RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Turkish protesters promised to stand on the side of Hamas when it next goes to war with Israel. They may not have to wait long to keep their promise. Over the past two weeks Hamas has steeply escalated its missile war with over 30 launches. Last week, a missile that narrowly missed a nursery school wounded a young girl.

Since Operation Cast Lead two years ago, Iran has helped Hamas massively increase its missile and other military capabilities. Today the terror group that rules Gaza has missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv. It has advanced antitank missiles. As Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida said Saturday (12/25), “We are now stronger than before and during the war, and our silence over the past two years was only for evaluating the situation.”

That evaluation has not tempered Hamas’s aim of annihilating the Jews of Israel. As Obeida’s colleague Ahmed Jaabari said Saturday, Israel’s Jews have two choices, “death or departing Palestinian lands.”

IDF commanders are taking Hamas’s new brinksmanship seriously. In recent days several have said that Israel’s deterrence has eroded. Another Cast Lead is just a matter of time, they warn.

In the meantime, the Palestinian Authority led by its unelected president Mahmoud Abbas is preparing its next round of political warfare with its many friends around the world. Despite some recent tactical repositioning, its goal is clearly to proceed with its plan to declare statehood with maximum international support within the next nine to 12 months.

Last week the PA announced it will ask the UN Security Council to pass an anti-Semitic resolution defining Jewish building in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem as illegal. This move dovetails nicely with Abbas’s statement over the weekend that “Palestine” will be Jew-free.

As Abbas put it, “If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won’t agree to the presence of one Israeli in it. When a Palestinian state is established, it would have no Israeli presence.”

To date neither of these racist bids to deny Jews basic rights to their homes and land just because they are Jews has been opposed by any government or human rights group.  This includes, of course, the Obama Administration.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signaled this month that the Obama administration is wholly on board the PA’s political warfare bandwagon. In her speech at the Brookings Institute on December 10, she said the Obama administration supports the PA’s plan to build facts on the ground that will make it more difficult for Israel to maintain its control over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

After calling Jewish presence in the areas “illegitimate,” Clinton pledged the US “will deepen our support of the Palestinians’ state-building efforts.”

Among other things, she pledged to continue training and deploying a Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria and pressuring Israel to withdraw the IDF from the areas.

As she put it, “As the Palestinian security forces continue to become more professional and capable, we look to Israel to facilitate their efforts. And we hope to see a significant curtailment of incursions by Israeli troops into Palestinian areas.”

These then are the contours of the Palestinians’ war plans for 2011. Hamas will launch an illegal missile war to provoke an IDF campaign in Gaza. Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Turkey, the UN and a vast array of NGOs and leftist governments from Norway to Brazil will support its illegal war.

The PA will escalate its political war. Its campaign will be supported by the US, the EU, the UN and a vast array of NGOs and leftist governments.

The purpose of these two campaigns, which complement one another, is to weaken Israel militarily and politically with the shared purpose of destroying it in the fullness of time.

So what must Israel do? In the first instance, it must decide that its goal is not merely to weather this storm, but to win both of these wars.

Now as the country contemplates a reprise of Cast Lead, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu must ensure that when the IDF acts, it acts decisively and emerges victorious.

The same is true in the political realm. The PA offensive must be met by a political counteroffensive that is informed by a strategy for victory. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman demonstrated the starting point on Sunday when he told Israel’s ambassadors that peace with the Palestinians is impossible. But this is not enough.

Any strategy for victory in political warfare must begin with a clear recognition of reality. Peace is impossible because like Hamas, the PA and it military arm, Fatah, is the enemy. Its leaders and rank and file reject our right to exist. They are building a state that will be at war with us. They are avidly working to delegitimize us with the intention of destroying us together with their brothers in Hamas – whom they finance with US and other foreign aid.

A political war against PA/Fatah would involve actively discrediting its members and leaders. Today PA/Fatah is running a campaign libeling IDF soldiers and commanders as war criminals. Israel must file valid war crimes complaints against Fatah terrorists and PA political leaders in the international and foreign judicial bodies.

The PA uses the UN to delegitimize us. Our delegations at all UN bodies must daily submit resolutions calling for the condemnation of the Palestinians for their efforts to criminalize us and carry out war crimes against us.

Israel must also rally its allies to its side. We must ask our friends in the US Congress to defund the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA. The PA is a terroristic and criminal syndicate that uses US taxpayer dollars to finance terrorism and pad the pockets of terror masters and apparachiks.

UNRWA, which is supposed to be a welfare organization, openly acknowledges that it employs terrorists, allows its schools and camps to be used as jihad indoctrination centers, training camps and missile launching pads. The Congressional Research Service has stated that it is impossible to claim that US funds to UNRWA do not at least indirectly finance terror groups.

At home the government must stop all tax transfers to the PA. It must prohibit the deployment of the US-trained Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria. It must rebuff US pressure to curtail IDF counterterror operations in Judea and Samaria.

The government must outlaw all organizations assisting the Palestinians in their military and political warfare operations. It should support class action lawsuits against the PA by terror victims in local courts. It should withhold diplomatic visas to representatives of countries like Britain where Israeli politicians and military personnel are barred from traveling due to Palestinian lawfare operations.

The government should implement Netanyahu’s open airwaves plan and encourage the launch of a private all news network along the Fox News model.

The Palestinians clearly see the coming year as a decisive year in their war to destroy Israel. The Netanyahu government needs to muster its forces to battle. These are battles we can win. But to do so, we must commit ourselves to victory.