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