By P. David HornikWe’ve long known that Israel is not supposed to protect its citizens against terrorist attacks. All Israeli antiterror measures, from targeted killings of terror masters to rooting out the Jenin terror-haven to mere curfews and checkpoints, have been roundly and almost universally condemned. Even the most passive measure of all—building a fence to keep terrorists out—has been censured at The Hague and become a cause celebre as the “apartheid wall” among a plethora of Israel-foes.
But now, to the principle that Israel must not defend itself against terror, has been added a new principle—that Israel has to fuel (quite literally) the terror against it.
Last week, after seven years of bombardment of Sderot and smaller Gaza-belt communities reached a new peak to the tune of about fifty rockets and dozens of mortars a day, the floundering Israeli government hit upon an idea that was sure to fail: sealing the border crossings and cutting the fuel supplies to Gaza. Some thought this might lead Gaza residents to “pressure Hamas to stop the rocket fire”—as if Gaza was a parliamentary democracy with responsive legislators who scurry to please their constituencies.
Instead, what has happened since has been drearily predictable.
Even after Israel cut off all fuel supplies, Gaza was still left with the two-thirds of its electricity that Israel provides to it directly. Yet, on Sunday evening, Hamas staged a “humanitarian crisis” by shutting down Gaza’s only electrical plant. Gaza City, as the reports put it, was “plunged into total darkness” complete with a candlelight protest of marching children, quickly becoming much more of a humanitarian concern than being plunged into seven years of rockets falling on houses and schools.
“We have the choice to either cut electricity on babies in the maternity ward or heart surgery patients or stop operating rooms,” warbled a Gaza Health Ministry official. It wasn’t really true, since Hamas still had plenty of electricity to direct to hospitals and other urgent needs, and could even, in theory, have solved the whole problem by ending its attempts to murder Israelis. But it worked wonderfully.
The same chorus that always rises to defend Palestinian terror didn’t miss its cue. On Monday European Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner said, “I condemn the rocket fire into Israel and we fully understand Israel’s need to defend its citizens…. However, the recent decision to close all border crossings into Gaza as well as to stop the provision of fuel will exacerbate an already dire humanitarian situation…. I have made clear that I am against this collective punishment of the people of Gaza.”
Also on Monday UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert to protest, after urging Israel over the weekend to end the closure. The Arab League met urgently in Cairo and, along with the Arab ambassadors to the UN, requested an emergency session of the UN Security Council that was quickly scheduled for Tuesday.
True to form, the Europeans, UN, and Arabs led, but the U.S. wasn’t far behind. On Tuesday Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters that “Nobody wants innocent Gazans to suffer and so we have spoken to the Israelis about the importance of not allowing a humanitarian crisis to unfold there.” She didn’t explain why, in her numerous visits to Israel in recent years, she has never perceived a humanitarian crisis in Sderot or any need to relieve its residents’ suffering.
U.S. ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad chimed in with, “We do believe that attacks against Israel are unacceptable and that it has the right to defend itself, but we have also said that when Israel defends itself it has to take the impact on civilians into account.” Translation: “Israel does not have the right to defend itself, since in acting against Gaza terrorists it is impossible to avoid sometimes harming Gaza civilians, and we could much more easily live with another seventy years of bombardment of Sderot than have that happen.”
Israel, of course, folded quickly . On Tuesday it resumed fuel deliveries to Gaza, pumping 700,000 liters of diesel through the Nahal Oz crossing while also providing cooking gas and medicine. Hamas quickly showed its appreciation by firing five Qassams that same morning. An Israeli woman was taken to hospital in Ashkelon, north of Gaza, for severe anxiety and shock.
Also on Tuesday morning Gaza terrorists resumed shooting at field workers near Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha, where last week a twenty-year-old Ecuadorian volunteer was killed by sniper fire. Needless to say, the Arab League did not hold another urgent session and the voices of Ferrero-Waldner, Ban, Rice, Khalilzad, et al. were not heard addressing these events.
Comments:
1. Israel has to partially blame itself for trying a policy aimed at depriving and pressuring Palestinian civilians, which in today’s world has about as much chance of succeeding as campaigning in favor of smoking or against condoms. Israel did so as another way of avoiding the truth that nothing can any longer protect its Gaza-belt citizens, save their communities, or restore Israel’s deterrence and functionality except a large-scale military action in Gaza. This too will collaterally harm Palestinian civilians and not be popular at all—but at least it will achieve something.
2. The Gazan population gets off scot-free for, along with its West Bank counterpart, electing Hamas as the Palestinian government in 2006. If, for instance, a large majority of the Iranian population was known to back the mullahcracy and its goals, it would lose sympathy as a result. The Palestinians, however, are the apple of the world’s eye, an icon of innocence no matter what they do—including choosing and backing a virulently anti-Western, jihadist regime.
3. While Hamas was bleating about babies, heart patients, and operating rooms and world leaders were sternly reproving Israel, nobody asked whether Egypt, for instance, or other Arab brethren of the Palestinians, could have eked out the supplies they claimed they desperately needed. The alleged importance of the Palestinian issue to the “moderate Arabs” has become a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and has recently led President Bush to convene a conference in Annapolis and publicly push Israel toward “ending the occupation.” But in the present episode this has not translated into suggestions, let alone pressure, on the Arabs to do anything to help the Palestinians. The Arabs want Israel, not themselves, to be in the hot seat; and they get what they want.
4. Israel got the worst of all worlds with its 2005 disengagement from Gaza. That is, it disengaged militarily, prompting a vast increase in the rocket attacks, but continued to be viewed by the world as fully politically engaged and responsible for Gaza’s welfare. Expectations that the world would become more “understanding” of Israel’s need to respond militarily, or otherwise, once it had ended its “occupation” did not materialize at all. Currently a cowardly Israeli government, whose leader was a prime disengagement advocate, keeps delaying the day of reckoning as the military challenge from Gaza grows ever more formidable and the inevitable price of confronting it ever higher.
5. Regarding the present situation, Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni noted that “Israel is the only place in the world that supplies electricity to terrorist organizations that launch rockets at it in return.” The connection—in effect, the self-destructive, suicidal behavior—is direct and physical, since the fuel supplied by Israel powers the very Gazan production lines that make the rockets. And not only that: the Gazans have repeatedly fired the rockets at the Israeli power station in Ashkelon that supplies Gaza.
Ideally, Israeli leaders like Livni and Olmert who in their personal careers have drifted from a robust nationalism to a weak-kneed eagerness-to-please would ask themselves if this—not only not protecting Jews, but fueling those who attack them and even attack the fuel itself—is not an apt symbol of Zionism in crisis and the need to regain the old acuity and pride.
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.