Why is Israel losing the information war? Watch Melanie Phillips interviewed on Israeli TV, for one of the best 9 minutes and 25 seconds you can spend to learn about the conflict.
Technorati Tags: Israeli-Arab conflict, Melanie Phillips, infowar
Hamas said on Sunday that it was in contact with other groups in the Gaza Strip to calm the situation and avoid another war with Israel.
Representatives of the Islamist movement said that they have urged the groups to abide by an unofficial cease-fire with Israel and stop firing rockets and mortars at Israeli communities. Hamas has even threatened any Palestinian who launches attacks on Israel.
Ayman Taha, a Hamas official, said that his movement did not want to give Israel an excuse to “wage a new war against the Gaza Strip.†He warned, however, that Hamas maintained the right to “respond to Israeli crimes, but only within the frame of national consensus.â€
What to make of this?
It seems to me that the situation is not that different from the period preceding operation Cast Lead. As you may recall, Israel decided to launch the operation after Hamas ended a ‘cease fire’ that had been in effect for about six months with a heavy rocket barrage that continued for about a month. Hamas’ pretext was a November, 2008, incident which began when IDF forces entered Gaza to destroy a tunnel being dug under the border fence, and ended with the death of six Hamas fighters.
Israel was aware that Hamas had been building up its forces over a long period, but most likely did not act earlier for political reasons, not wishing to be seen as an aggressor. The Hamas rocket attack (which they called “operation oil stain”) was intolerable — 87 rockets were fired in the first 24 hours — and triggered the Israeli response. Unfortunately, Israel was prevented from bringing the operation to a conclusion by pressure from the incoming Obama Administration and the weakness of the Olmert government.
Although the first stages of the operation were highly successful from a military standpoint, achieving their objectives and minimizing collateral damage to an unprecedented extent, Cast Lead was portrayed in the anti-Israel media and UN as a deliberate massacre of the civilian population.
The third and last phase of the operation, which would have seen the IDF entering the densely populated Gaza City and destroying the Hamas regime, was never carried out, and the military significance of the operation was only to temporarily weaken Hamas. In the theater of information war, Israel took a huge beating, just as it had in the 2006 Lebanon conflict.
Diplomatically, the result was the Goldstone report, which — combined with the Mavi Marmara flotilla — made it impossible for Israel to continue its economic strategy to weaken the Hamas regime.
And despite the operation, Gilad Shalit remains in Hamas captivity, where he has been since June 2006.
Israel did take note of the way the media had been used against it in 2006 and tried to prevent a recurrence. Although it went to great lengths to reduce harm to civilians — and generally succeeded — the media reaction was no better, and possibly worse, than in 2006.
It’s my judgment that Hamas has a great deal of control over the other terrorist groups in the Strip and their protestations about ‘wildcat’ terrorism are not believable. They choose to permit a certain amount of it for the psychological effect on Israelis, but keep it down to a level which they think will not trigger a serious response. At the same time they continue their operations near the border fence — like the one that resulted in the death of one Israeli soldier and the serious wounding of several others yesterday, in the hopes of pulling off another coup like the kidnapping of Shalit.
Hamas seems to be trying to replay the same game as in 2008 — to stay out of war until a moment of its own choosing. When they initiate hostilities, the expectation is that — yet again — Israel will be prevented from achieving a decisive victory, and that the public relations and diplomatic consequences will favor Hamas.
Israel is deterred from launching a preemptive operation by several factors:
Nevertheless, my recommendation is that Israel preemptively attack Hamas in Gaza. Here’s why:
There is no possibility that Hamas will become moderate. Its entire reason for being, as presented in its charter, is to remove the Zionists from ‘Palestine’ by means of violent jihad. The strategy of weakening Hamas by pressuring it economically has failed, killed by the Goldstone report and the Mavi Marmara flotilla. War is inevitable.
In that case, the first three deterrents to Israeli action are mitigated to some extent if the action is unexpected. Regardless of who shoots first, Israel will be called the aggressor. This was proven by Cast Lead, which — while it was actually a response to Hamas’ unilateral ending of the cease-fire — is universally considered an Israeli ‘attack’. In any event, the less preparation that Israel’s enemies have, the better.
Coordination with Hizballah will also be much less effective if their operation is reactive, and happens at a time of Israel’s choosing. It might even be possible to deter Hizballah altogether from joining in.
Similarly, the reaction of the international institutions, if not primed by Hamas, will be slower. The US will respond depending on the diplomatic climate created by the Arabs, Iran and Israel, and again, the less prepared Israel’s diplomatic enemies are the better.
Another consideration is that as long as Hamas retains its capabilities, Israel is at risk for incursions, perhaps bloody ones and perhaps including more kidnappings, as well as rocket attacks which may strike critical infrastructure. And now Hamas has the capability of hitting densely populated areas.
The problem of what to replace Hamas with remains, and I don’t have an answer to this. But it will remain exactly as much of a concern if Hamas is allowed to initiate hostilities.
As I recently wrote, we can’t avoid the coming war, which has been enabled by Western cowardice in confronting Iran. But there is an enormous difference between a successful preemptive war, as in 1967 when Israel lost about 900 soldiers, and a successful defense against a surprise attack, like 1973 when the IDF’s death toll reached about 2,700.
Israel should strike Hamas first, and continue the operation at least until its military infrastructure — including what is buried in Gaza city — is completely destroyed.
A group of Arab states launched negotiations on a resolution against Israeli building in West Bank settlements and aimed to finish a final draft in the near future, chief Palestinian UN delegate, Riyad Mansour was quoted as saying by Reuters on Wednesday.
“We are beginning the process of text negotiations, and we hope that we can finish this exercise as soon as possible … to pave the way for action by the Security Council,” Mansour said…
“Once Israel complies with this resolution — meaning to stop all settlement activities immediately — the day after that we will be ready to go back to negotiations,” he said.
Probably this resolution will say something about the settlements being ‘illegal’. But this is not a simple concept. At the risk of oversimplification, international law is based on the consent of the parties involved: the treaties and agreements that nations have agreed to be bound by. Disputes can be adjudicated by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), insofar as the parties agree to submit such issues to its jurisdiction (there is also an International Criminal Court, but it only has jurisdiction over ‘crimes’ like genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Israel is not a signatory to the statute which created it).
In any event, the issue of the legality of the settlements has not been submitted to the ICJ, and given the politicized nature of it — in a famous and idiotic decision, Israel’s security barrier was declared ‘illegal’ — will not be. The usual arguments against Jewish settlement in the territories are made in terms of the fourth Geneva Convention, and in my opinion are very poor. You can read a good discussion of this issue here.
The point is that the UN Security Council (UNSC) is not a court which can adjudicate whether settlements are ‘illegal’, and constant reiteration in the BBC and the NY Times, etc., does not make them so.
The UNSC is simply a device that can be used by its permanent members to give a fig leaf of international legitimacy to their use of force or economic sanctions. At present it is not believed that the US will allow a resolution against the settlements to pass, although there’s no doubt that the Obama Administration wishes them to go away. The prospect of force or sanctions being applied to Israel would be very unpopular in the US, both among voters and in the Congress.
The distorted usage of language about legality, morality and human rights by the Arabs and others who in fact want to deny basic rights to the Jewish people was recently noted by Melanie Phillips:
In routine, everyday discourse history is turned on its head; logic is suspended; and an entirely false narrative of the conflict is now widely accepted as unchallengeable fact, from which fundamental error has been spun a global web of potentially catastrophic false conclusions.
This has led to a kind of dialogue of the demented in which rational discussion is simply not possible because there is no shared understanding of the meaning of language. So victim and victimiser, truth and lies, justice and injustice turn into their precise opposite.
Phillips explains the process that gave rise to this collective mental illness, and adds
Israel and its defenders have been fighting on the wrong battleground: the one that has been chosen by its enemies. The Arabs brilliantly reconfigured the Arab war of extermination against Israel as the oppression by Israel of the Palestinians.
That has transformed Israel from victim to aggressor — the reversal of reality which lies at the very heart of the western obsession with the ‘settlements’ and the territories.
The attempt to bring this issue to the UN — when the real issue of 63 years of aggression against Israel is ignored — is the fruit of this disorder. Phillips explains at length how Israel should respond to the wholesale warping of historical truth that underlies the anti-Israel worldview that has come to suffuse the political, intellectual and media universe.
Phillips says that Israel needs a policy, and it must be a proactive one. Israel must stop playing defense and move to offense.
Here is what I think such a policy should look like:
Politically, the main thing is for Israel and her friends to end the apologetic acceptance of the goal of the Palestinian movement — purportedly to have a state, but in reality to end the Jewish state. Israel’s official position should be that the Palestinian Arabs are a hostile entity.
Negotiations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) are based on the false premise that the PA can deliver — or wants to deliver — peace in return for withdrawal. Therefore, continued negotiations represent acquiescence to this lie. Negotiations are used as a lever to force Israel to make concessions of various types, such as ending construction inside of settlements. The status quo cannot continue. It can only lead to the piecemeal destruction of the Jewish state.
It must be a condition for negotiations that the PA commit to recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and agree to end demands for the transfer of the descendants of the 1948 Arab refugees to Israel. Until the PA can agree to this, talks are about surrender, not peace.
Israel should decide what portions of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem are natural and appropriate parts of Israel, taking into account population, historical/religious sites, and security issues. Then it should annex these areas. What the Arabs do with any areas that are not annexed is up to them, except that it should be understood that aggression against Israel from them will be answered by force.
In order for this to be practical it will have to happen along with the destruction of Hamas and Hizballah as military threats. When the next war breaks out — and there is no doubt that it will — this has to be Israel’s objective. At the same time, fully rational and defensible borders should be established as above.
Arab citizens of Israel will have to be loyal to Israel. There’s no alternative. A state can’t exist when one-fifth of its population wants to overthrow it. The end of the Hamas and Hizballah armies should make it clear to them that there is no solution for them other than loyalty, except emigration.
It’s unfortunate that Western weakness has allowed the military threats against Israel to develop to the point that it will require another war before the conditions for peace will be restored. As Phillips makes clear, the West has allowed its own narrative to be replaced by one created by the Islamic world, and it will have its own existential problem until this is sorted out.
For Israel, the next war will have to be its second War of Independence.
Technorati Tags: Israel, UN, Arabs, Melanie Phillips
It’s hard to read this and not think in personal terms:
Hizbullah would likely shoot between 400 and 600 missiles a day into Israel during a future war, a senior Mossad official told a congressional delegation to Israel in 2009, according to a US diplomatic cable published on Sunday.
The cable from November 2009 summed up meetings a delegation led by Ike Skelton (D-Missouri) held with top officials from the Mossad, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and the IDF. It was first published on Sunday by Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper, which received it from WikiLeaks.
According to the Mossad official, 100 of the missiles will hit Tel Aviv.
Hizbullah, the delegation was told, has 40,000 missiles as well as a number of Iranian-made Ababil unmanned aerial vehicles that have a range of 150 km. and can be loaded with explosives and sent to bomb strategic targets in Israel. — Jerusalem Post
100 missiles will hit Tel Aviv.
This is the fruit of Western appeasement, of sophisticated Europeans and Americans turning a blind eye to murderous barbarians. This is the fruit of the process that happens at the UN, the snotty British academics, my ignorant neighbors in Peace Fresno, the churches that call for BDS, and the stupid ‘Left’ that’s taken over the perennial job of hating Jews from its previous occupants.
This is what it finally comes down to, attempted murder and even genocide. This is what you are calling for, my friends at KPFA and NPR, Roger Cohen and the New York Times, Richard Silverman and Max Blumenthal, the Muslim students at UC Irvine. You said you were concerned about peace and human rights, but what you actually did was lay the foundation for what you purport to hate — war.
The Jews have the means to defend themselves, and today they are very well prepared. Once the missiles start falling on Tel Aviv, Mr. Obama’s telephone calls to Jerusalem will go unanswered until the threat is wiped away. Israel is cornered with no place to go. It will fight with all of its considerable means.
Israel’s enemies have always underestimated her, and this time it won’t be different except for the scale. It’s a pity that it had to come to this, that instead of restraining the real war-mongers like Iran and Syria, you chose to coddle them. Instead of crushing the anti-civilization forces of Hamas and Hizballah, you legitimized them.
Some of you laid flowers on Yasser Arafat’s grave, and before that you allowed him to speak at the UN, just as you welcomed Ahmadinejad, who aspires to Hitler’s mantle. It made you feel very multiculturally correct to ignore the fact that these ‘leaders’ were in fact monsters. Monsters who have given birth to the coming war.
Now not only are some innocent Israelis going to die unnecessarily and violently, so are thousands of Arabs and Iranians in places like Gaza and Lebanon, and maybe Syria, and maybe Iran. This is what war is. This is what you worked for. Congratulations on a job well done.
