hamas for its unlawful and immoral policy of using its own civilians as human shields, behind whom they fire rockets at Israeli civilians.

The most dangerous of the three responses is not the Iranian-Hamas absurdity, which is largely ignored by thinking and moral people, but the United Nations and European Union response, which equates the willful murder of civilians with legitimate self-defense pursuant to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.

This false moral equivalence only encourages terrorists to persist in their unlawful actions against civilians. The US has it exactly right by placing the blame on Hamas, while urging Israel to do everything possible to minimize civilian casualties.

 

ROCKETS MAKE ISRAEL RETHINK WEST BANK PULLBACK

Rockets make Israel rethink West Bank pullback
By Aron Heller and Matti Friedman
The Associated Press
December 31, 2008

ASHDOD, Israel (AP) – As rockets from Gaza reach deeper into Israel than ever before, they may be weakening what has long been a cornerstone of Middle East peace efforts – the prospect of exchanging land for peace.

Israeli hard-liners have warned for many years that any territory Israel vacates will be used to attack it.

Now they can point to the Hamas missile that slammed into a bus stop in this port city Monday, killing a 39-year-old woman. It was fired from the Gaza Strip, which Israel gave up in 2005 and is now ruled by Hamas militants who reject the existence of the Jewish state.

Even in the midst of the war, many Israelis still argue that a peace deal with the Palestinians, which would require a withdrawal from virtually all the West Bank, is the country’s only real security guarantee.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in defending the Gaza offensive in a speech to parliament Monday, said Israel remains committed to the idea of a Palestinian state alongside it.

But the missile that hit Ashdod, Israel’s largest southern city with 207,000 residents 23 miles north of Gaza, drove home a grim new reality for 32-year-old Alin Ben-Yosef. She fled to Tel Aviv for the night with her two young daughters after the attack.

“Tel Aviv is the safest place we have,” Ben-Yosef said. “But it is starting to feel as if there are no safe places anymore.”

At least one-tenth of the country’s 7 million citizens and some of its largest cities are now in range of Gaza missiles, and millions more live within reach of Hizbullah rockets from Lebanon.

Israelis who never thought they would be living under rocket fire prepared bomb shelters. Newspapers and TV stations displayed color-coded maps informing Israelis that they had 15, 30 or 45 seconds to reach cover after a warning siren goes off. In Ashdod malls, directions to the nearest shelters were posted.

Four Israelis have died in rocket fire since the strikes began. Gaza officials say 390 people there have been killed in airstrikes including 200 members of Hamas security forces.

Israel is now being hit by more sophisticated weapons that Hamas has smuggled into Gaza through underground tunnels along the border with Egypt.

Militants once relied on crude homemade rockets that could fly just 12 miles to terrorize Israeli communities near the border with Gaza. Now they are firing more accurate weapons manufactured in China and Iran that have dramatically expanded their range, Israeli defense officials say.

More than two dozen rockets and mortar shells had been fired by midday Wednesday, including five that hit in and around the major southern Israeli city of Beersheba, whose 186,000 residents live 22 miles from Gaza. One hit an empty school. Another landed in a small farming community about 20 miles southeast of Tel Aviv, the country’s most populated urban area. No serious casualties were reported.

The expansion of rocket range has implications for the West Bank, where U.S.-led diplomacy long focused on a withdrawal that would make way for a Palestinian state at peace with Israel.

The West Bank is run by a government headed by moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a Hamas rival who has been conducting peace talks with Israel. Hamas seized control of Gaza by force from Abbas’ Fatah faction forces in 2007.

Israeli opponents of this strategy argue that such a peace would be too fragile to survive, and would bring Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the nation’s international airport within rocket range.

Meanwhile, Israel is developing an anti-missile system called “Iron Dome,” but completion is years away.

Israeli historian Michael Oren, a Georgetown University professor and fellow at the Shalem Center think tank in Jerusalem, said the events of recent days, and especially the international criticism of Israel’s response, are likely to “compound Israelis’ reluctance” to support further withdrawals.

“This has become a recurring nightmare for Israelis and has made them reluctant to give up strategically vital territory,” Oren said.

But Shaul Arieli, a former military colonel and peace negotiator, said the current violence did not mean an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank was dead. Israel’s mistake in Gaza was to withdraw unilaterally instead of reaching an agreement with the Palestinians, he said, adding that the missiles from Gaza began long before Israel withdrew.

“Israel has to leave the West Bank in an agreement with someone who recognizes it,” Arieli said.

Israeli hard-liners maintain that every withdrawal brings Israel’s enemies closer: They say the Oslo accords negotiated in the Norwegian capital in the 1990s turned parts of the West Bank into breeding grounds for suicide bombers; the 2000 pullback from south Lebanon brought Hizbullah closer to Israel.

Israeli intelligence believes the Lebanese militia now has rockets that can reach 125 miles, far beyond Tel Aviv – meaning the vast majority of Israelis are in range.

“The historical lesson of Oslo, of Lebanon and of Gaza proves that with every concession, every territory we leave is used for attacks against us,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former general now with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.