Howard Linett
Terrorists 2, Israel 0
January 27, 2009
 

Just as Hezbollah won the war Israel waged against it in 2006, Hamas won the war Israel waged against it that ended last week. Both terrorist groups knew how to define victory and what they needed to do to achieve victory. They needed to survive until Europe and the West pressured Israel into a cease-fire. They did. Then the terrorists needed to emerge from under their rocks, gloriously celebrate their not being defeated and begin rearming. They have.

Even those few remaining non-cynical Israelis acknowledge that if Kadima, the Israeli political party presently heading Israel’s government, had not been facing severe losses in Israel’s national election to be held early next month, the IDF would have never been allowed to carry out the extensive campaign just stymied. Israelis know that their government had no preconceived notion of what its war objective was, other than raising its percentage points in the pre-election polls.

The vast majority of Israelis had no such inability to set a goal for the IDF. Hamas was to be rendered impotent - permanently! The 8 years of terrorists using the Gaza Strip as the launching ground for all manner of terror attacks on Israel was to be ended forever. Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier captured by Hamas on a cross-border (actually under the Gaza border) raid, was to be returned home. These goals were no different than the goals the Israeli public set for the Second Lebanon War. Render the terrorist evil forever impotent and bring our captive soldiers home. The Israeli government has again achieved neither objective. But the harm goes much deeper. After the images from Gaza, Israel no longer has the political coinage that will permit it to attack Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Iran now has both the time, counted in months; it needs to complete building its atom bombs and the first-strike capability to use them.

Some believe that Iran precipitated the Hamas-Israel war. Facing multiple scenarios of President Bush in the days between the American Presidential election and Inauguration ordering an attack on Iran coordinated with Israel, Iran ordered Hamas to bring about the compact conflict in Gaza that ended the day President Obama took his Oath of Office. The scheme worked. Neither Israel nor the Bush Administration could launch an attack against Iran’s nuclear program with the world already screaming massacre in Gaza. Iran’s leadership knows that the new American Administration’s approach to their often repeated and publicly stated goal of wiping Israel off the face of the map, will be to try to find those elusive words to whisper into their ears, that will turn away Iran’s leaders from their wicked ways.

America will talk and talk and talk, until Iran has the number of nuclear weapons it needs. Then Iran’s martyrdom-bound leaders will use the nukes on Israel. And perhaps one on NYC - to make sure that the Infidel Americans understand what despised fools they are.

Hamas fought a classic guerrilla battle, with great success. Other than limited, minor harassment actions against the invading IDF, the terrorists hid their weapons, shed their uniforms and melted into the population. Friendly fire may well have accounted for a majority of Israel’s dead and wounded soldiers.

The low estimate of the number of genuine, armed Hamas in Gaza is 20,000. The IDF killed no more than 500 or 600 of them. That’s it! The IDF "estimates” I have heard put the amount of Hamas ordnance destroyed, their homemade Kassam rockets, Iranian-made Grad missiles and 120mm mortar bombs, RPGs, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft and anti-tank rockets, explosives, small arms and ammunition, at somewhere between 60 and 75 percent. The IDF "estimates” that it destroyed 80 percent of the tunnels through which Hamas smuggled their huge supply of war material into the Gaza Strip under the very nose or with the complicity of the Egyptian military deployed to halt the flow of weapons to Hamas.

Hamas’s efforts have now been aggressively underway for more than a week to replenish what it used or lost in the few days before and during the war, and to do so with bigger and better weaponry. Israel for its part withdrew from the Gaza Strip allowing Hamas to renew its smuggling as unmolested as before. Israel’s approach to Hamas’s rearming has been to host a gathering of those foreign leaders that demanded and "forced” Israel into declaring a unilateral cease-fire (probably the Israeli government’s only "exit strategy” from the start). Israeli Foreign Ministry personnel are now chasing around Europe and elsewhere trying to get those same leaders to sign on the American-Israeli Agreement to thwart further weaponry from getting to Hamas.

Egypt, across or under whose borders almost all weaponry and munitions must pass to reach Hamas, is angry. It sees the American-Israeli Agreement as an affront. President Mubarak refers to the Agreement not as an American-Israeli initiative, but as the Rice-Livni agreement. American Secretary of State Rice is gone. Zippy Livni, leader of Kadima and Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs may well be history within weeks.

Meanwhile there is no new effective effort to stop the flood of weaponry into Gaza. The old smuggling tunnels are being repaired. New ones are being dug. One might even deem it a Hamas "public employment program.” Hamas is merely following in the footsteps of Hezbollah. Two years after the Second Lebanon War, the UN Resolution designed to prevent the rearming of Hezbollah has turned into a sick, sad joke. Hezbollah today possesses four times the missiles, rockets and other weaponry, significantly more advanced with longer range and larger payload capacity, than it possessed pre-war. Hamas expects no lesser treatment and will undoubtedly receive no less.

Israel’s government and military not only embarked upon a war against Hamas without a clear, defined set of objectives, but also without a strategy for not losing the war media. No victory in battle can become a political victory without winning the war of images on TV screens, computer monitors and in print worldwide. The media battle had two Fronts, "Humanitarian Aid” for the civilian population of the Gaza Strip and "Reporting about the War,” especially from inside Gaza to the world. Israel had already lost on each Front weeks before the Israeli Air Force dropped the first bomb on a Gaza target.

The Gaza Strip has been called one of the most densely populated areas on the face of the earth. It is little more than a sixty year-old welfare state. The UN is especially deserving of credit for having perpetuated the stagnation of the population. The UN and other relief agencies that suckle the refugees have a vested, self-interest in institutionalizing the squalor and helpless that is the Gaza Strip. How better to assure the agencies’ continued existence than by assuring the population’s continued need to be suckled. The money that has been spent for Gaza "relief,” in total dollars and as a percentage of that spent on humanitarian relief worldwide since 1950 is staggering. It is your tax dollars at work. Proportionate to world-wealth, a pittance has been donated by the Arab world. One could argue they have contributed more to fund terror than to further the lot of the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.

By definition, having less than a three-month supply of food, medicine, medical supplies and other staples in their warehouses constitutes a "Humanitarian Crisis” according to the UN and other relief agencies. Israel knew this. Hamas knew it as well and actively fostered the "Crisis,” wheedling it like a sword. Israel played right into Hamas’s hands.

Rather than implement a strategy that increased the flow of humanitarian aid, Israel utilized tactics that further curtailed it. Only too late, well into the war, did Israel begin a campaign of trying to assure the flow of humanitarian aid to the residents of the Gaza Strip and of publicizing those efforts. The same criticism can be leveled at Israel’s response to the medical crisis its attacks caused. There were civilians wounded. That Hamas forced the doctors to inflated the number of wounded by double does not lessen the human suffering. Nor is the wounding of innocent civilians mitigated by the fact that much, if not most of the wounded and the devastation of the Gaza Strip resulted not from Israeli bombs, but from the secondary explosions caused by Hamas’s having turned all of Gaza into one big ammo-bunker. The efforts Israel instituted, well into the war, to ease the suffering of the civilians wounded in the war, should have been proactive not reactive.

Israel had the means to win on the Humanitarian Aid Front. It just did not. It was a failure of foresight, planning and caring. That loss was exacerbated by Israel’s loss on the "Reporting of the War” Front, a recurring, constant, habitual and self-fulfilling failure. Israel’s miserable handling of the foreign media deserves an article all on its own. In years to come I am sure the actions of the IDF Spokesman’s Office and the Prime Minister’s Government Press Office will become a classic "Don’t Do These” seminar for college and university students majoring in Communications.

First Israel banned the foreign press from entering the Gaza Strip. The Ban went into effect several weeks before the war commenced. The Foreign Press Association was forced to institute a lawsuit in the Israeli Supreme Court in an effort to overturn the Ban that was still in effect well into the war. Ultimately a small number of reporters were granted permission to enter Gaza. The Ban resulted in the coverage of the war from within Gaza being reported by individuals regularly reporting from in Gaza. Not the most flattering coverage from Israel’s perspective, but then Israel was just trying to keep the foreign press corps out of harms way.

How (expletive deleted) paternalistic! And how evoking of the Press’s chant, "What are you trying to hide?” Frustrate, alienate and antagonize the individuals who can help you the most. How Israeli. As a predictable result most of the coverage of events from within Gaza, what the world saw, came from the Arab News Network Al-Jazerra and a number of Arab TV networks with reporters permanently in Gaza. Just the kind of coverage Israel didn’t need. Once again Israel snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Can you sense my frustration?

Several weeks into the war our unit of Israeli Police Civil Guard volunteers was asked to start "supporting” the police responsible for Sderot and the surrounding region. We agreed immediately. Sderot is at the center of the bull’s-eye the Gaza Strip terrorists painted on Israel’s western Negev towns and farming communities. It may well be the most continuously rocketed and mortared civilian community (8 years and counting) of any civilized country in modern times. Today it is a small college town more than anything else. My younger daughter attends school there. You can drive the length and breadth of Sderot in less than ten minutes. The town’s most prominent features are its overlooks of the entire Gaza Strip.

My personal tour-of-duty in Sderot turned out to be on the first day of the Israeli unilateral cease-fire. The 14-hour day began with Miri, my partner and I reporting to Jerusalem Civil Guard Headquarters at 06:30 to pick-up our police van. We were part of a convoy of 5 police vehicles signed-out by uniformed Jerusalem Civil Guard volunteers who would be patrolling the towns and cities targeted by the Hamas Kassam and Grad-class missiles. We all also signed-on flack vests and combat helmets. As our convoy entered the area within range of the Hamas missiles we tuned our van’s radio to the regional radio station. The station instantly broadcast to motorists the "COLOR RED” warning that meant missiles were on the way - take cover immediately.

We arrived at the Sderot Police station about 08:00 to a warm reception and a briefing. We were urged to take special notice of the public bomb shelters and the dozens upon dozens of pre-fabricated, trucked in and hoisted into position, reinforced concrete "Protective Rooms” virtually everywhere. "If you take a break or have to attend to some police matter, always park close to a shelter or a protective room,” we were advised. It was the voice of experience speaking words to live by, literally. That sentence will remain with me for a long time to come as will the chill I felt when the admonition was first spoken. As if an exclamation mark ending the sentence, an Israeli fighter jet roared overhead not 50 feet above the police station. Those of us from Jerusalem in that second-story briefing room hit the floor so fast our chairs were sent flying. Aircraft, especially fighter aircraft flying at high-speed over Jerusalem, are a once-in-a-blue moon affair and never at low level. Our hosts were polite. They said nothing, allowing us to pick ourselves up off the floor, dust off our uniforms and even enough time for some to make an emergency trip to the bathroom.

We spent the day in our vehicle patrolling the town. It was difficult to find a single home or business that did not bare the scars from a rocket attack. The population clearly bore mental scars. Without exception each and every person we engaged in conversation was "walking wounded.” Not a single citizen was free from the signs and symptoms of combat fatigue and shell shock; today popularly know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A few hours in Sderot and you understood why the entire population of the region felt abandoned by their government. They had been. One must personally spend time in Sderot, ears alert for the "COLOR RED” warnings, your life threatened to understand.

By mid-afternoon it was both warm enough and peaceful enough that we took off our helmets and flack vests. We heard that Hamas, the most disliked and least excused by the International Community of the terrorist groups, had publicly accepted Israel’s cease-fire. There was now another temporary respite for the residents of the area in the eight long years of terrorists attacking Israeli civilian population centers within the rapidly expanding range of the terrorist missiles, obscenely being fired from within the population centers of the Gaza Strip. As of today well over 35 percent of Israel has been brought within the range of Hamas missiles. Truth is, that with a strong enough tailwind in the correct direction, Hamas might have been - and still remains capable of hitting targets as far away as Tel Aviv and Beit Shemesh.

Miri and I drove back to the reality of daily life in Jerusalem. We dropped off the police van around 19:30 and were both back in our homes before 20:00. For the first time since the Police High Command discarded the Civil Guard Precision Marksmen and Markswomen volunteers units, without so much as a thank you for 36 years of outstanding service and we stopped being the "protectors up above,” we felt we had done something valuable and had made the type of contribution we had not made in a long time. It was a good feeling, like in the old days.

As I write, in several European countries and a number of International forums Israeli government officials and military officers have already had charges offered against them for "Crimes Against Humanity” for the conduct of the war against Hamas recently ended. A war in which Israel even telephoned the civilians in harms way urging them to flee because they were in the danger zone of an impending air strike, action by a combatant nation to protect civilians unprecedented and without parallel in modern warfare. By way of contrast there are no such charges or accusations filed against Hamas or other terrorist groups for their war crimes of firing missiles into civilian population centers from among civilian neighborhoods.