OPERATION CAST LEAD II…..MARK SILVERBERG
Operation Cast Lead II Mark Silverberg
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.9223/pub_detail.asp
In March, Palestinian terrorists infiltrated the West Bank community of Itamar and murdered five people in their sleep, including three young children. Days later, a bomb exploded at a Jerusalem bus stop, killing one woman and wounding dozens more. This was followed by a Hamas missile attack on an Israeli school bus critically injuring a 16-year old boy, and several hundred missiles and mortar rounds pounded southern Israel over the next several days requiring almost a million Israelis to retreat into bomb shelters. Despite these attacks from an enemy that is ideologically committed to the destruction of their country, Israeli military planners continue to base their strategy on targeted retaliations rather than on a broader, more comprehensive paradigm designed to end the conflict.
Israel should have learned by now that targeted retaliation without supporting ground operations can never destroy the increasingly sophisticated heavy weapons systems Hamas has acquired from Iran over the past four years. From a broader perspective, Israel can never hope to end the hatred and incitement that has become an intrinsic part of Palestinian culture without fundamentally changing that culture.
Nations not only have the right, but the obligation to defend their citizenry and territory from attack. As such, it is only a matter of time before Hamas and its Palestinian sympathizers are called to account for the death and destruction wrought by their missile attacks on Israeli cities, towns and kibbutzim. Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar set out Israel’s dilemma recently when he noted:
“We do not recognize the State of Israel or its right to control any of the land of Palestine. Palestine is holy Islamic land. Our national problem is not related only to the West Bank, Gaza, and al-Quds (Jerusalem)…but to Palestine, all [the territory of] Palestine.”
By that he means Israel proper or what he terms “the Zionist entity.” So far as Hamas is concerned, the battle will continue until Israel is destroyed, even if that takes decades. He must be taken at his word.
Nor is he alone in this thinking. A recent poll of Palestinians asked: “Do you support or oppose suicide bombings against Israeli civilians?” Fifty-six percent (56%) said they support it. That poll paralleled the results of an earlier survey conducted jointly by Public Opinion Research of Israel and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion that found that only 13% of Palestinians agreed with the statement that “Hamas was a terrorist group”; 82% agreed that Hamas was a “freedom-fighting organization”; and a mere 10% believed that bombings targeting Israeli civilians in buses and restaurants could be classified as “acts of terrorism.” The world may have been appalled several years ago when students studying in an Israeli yeshiva were shot to death by a Palestinian jihadist, but the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reports that 84% of Palestinians approved of this act of terrorism.
These attitudes suggest an enormous ethical and moral divide separating Palestinian and Israeli cultures. What the Obama Administration and the Europeans fail to understand is that Hamas was not elected by accident back in 2006. It was elected because its very rationale for existence reflects the prevailing attitude within mainstream Palestinian society. For the Palestinians, terrorism is not a weapon borne of “root causes”, desperation or poverty, but is a strategic choice. So if Hamas and its Palestinian supporters seek the annihilation of Israel, they had best understand the consequences that will flow from their actions.
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute writes: “Modern Western man is faced with an awful dilemma, from which he recoils: Real peace and successful reconstruction are in direct proportion to the degree to which an enemy is defeated and acknowledges it – the aim being that he will come to feel that he cannot go on being what he has been.” In effect, only after eradicating the reasons for which wars are fought – slavery, fascism, Nazism, Japanese militarism, and now Islamic jihadist expansionism – can real peace and re-construction follow.
That moment is reached when an enemy is rendered incapable of and unwilling to continue the conflict. Only then can an enemy’s terror apparatus be dismantled (as was the case of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the FARC in Columbia); its leadership replaced, its capacity to wage further war eliminated; its weapons seized; its militias hunted down; its propaganda machine terminated; its educational system reformed; its human and financial resources channeled back into massive social and economic reconstruction, its government and judiciary made transparent, its universities secularized, and its population prepared for a new and better future. If his historical analyses of the meaning of victory and defeat are correct, neither Israel nor the US will be able to accommodate or moderate an ideologically-driven enemy, be it Iran or its Middle East proxies Hamas and Hezbollah whose entire rationale for existence is their divinely-inspired mission to conquer Israel (for starters) and compel its citizens to submit to Islam.
Faced with a choice between annihilation and survival, the Israelis will choose survival. Like ancient man, Israelis (just like the rest of us) are hard-wired to survive, and they will eventually be forced to use their full military arsenal when faced with the alternative of extinction. For post-modern children of the Enlightenment, the idea that we would ever have to destroy our enemies to ensure our survival is very disturbing. War is neither pleasant nor desirable, but in an environment where a society educates its population virtually from birth to hate Jews and revere suicide bombers as “martyrs,” where Palestinian children play soccer with the decapitated head of a fallen Israeli soldier and have an orgy in the blood of their Israeli victims, where Palestinian mothers celebrate the “martyrdom” of their children, name town squares and tournaments after them, and where Palestinians are taught a culture of death in their textbooks, schools and summer camps, in their mosques and marketplaces, in their radio and television programs, in their video games and on the Internet, war becomes necessary in order to eradicate the culture that spawns such pathologies.
In their time, Sherman and Grant and later Churchill, Eisenhower and Patton during World War II understood this. They were driven by a concept rarely heard or spoken of these days by Western powers, although it is referred to incessantly by our enemies. That concept is called “victory”. During World War II, these leaders understood that it would be impossible to end Japanese militarism in the Far East and to dismantle the Hitler Youth, the Nazi SS, the death camps and the cult of Aryan supremacy without the complete destruction of the Third Reich. Only such destruction permitted the re-birth of a new Germany and Japan. Today, the belief that genocidal, messianic regimes like Hamas can be bribed or cajoled into denying their rationale for existence (especially given that the West and Israel are perceived as weak and fearful, while Iran is perceived as the rising power in the region) is the height of folly and flies in the face of history.
Eventually, a point will be reached when Israel will be forced to act with or without America’s blessing. Just as the creation of free and democratic societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive purge of their pre-war political, economic, military, social and cultural infrastructures, including the re-education of their entire populations over many years, so Palestinian society will be forced to undergo a profound metamorphosis that will sweep away the culture of “martyrdom” and religiously-inspired genocide and sow the political, social, cultural and economic seeds for a new tomorrow.
The “death cult” whichisa recurring message on both Fatah-controlled PA TV and Hamas-controlled Al Aqsa TV must be extirpated from Palestinian society. That will not be achieved by forcing the Israelis to concede Palestinian statehood to terrorists, relinquishing the Golan Heights to Syria, returning the Sheba ‘a Farms area to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, dividing Jerusalem, rectifying Israel’s borders, or settling on a refugee compensation formula – at least, not at present. Real peace will be achieved only after the Palestinians have been brought to the realization that their dream of conquering Israel is futile, and that whatever the future holds for them, it will be far better than the war they have brought upon themselves. Israel has no intention of becoming the next Czechoslovakia.
The US administration and the Europeans are wrong in believing that there is “no military solution” to the problems caused by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah throughout the Middle East. Multicultural tolerance, appeasement, concessions, and utopian pacifism do not work well against radical Islamists who seek absolute power. Conflict-resolution theory that is taught in our universities and the belief that disagreements between nations are not really the result of evil actions or incompatible worldviews, but simply misunderstandings requiring an analysis of the “root causes” of their “grievances” that can be rectified through dialogue and reason will not resolve the “problem” these Islamists see in Israel’s existence. As we saw in Mumbai, Islamists are violently affronted when Hindus, Jews, Buddhists or Christians exercise sovereignty over Muslim minorities. Michael Ledeen of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies points out that “Peace cannot be accomplished simply because some visiting envoy, with or without an advanced degree in negotiating from the Harvard Business School, sits everyone down around a table so they can all reason together.” Unfortunately, in the case of radical Islamists, these are actions best taken after the terrible swift sword has done its work.
In the end, Israel will be forced to re-occupy Gaza and quite possibly significant areas of the West Bank for an extended period of time and return to its pre-Oslo administration state. Such a return would permit Palestinian society to be re-structured and rebuilt under a new generation of moderate Palestinian leaders. In Lebanon, breaking the power of Hezbollah would permit the Lebanese army and Lebanese government to regain control of their country, an act that would pave the way for a restoration of the democratic Cedar Revolution that was quashed by Syria and Hezbollah under Iranian tutelage.
The Palestinians will eventually learn to reject violence not because it is politically ineffective, but because it is morally wrong, although that level of understanding may take decades to evolve. One thing is certain – only a society freed from the pathological demons that now control it can evolve into a proper state that can take its rightful place in the family of nations. The scourge of “martyrdom” and the jihadist rationale that epitomizes Hamas and Hezbollah must be eradicated. Anything short of this merely prolongs the agony, delays reconciliation and re-construction, sows the seeds for future conflict, and renders a Palestinian rebirth impossible
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Mark Silverberg is a foreign policy analyst for the Ariel Center for Policy Research (Israel), he contributes to Arutz Sheva (Israel National News) and the New Media Journal and is a member of Hadassah’s National Academic Advisory Board. His book “The Quartermasters of Terror: Saudi Arabia and the Global Islamic Jihad” and his articles have been archived under www.marksilverberg.com and www.analyst-network.com.
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