Hamas has decided that the six month truce with Israel no longer serves a purpose,now that they feel they've built up their forces and missile arsenal sufficiently.
As I predicted, the hudna with Hamas turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea, and was never a truce at all anyway, since the rockets and mortars shells kept coming at Southern Israel. In truth,it was just a respite to allow Hamas to train its forces, stock up on missiles and heavy weapons via Iran while Egypt turned a blind eye. and then continue the war of attrition at a time of its own choosing.They obviously feel they're ready now. Part of that of course is political. With Mahmoud Abbas' term in office due to expire January 10th, Hamas knows its audience and wants the political cachet of leading the War against the Jews.
Only the farcically weak Olmert/Livni/Barak triumvirate would have been stupid enough to allow Hamas to continue its military buildup while clinging to the fiction of an imaginary 'ceasefire'.
As always,I find most of what's written about Gaza as it heats up , especially in the dinosaur media to be factually challenged and deeply flawed.
A good example is from the Washington Post. Here's the opening bit:
"AFTER SIX months of relative calm, hostilities once again are escalating between Israel and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Between Friday and yesterday some 60 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel, whose air force responded with strikes against the launchers. So far there have been no serious injuries on the Israeli side, and one Palestinian has been reported killed."
There are two outright lies here - one,that there has been 'relative calm' and second that there have been 'no serious injuries on the Israeli side.' I wonder how the WAPO editorial staff would call it 'relative calm' if they had to live under the same conditions the people of Sderot do,never knowing if their homes were going to be hit,and with enough evidence on the part of their neighbors that getting hit was far from impossible? Yesterday's barrage, for example, took out a home and moderately injured the woman living there, among other things.
A few days ago, Hamas mortared an Israeli military base and wounded eight soldiers,one of whom lost a leg,and there have been over 26 Israelis killed by the Hamas barrage on Southern Israel, along with thousands of dollars of property damage.
'Relative calm'? 'No serious injuries?' I could be wrong, but I have a feeling the WAPO editorial staff might look at things differently if Georgetown and Bethesda were under that kind of attack.
The editorial then goes on to actually equate the way Israel and Hamas have approached the ceasefire:
"...neither Israel nor Hamas has been satisfied with the informal cease-fire they reached in June with the help of Egypt. During the summer and fall, the rocket fire from Gaza diminished but never entirely stopped. Israel, in turn, allowed only a modest increase in the flow of goods into Gaza, which has been under virtual siege since last year, and frequently sealed off the strip entirely in response to fresh attacks. "
Same ol' cycle o' violence script beloved by the dinosaur media...of course, the fact that Hamas are a bunch of genocidal terrorists who have initiated almost every instance of violence goes unmentioned.Do the people who wrote this bilge expect Israel to just allow business as usual when they're being attacked? Obviously, as we will see.
Also unmentioned is the fact Israel is not completely in control of access to Gaza. The Egyptians have a border with Gaza as well, and one that they've walled off to normal traffic.You might recall the ruckus that occurred when Hamas blew a hole in it twice at the beginning of the year.Yet Egypt's part in isolating Gaza somehow doesn't fit the script,so it goes unsaid.
But never fear, the WAPO has the perfect solution to dealing with Hamas..Israel needs to sing kumbayah, open up the borders and wait for the love to flow:
But an increasing number of Israeli thinkers are pointing out that the prevailing strategy of trying to isolate and destroy Hamas while building up the rival Palestinian leadership in the West Bank hasn't worked. Some 200,000 Gazans recently turned out for a rally in support of Hamas; a war would only strengthen the movement's most radical factions{...}Israel would be better positioned to defeat Hamas politically and diplomatically if it allowed the full resumption of food, medicine and fuel deliveries to Gaza and made clear its willingness to end other restrictions on civilian trade in exchange for a full cessation of rocket attacks and other hostilities. If Hamas is to be toppled, it will have to be through a political process led by Palestinians.
I can just imagine the sort of 'Israeli thinkers' the WAPO has in mind..probably the same sort of people who thought Arafat could be trusted, totally retreating from Gaza was a great idea and that a six month respite for Hamas to build up its military was an even better one.
Another 'ceasefire' is going to bring Hamas around? Wasn't that the idea of the last one? Worked well, didn't it?
I've got a small bit of news for these people. An all out war against Hamas would not 'strengthen radical factions' it would kill and defeat them.But only if it were an all out war,that included shutting down the Israeli-supplied electricity and taking out the power plant and Gaza's infrastructure as well as targeting Hamas' military and its leadership for annihilation.
It won't easy or pleasant, but the longer Gaza festers the more costly it will get. The Palestinians will not do a damned thing to dismantle Hamas. Israel will have to do so itself.
And here's the vital part for anyone concerned about an exit strategy, a guerrilla war or an 'occupation' afterwards.You make sure it doesn't happen.
As part of the festivities, you blow the Egyptian border fence and facilitate as many of Gaza's inmates escaping the lunatic asylum into Egypt as you can,and then reseal it and refuse to allow them back in.Then you pack most of the rest off to the Palestinian occupied areas in Judea and Samaria ( AKA the West Bank). Then you annex Gaza to Israel permanently and move the Jews back in permanently. You don't hand it over to Fatah and Abbas 'for peace'.
The Jews once there will rebuild the greenhouses at Gush Katif and turn Gaza into a garden again, and the world will watch as Gaza City turns from a terrorist armpit swimming in its own sewage into a beach resort and high tech trade center.
Not only will the guys in the green hats have suffered a huge blow,but the threat on Israel's southern border will be substantially reduced...and like minded jihadist Palestinians in Judea and Samaria might just take a good look at what happened to Gaza and realize that launching attacks from there against Israel's civilians might just lead to the same thing happening to them.
Of course,the sort of folks who wrote this drivel for the WAPO would be absolutely horrified at the idea Israel actually removing a hostile population from within its borders in the interest of peace and security.Oddly enough , most of them fully supported doing exactly that to the Jews who used to live in Gaza on behalf of the Arabs, and support doing the same thing to those Jews who's crime is living in East Jerusalem or in Jewish communities in what the WAPO editorial staff would doubtless refer to as 'settlements in the West Bank.'
There's a word for that kind of selective bigotry,I think.
No comments:
Post a Comment