Israel is good at using sticks, but its carrot approach needs work

During its three-week offensive on Hamas, Israel has used a great big stick on the Palestinians of Gaza. Most Israelis, myself included, have supported our right to use that stick, pained as we are at the suffering we have inflicted on many innocent Palestinians.

But when the core narrative of the situation was “We got out of Gaza; you continued to attack us” – which, despite Israel’s continued blockades and targeted assassinations, remains the basic truth of the Gaza story over the past 3 years – then we were justified in taking action to prevent these attacks.

Israel is very good at using sticks. It’s the carrots where we mess up.

It’s just no good continually beating up the Palestinians. Yes, they were in the wrong. Yes, they elected an evil and disgraceful leadership. Yes, they once more didn’t miss the opportunity to miss the opportunity. Yes, this war is justified. Yes, yes, and yes.

But killing lots of Palestinians is not going to magically turn them into Zionists. When the war is over, they will still be there. Our neighbors. We will still need to live next door to them. We will still need to come to a modus vivendi.

There will never be a way out of this conflict until we offer the Palestinians some carrots: hope and belief. The sheer despair and hopelessness of many well-meaning Palestinians, in both Gaza and the West Bank, bodes ill for anyone who cares about Middle East peace. They just don?t believe it?s possible any more.

Filed under: Analysis, Gaza, Gaza strip, Hamas, Hezbollah, IAF, IDF, Iran, Israel, Kassam Rockets, Middle East, MidEast, Operation Cast Lead, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Qassam Rockets, Terror, Terrorism, The Terror Journal

Masada legend galvanises Israel

“You cannot surrender, you cannot give up. You should fight to the last second,” the young Israeli boy said after scratching his head and thinking for just a few seconds.

He was talking about what he had learned from his tour of Masada, the ancient site where a band of Jewish rebels once held out against the might of the Roman Empire.

The tour prompted a similar conclusion from one of his female classmates: “It’s really important to stand up for yourself.”

They want us to vanish from the world. But it will never happen. Masada will never fall again!
Teacher at Masada

“Especially now that we’re at war. We need to do whatever it takes,” she told me.

It is something of a rite of passage for Israeli schoolchildren – a trip to Masada – as obligatory a part of their upbringing as exams and sports days.

And Masada is a remarkable story, albeit one that is mired in legend.

Filed under: Voice, Arab, Gaza, Gaza strip, Hamas, Hezbollah, IAF, IDF, Iran, Israel, Kassam Rockets, Middle East, MidEast, Operation Cast Lead, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Qassam Rockets, Saudi Arabia, Terror, Terrorism, The Terror Journal

Arab peace offer won’t last forever – Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabian King Abdullah warned on Monday that a 2002 Arab initiative offering peace with Israel would not remain on the table forever.

Israel must understand that the choice between war and peace would not always stay open, Abdullah told delegates in Kuwait City at a summit focused on boosting economic growth and development in the Arab world.

The Arab peace initiative was first proposed in 2002. It offers pan-Arab
recognition of Israel in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from lands
captured in 1967.

Filed under: MidEast, Arab, Gaza, Gaza strip, Hamas, Hezbollah, IAF, IDF, Iran, Israel, Kassam Rockets, Middle East, MidEast, Operation Cast Lead, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Qassam Rockets, Saudi Arabia, Terror, Terrorism, The Terror Journal

Mr. Obama, grant Hamas the freedom to fail

Mr. President, a couple of off-the-record observations as you take the oath:

In the Mideast equation, settler outposts are the Qassams of the Jews

Outposts are tools. They are bargaining chips of great weight. They are potent, if also self-defeating symbols of nationalist assertion. They are sacrosanct to religious fundamentalists. Most importantly, and most potently, they are meant to cripple the possibility of peace.

Mr. President, quietly encourage Israel to carry out its own longstanding policy of removing illegal settlement outposts. At this point, it is the one step that Israel can take, to bring it materially closer to an eventual negotiated peace with the Palestinians.

There will be many of your constituents on the Jewish and evangelical right who will tell you that illegal outposts, and settlements in general, promote peace and anchor security.

In fact, so ingrained has that mantra become in right-religious circles within Judaism as a whole, that at the height of the recent war, Michael Freund, a former aide to former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, earned rave rightist reader responses by

“This is not to imply a moral equivalence between the two. Just the opposite.”

Filed under: Voice, Barack Obama, Gaza, Gaza strip, Hamas, Hezbollah, IAF, IDF, Iran, Israel, Kassam Rockets, Middle East, MidEast, Operation Cast Lead, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Qassam Rockets, Terror, Terrorism, The Terror Journal

We have achieved victory – Hamas

In a speech broadcast on Hamas television on Sunday night, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said the Palestinians had achieved a historical and strategic victory over Israel, and claimed that Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip had failed.

The Hamas leader repeated the terror organization’s demand for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Strip, and for the opening of the border crossings.

Haniyeh promised that Hamas would give aid to Palestinian families whose relatives were killed or injured during the war, and said Israeli leaders should be tried for war crimes.

Filed under: MidEast, Analysis, Gaza, Gaza strip, Hamas, Hezbollah, IAF, IDF, Iran, Israel, Kassam Rockets, Middle East, MidEast, Operation Cast Lead, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Qassam Rockets, Terror, Terrorism, The Terror Journal

Even Gaza hospitals came under fire

Dr Waleed Abu Ramadan sighs down the phone.

The medical director of al-Quds hospital has not wept since he helped evacuate several hundred people from the blazing Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC) compound on Thursday night, but he says: “My heart is crying.”

He says he is standing next to the smouldering remains of a pharmacy filled with bandages, medicines and other medical supplies, describing the chaos as intensive care patients and premature babies were wheeled onto the street.

The compound was hit twice during heavy fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in the Tel al-Hawa district in the west of Gaza City.

Filed under: MidEast, Analysis, Gaza, Gaza strip, Hamas, Hezbollah, IAF, IDF, Iran, Israel, Kassam Rockets, Middle East, Operation Cast Lead, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Qassam Rockets, Terror, Terrorism, The Terror Journal

Hezbollah’s turn to face Israel?

United Nation helicopters circle in the cloudless sky above South Lebanon. The bumpy road below them is dotted with Lebanese army checkpoints.

Past them lies what is known here as the land of resistance – the villages where the Shia militant group Hezbollah controls hearts and minds.

From here, its fighters battled Israel in a fierce conflict in 2006 and now the portraits of Hezbollah fighters killed in that war look down from the roadside billboards.

Filed under: Analysis, Analysis, Gaza, Gaza strip, Hamas, Hezbollah, IAF, IDF, Iran, Israel, Kassam Rockets, Middle East, Operation Cast Lead, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Qassam Rockets, Terror, Terrorism, The Terror Journal

The price Gazans paid

All day, thousands of Gazans have been rushing back to their neighbourhoods to see what is left after Israel’s campaign of bombing and shelling.

Gaping holes and fire-blackened cars litter the streets in the areas hit hardest by the fighting.

I have spoken to some people who say they have not even been able to find their way round their bomb-damaged neighbourhoods, never mind find the remains of their homes.

Filed under: Analysis, Analysis, Gaza, Gaza strip, Hamas, IAF, IDF, Iran, Israel, Kassam Rockets, Middle East, Operation Cast Lead, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Qassam Rockets, Terror, Terrorism, The Terror Journal

In Gaza war, lions led by donkeys?

It’s not often that a senior member of Washington’s usually staid and cautious foreign policy establishment likens Israeli political leaders to donkeys and questions their competence. But the fighting in Gaza prompted Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies to do just that.

“Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s action seriously damage the U.S. position in the region, and hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process? To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes.

“To paraphrase a comment about the British government’s management of the British Army in World War I, lions seem to be led by donkeys…The question is not whether the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) learned the tactical lessons of fighting in 2006 (in Lebanon). It is whether Israel’s top political leadership has even minimal competence to lead them,” he writes in an analysis on Gaza.

In Cordesman’s view, the leadership lacks a grand strategic purpose. Are the tactical gains the IDF is making in its assault on Hamas to stop it from firing rockets into Israel worth the political and strategic costs to the Jewish state?

Strong words from a respected authority on the Middle East, a member of an influential network of scholars who migrate from senior government jobs (his included director of intelligence assessment for the Secretary of Defense) to think tanks and from there often move back to government in Washington’s revolving door scene.

With the prospect of fighting in Gaza dragging on past next week’s inauguration of Barack Obama as the next U.S. president, analyses and advice have flowed freely on how the new administration should deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a problem that has plagued a string of presidents and shaped Arab perceptions that the U.S. backs Israel, no matter what.

Source: Reuters

Filed under: Analysis, Gaza, Gaza strip, Hamas, IAF, IDF, Iran, Israel, Kassam Rockets, Middle East, Operation Cast Lead, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Qassam Rockets, Terror, Terrorism, The Terror Journal, Tunnel, Tzipi Livni