6 | MAY 27 • 2021 

PURELY COMMENTARY

continued on page 12

1942 - 2021

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essay
Israel Must Control its Destiny
D

uring the just-ended 
battle with Gaza, 
Israel’s subterra-
nean barrier against Hamas’ 
cross-border “terror tunnels” 
proved effective. 
 The IDF, as 
well, thwarted 
Hamas attempts 
to attack from 
the sea. 
 It intercept-
ed unmanned 
explosive-carry-
ing drones. 
 It repeatedly bombarded 
Hamas’ network of tunnels 
within Gaza — the so-called 
“Metro” — through which 
Hamas moves its forces and 
weaponry, and from where it 
intended to emerge and kill 
and kidnap Israeli soldiers in 
any IDF ground offensive.
Several key Hamas com-
manders were killed; others 

were on the run; innumerable 
rocket launchers and weapons 
stores were destroyed. 
 In short, Hamas “received 
blows it didn’t expect” and 
been set back “years,” Prime 
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 
asserted.
Which may well be true. 
But the IDF’s tactical successes 
are no substitute for a strategy. 
And as this latest, terrible con-
flict underlines, Israel has no 
strategy for dealing with the 
Hamas terror-state. By con-
trast, Hamas knows exactly 
where it is heading strategical-
ly and made deeply worrying 
progress over the first days of 
the conflict.
It opened the conflict on May 
10, by launching a barrage of 
rockets at Jerusalem — staking 
a claim among the Palestinians 
as the ostensible defender of the 
contested city and marginaliz-

ing the West Bank leadership of 
Palestinian Authority President 
Mahmoud Abbas.
Its rocket fire forced the 
evacuation of the Knesset 
plenum. It played havoc with 
Israel’s Jerusalem Day cele-
brations. It delayed a court 
decision on evictions in 
Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah dis-
trict and forced the extension 
of a ban on Jews visiting the 
Temple Mount. Its incessant 
rocket fire subsequently neces-
sitated the intermittent closure 
of Israel’s main international 
airport and the cancellation 
of most foreign airline flights 
to and from Israel. It closed 
schools, stopped some of our 
trains. It rained rockets and 
mortar shells upon a widen-
ing swath of southern Israel, 
and sent longer-range, more 
potent rockets deeper into 
the center of the country than 

ever before.
Perhaps most significantly, 
and worryingly, it has helped 
escalate tensions within Israel 
— between Israel’s own Arab 
and Jewish citizens — to 
murderous heights, with mob 
violence raging for days in 
several Arab-Jewish cities and 
beyond.
As the very wise Arab 
affairs analyst Shimrit Meir 
noted in a television inter-
view on May 18, when Israel’s 
Arab sector held a general 
strike and thousands rallied 
and rioted across the West 
Bank in a so-called “day of 
rage,” Hamas saw itself “as 
the trigger that has unified 
the ‘Palestinians of 1948’ — 
Palestinian citizens of Israel — 
together with Gaza, the West 
Bank and Jerusalem, into a 
single entity, protesting as one, 
acting as one.”

David 
Horovitz
Times of 
Israel

