Eliminate Hamas

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under.}

Yoav Zitun and Elior Levy write in Y-Net:

A heavy barrage of rockets was fired at Israel on Tuesday night, around 10:40pm. Loud explosions were heard in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, while Code Red sirens blared throughout southern and central Israel.

Hamas said it fired 40 rockets at Israel. Among them, two hit open areas in the Sha'ar HaNegev Regional Council, four more in open areas in the Eshkol Regional Council, and five hit open areas in the Be'er Sheva area.

Hamas apparently believes if enough people such as this idiot call upon Obama to pressure Israel to give in to their demands then maybe Netanyahu will fold.  And Netanyahu may very well fold.  In fact, as far as I am concerned, he already has.

By not finishing the job - which is to say, by not eliminating Hamas - he is damning Israel to never-ending war in the Gaza strip.

Furthermore, if he gives in to Arab demands to significantly lift the blockade, he signals to Hamas and Hezbollah and the Islamic State (ISIS) and the Palestinian Authority and Islamic Jihad, and all the enemies of the Jewish people and the Jewish State, that if they hit us hard enough and long enough, we will give them whatever they want.

This is a huge mistake.

Every time Hamas breaks another cease fire by shooting rockets at Tel Aviv - Tel Aviv, for chissake! -  it opens an opportunity to hit them hard enough to wreck their ability to operate as a significant organization.

Israel should do what is necessary to finish this, once and for all.

I know that it is hard and I know such a thing would be bloody and awful, but I also know that so long as Israel negotiates with this group of theocratic fascists they legitimize an organization that calls specifically for the murder of the Jews wherever we might be found.

So long as Israel caves to Obama's demand that it not defend its people, the more it will have to in the years and decades ahead.

This is simply not acceptable.

Israel should seek, as it always does, to minimize civilian casualties, but it should not allow either the prospect of collateral damage, nor the PR storm that will inevitably result, to prevent it from completing its operational objectives.

The western-left, it should be understood, has lost any ethical standing with which to criticize Israel.  For years southern Israel withstood the rocket fire and they said not a word.  Thus anything that they say now should be entirely dismissed on moral grounds.

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By the way, my non-peace process predictions turned out to be largely correct:

1) The US and the EU demand negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

2) The parties agree to talk and then the PA, the US, and the EU demand various concessions from Israel for the great privilege of sitting down with the PA's foremost undertaker.

3) Israel fails to meet all the concessions, thus causing the PA to flee negotiations, which they never had any intention of concluding to begin with.

4)  The PA and the EU and the Obama administration place the blame for failure at Jewish feet.

5)  The EU and various European countries announce additional sanctions, thereby essentially joining the anti-Semitic anti-Zionist BDS movement.

6)  Arabs seek to murder Jews.

Let's hope that I am wrong.

Well, as it turns out, I was not.

Here is a question:

How is it that the same people who spout the same worthless ideas, over and over again since 1992 - ideas that never work and that never change no matter how circumstances evolve - are still considered respectable for their analyses?

{For example, should not Thomas Friedman be out someplace selling pencils out of a tin cup on a street corner, by now?}

These also tend to be the same people who claimed that the misnamed "Arab Spring" was the great up-welling of Arab democracy.

These are the same people who supported Obama even when he supported the Brotherhood, which is the parent organization of Qaeda.

These are the same people who never breathe a word about the absolutely mind-boggling degree of Muslim-on-Muslim violence that reaches easily into the hundreds of thousands of dead and millions displaced, yet will bang their fists on the floor and demand that the Jews stop defending themselves in Israel.

The western liberal-left has been consistently wrong about almost everything when it comes to foreign policy under the Obama administration, particularly the Arab-Israel conflict, yet they never admit a mistake and excoriate those who point them out.

We need a new paradigm to discuss the long Arab war against the Jews, because relying upon the terms of Oslo is to rely upon the enemy's terms.   It is not merely that we yield the home field advantage, but that we concede the debate before it begins.

What I suggest, as a preliminary to even thinking about the question, is to remember to expand the context historically.  It is exceedingly important to include thirteen hundred years of dhimmitude in the conversation if Jews wish to have any hope of appealing to rational liberals... which, in itself, does not seem very likely.

It is also exceedingly important, and for the same reason, to get them to understand the conflict is not some Jewish "Goliath" against a thumb-sucking and helpless Arab "David."  Arabs outnumber Jews 60 or 70 to 1 in that part of the world and are more than willing to use their cousins in Gaza, and in Judea and Samaria, as a club against the hated Jewish prophet-killers.

We can never win the argument so long as we fight on progressive-left anti-Israel rhetorical turf and, yet, with few exceptions, we almost never seem to fight anywhere else.