6 | MAY 27 • 2021 PURELY COMMENTARY continued on page 12 1942 - 2021 Covering and Connecting Jewish Detroit Every Week To make a donation to the DETROIT JEWISH NEWS FOUNDATION go to the website www.djnfoundation.org The Detroit Jewish News (USPS 275-520) is published every Thursday at 32255 Northwestern Highway, #205, Farmington Hills, Michigan. Periodical postage paid at Southfield, Michigan, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send changes to: Detroit Jewish News, 32255 Northwestern Highway, #205, Farmington Hills, Michigan 48334 MISSION STATEMENT The Detroit Jewish News will be of service to the Jewish community. The Detroit Jewish News will inform and educate the Jewish and general community to preserve, protect and sustain the Jewish people of greater Detroit and beyond, and the State of Israel. 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Cohen, Shelli Leibman Dorfman, Louis Finkelman, Stacy Gittleman, Esther Allweiss Ingber, Barbara Lewis, Jennifer Lovy, Rabbi Jason Miller, Alan Muskovitz, Robin Schwartz, Mike Smith, Steve Stein, Ashley Zlatopolsky | Advertising Sales Director of Advertising: Keith Farber kfarber@thejewishnews.com Senior Account Executive: Kathy Harvey-Mitton kmitton@thejewishnews.com | Business Office Director of Operations: Amy Gill agill@thejewishnews.com Operations Manager: Andrea Gusho agusho@thejewishnews.com Operations Assistant: Ashlee Szabo Circulation: Danielle Smith Billing Coordinator: Pamela Turner | Production By Farago & Associates Manager: Scott Drzewiecki Designers: Kelly Kosek, Kaitlyn Schoen, Michelle Sheridan 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