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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIsrael Must Be Permitted To Crush Hamas
By Michael Oren July 24
Michael Oren was Israels ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013. He currently is a fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and the Atlantic Council.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary of State John Kerry and the foreign ministers of Great Britain and France all are rushing to achieve a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Their motive to end civilian suffering and restore stability to the area is noble. The images of the wounded and dead resulting from the conflict are indeed agonizing. However, these senior statesmen can be most helpful now by doing nothing. To preserve the values they cherish and to send an unequivocal message to terrorist organizations and their state sponsors everywhere, Israel must be permitted to crush Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
This is the lesson of previous rounds of fighting between the Israeli Defense Forces and terrorist strongholds. In Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in 2008 and again in 2012, Israel responded to rocket attacks on its cities with fierce counteroffensives. Fighting against a deeply dug-in enemy that both blended in with the local population and used it as a shield, Israels best efforts to avoid civilian casualties invariably proved limited. Incensed world opinion generated immense pressure on governments to convene the U.N. Security Council and empower human rights organizations to censure Israel and stop the carnage. These measures succeeded where the terrorists rockets failed. Israel was compelled to back down.
And the terrorists, though badly mauled, won. Admittedly, their bar for claiming victory was exceptionally low. While Israel must achieve a clear battlefield success to win, the terrorists merely had to survive. But they did more than survive. Under the protection of cease-fires and, in some cases, international peacekeepers, they vastly expanded their arsenals to include more lethal and longer-range missiles. While reestablishing their rule in the streets, they burrowed beneath them to create a warren of bombproof bunkers and assault tunnels. Such measures enabled Hamas, as well as Hezbollah, to mount devastating attacks at the time of their choosing, confident that the international community would once again prevent Israel from exacting too heavy a price.
So the cycle continued. Allowed to fight for several weeks, at most, Israel was eventually condemned and hamstrung by cease-fires. The terrorists, by contrast, could emerge from their hideouts and begin to replenish and enhance their stockpiles. That is precisely the pattern established in the second Lebanon War and repeated in Operations Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense in Gaza. Hezbollah and Hamas sustained losses but, rescued and immunized by international diplomacy, they remained in power and became more powerful still. Israel, on the other hand, was forced to defend its right to defend itself. Jihadist organizations no different from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda gained regional legitimacy, while Israel lost it in the world.
MORE...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-oren-israel-must-be-permitted-to-crush-hamas/2014/07/24/bd9967fc-1350-11e4-9285-4243a40ddc97_story.html?tid=pm_opinions_pop
Aerows
(39,961 posts)when it isn't you, your family or those you care about (if you lack any empathy whatsoever).
Damn warmongering. All that some people care about is winning, no matter what or who they destroy.
Makes me sick to my stomach.
ChairmanAgnostic
(28,017 posts)davidpdx
(22,000 posts)I saw an interview with him this week. He is as sick as those in Israel that call for the termination of Palestinians.
villager
(26,001 posts)...which sums up not only the Mideast, but much of humanity at the present juncture.
Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)justiceischeap
(14,040 posts)I wouldn't wade into this argument I never comment on however, Israel isn't only "crushing" Hamas... far as I can tell there haven't been that many Hamas injured. Women and children are littering the ground but not so much the Hamas terrorists.
Journeyman
(15,001 posts)justiceischeap
(14,040 posts)That seemed to work a treat for us in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)This can only lead to a NEW resistance group emerging to "avenge the martyrs".
And that's assuming that such "crushing" is even possible.
No other result is possible.
Then again, as a long-time hack in a political party that NEEDS to have the war go on forever in order to remain in existence, Oren can't be expected to want anything but more and more war.
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)Hamas is "crushed" - and for every one of them, three other Gazans die too - and what then? welcome the ascendancy of Islamic Jihad, perhaps? Then crush them - no reason to think there won't be a 3:1 civilian-combatant ratio that time, too. Then ho? 'Cause so long as palestine is under military subjugation, someone is going to be fighting.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)the ones who claimed that they were "stabbed in the back" by the civilian German representatives at Versailles.
And the ideological descendants of those generals...the U.S. right-wingers who made the same claim about the military being "stabbed in the back" regarding Vietnam.
Chathamization
(1,638 posts)Look at the rise of extremism in "the West" when we've experience a brief period of much more modest unemployment. It's not terribly surprising that there will be extremists in a place like Gaza that's much worse. Is there any place on earth with a comparable amount of violence, unemployment, and poverty that doesn't have extremism?
Karmadillo
(9,253 posts)tool of governance. If we want a world of greater equality and decency, we will have to find a way to govern ourselves without them.
http://richardbrenneman.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/chris-hedges-on-the-pathology-of-the-elite/
HEDGES: Because we dont understand the pathology of the rich. Weve been saturated with cultural images and a kind of cultural deification of wealth and those who have wealth. We are beingyou know, they present people of immense wealth as somehow leadersoracles, even. And we dont grasp internally what it is an oligarchic class is finally about or how venal and morally bankrupt they are.
Hell Hath No Fury
(16,327 posts)I have to turn the channel every time I see his face on TV.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)Israel's continuing abrogation of their responsibilities under international law and apparent determination to thwart any credible peace process and two-state solution provokes violence. The policies of the Israeli government in the occupied territories appear to be deliberately designed to induce a violent reaction that justifies crushing the Palestinians.
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)when the Palestinians are quiet, Israel takes it as a go-ahead to sweep them out of the west Bank, as implicit permission to keep strangling Gaza, and a green light to just do whatever they want to do in Palestine.
But when the Palestinians break the cycle of apathy, Israel cites it as justification... to do whatever they want to do in Palestine.
Palestinians aren't idiots. They realize they're fucked either way. As Sun Tsu pointed out a long-assed time ago...
and
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)Because I can guarantee your plan won't work.
If true peace, ever came to the middle east.....not fighting each other will kill all of them