Israel Must Be Permitted To Crush Hamas

[Purveyor]

By Michael Oren July 24

Michael Oren was Israel’s 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, Israel’s 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]

1. Life is cheap

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]

2. Oren is one glib, sick fuck.

[davidpdx]

6. +1

I saw an interview with him this week. He is as sick as those in Israel that call for the termination of Palestinians.

[villager]

4. Like this great Gahan Wilson cartoon:

...which sums up not only the Mideast, but much of humanity at the present juncture.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

12. +844. and counting. nt

[justiceischeap]

3. If Israel were only "crushing" Hamas

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]

9. Bystanders are relatively easy to kill. Fighters, however, are considerably harder . . .

[justiceischeap]

11. Apparently they need a deck of cards

That seemed to work a treat for us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Ken Burch]

5. Problem is, if Hamas is "crushed"(at the unavoidable cost of massive civilian casualties in Gaza)

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]

13. Bingo, Ken

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]

14. If anything, Oren sounds like one of those German generals in the 1920's-

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]

16. Yeah, and poor bombed out cities with 50% unemployment isn't exactly where moderates come from

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]

7. Our ruling elites are littered with the morally bankrupt who find mass slaughter an essential

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 don’t understand the pathology of the rich. We’ve been saturated with cultural images and a kind of cultural deification of wealth and those who have wealth. We are being—you know, they present people of immense wealth as somehow leaders—oracles, even. And we don’t grasp internally what it is an oligarchic class is finally about or how venal and morally bankrupt they are.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

8. God I hate that fuck.

I have to turn the channel every time I see his face on TV.

[Spider Jerusalem]

10. Israel should stop expanding settlements in the occupied territories.

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]

15. That's exactly it, Spider

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...

Where if one fights with intensity he will survive, but if he does not fight with intensity he will perish, it is "fatal terrain". Cast them into positions from which there is nowhere to go and they will die without retreating. If there is no escape from death, the officers and soldiers will fully exhaust their strength.

and

On hemmed-in ground, resort to stratagem. On desperate ground, fight.

[gratuitous]

17. Is that your final solution, Mr. Oren?

Because I can guarantee your plan won't work.

[jlover70]

18. peace

If true peace, ever came to the middle east.....not fighting each other will kill all of them