Mounting Terror in Israel

by P. David Hornik

Snugly asleep at 5:30 on Wednesday morning, I was awoken by sirens that rang through Beersheva. By the time, groggy, I made it to the stairs of the apartment building, heading down to the air-raid shelter, I and other groggy, semi-dressed people around me heard the boom, sounding very near.

It was a Grad rocket fired from Gaza. It landed in a private yard—indeed not far from us—and a man who saw the explosion from his third-story window was injured by shrapnel. Beersheva schools were closed for the day.

Another Grad from Gaza hit Beersheva four hours later, this time with no damage.

These two Grads were part of a larger barrage of southern Israel: a Grad had also landed near Ashdod Tuesday night, causing no damage, and another seven mortar shells struck the region on Wednesday. During Tuesday, amid a general escalation stretching back to the weekend and earlier, Israeli planes had hit terrorist targets in Gaza, killing nine including four civilians.

Not surprisingly, on such days all Israelis with access to a TV turn it on periodically to see if there’s further news. Wednesday afternoon, there was: this time it was a bus being bombed in Jerusalem, killing a 60-year-old woman and injuring dozens, some seriously. The bomb appears to have been left inside a bag beside a telephone pole, the bomber—for the time being—to have escaped.

Not long ago, as anti-regime protests broke out first in Tunisia and then in Egypt, Israel was criticized by liberals like Thomas Friedman and Peter Beinart, and neoconservatives like Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, for not showing enthusiasm over a purported wave of democracy sweeping the Arab world. But of course it’s hard to celebrate under such circumstances. And there’s a strong connection between those circumstances and the supposed “democratic” developments—and not a positive one from Israel’s standpoint.

Various reasons have been adduced for Hamas’s (whether or not it was responsible for the Jerusalem bomb) current escalation of terror, including a desire to deflect popular discontent over its inability to reunite with the Fatah movement that rules the West Bank. Undoubtedly in the mix, though, is the tailwind Hamas is feeling these days from its southwest, in the Land of the Nile, where hasty arrangements to hold elections in September are seen by all knowledgeable observers as favoring Hamas’s parent organization the Muslim Brotherhood—the virulently jihadist group that calls to wipe Israel off the map.

No, in Israel we have to disappoint the critics and admit that, amid the bombs bursting in air and in the streets, we’re not celebrating the advent of “Arab democracy.”

As the crisis intensifies, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has canceled a trip to Russia and is consulting with top security officials. As always, Israeli decision-making in such situations is particularly difficult. If it were just a military matter, Israel is clearly superior militarily to Hamas, as was evident two years ago in Operation Cast Lead. Hamas has built up its capacities since then, but so has Israel.

But Israel also has to face diplomatic issues if and when it decides to defend itself. Put differently, it has to face what passes for Western (and UN) “moralism.” Seemingly, at a time when the U.S., Britain, France, Italy, and Canada have gone into combat in Libya, it shouldn’t be hard to grasp that Israel—which lives amid the Arab Middle East all year round—has to fight sometimes too.

But it isn’t that simple, and it wasn’t during Operation Cast Lead. As Palestinian civilian casualties—inevitable as Hamas ensconced itself in mosques, schools, and hospitals—flashed across U.S. and European TV screens, Israel came under mounting Western and UN pressure to halt the fighting and leave Hamas standing, and eventually it caved to it.

Meanwhile Hamas has rebuilt, and the results in Israel are already bloody. Will it be different this time if and when Israel hits Hamas hard again?

It would not be a safe bet. Israelis could hardly be encouraged by the world reaction to the Itamar massacre—indifferent at best, dehumanizing the victims as “settlers” at worst. This despite the fact that the victims—when terrorists broke into a home in the Samarian community of Itamar two weeks ago—were a mother and father and their 11-year-old, 3-year-old, and 3-month-old children, all stabbed to death, the grisly photos disseminated by the Israeli government in what turned out to be a futile measure.

Added to the basic disposition to keep Israel on a very short leash militarily—no matter how severe the hypocrisy, especially on the part of Western powers that also find themselves fighting in the Middle East and even kill civilians as collateral damage when they do—is that, unlike Operation Cast Lead in the waning days of the Bush presidency, another president now sits in Washington. As many have pointed out, President Barack Obama seems to waffle on almost all other Middle East issues but to come out swinging only when condemning Israel for building housing in places he thinks no Israelis should live. Again, it makes Israeli decision-making about possible military measures all the more difficult.

In sum, while Israeli civilian casualties of terror no longer seem to register, unintended Palestinian civilian casualties—should Israel mount another offensive in Gaza—are sure to kick up a storm. Somehow, the laudable Western ethos of trying to avoid civilian casualties gets twisted—particularly in Israel’s case—into something self-defeating and self-destructive: the purpose of war no longer being to protect one’s own population, but to protect the other side’s population, even if it means forfeiting any lasting, solid achievements in the war.

As the old Jewish maxim has it: “If I am not for myself, who will be?” Translated into today’s terms: if I am under terrorist assault, am I allowed to defend myself?

Original URL: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/24/mounting-terror-in-israel/

P. David Hornik

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