Israel’s Appropriate Response

By Gary Bauer
Posted 03/07/2008 ET
Human Events.com

In August 2005, Israel spent billions of dollars forcibly relocating thousands of its own citizens from 21 settlements in a land they had inhabited for nearly 40 years.  Families were uprooted.  Homes were bulldozed.  Tears were shed, both by Israeli citizens and the security forces sent to remove them.  Such was the Israeli sacrifice, all done in the name of peace.

At the time of Israel’s Gaza disengagement, its proponents -- which included U.S. State Department bureaucrats, the U. N. (whose then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called it a “courageous decision”) and assorted European officials -- assured Israel that the move would put an end to the terror attacks that had raged since 2001 and represented a first step toward sustainable peace in the Middle East.  Critics were assured that Gaza’s Palestinians wanted only peace, a sentiment numerous public opinion polls seemed to confirm.   

But realistic observers were less certain of the results of this unprecedented concession, one which terrorist groups like Hamas could be expected to interpret as validation of their brutal tactics.  Benyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s former prime minister, who resigned from Ariel Sharon’s cabinet in protest of the unilateral withdrawal, declared that a pullout would make Gaza “a huge base for terror.”

And so it happened.  In the 30 months since disengagement, not only have terrorist attacks against Israel not ceased, they’ve, well, skyrocketed.  Hamas has used Gaza as a launching pad from which to fire rockets further into Israel.  As Israel scholar Dore Gold has noted, “after Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, the number of confirmed rocket strikes against Israel increased by more than 500 percent.”  In Sderot, a small city of 20,000 that lies just one kilometer from Gaza, over 2,500 rockets have bombarded, killed, maimed and terrorized Israeli citizens. 

Last weekend saw Israel besieged once again, as a dozen long-range rockets rained down on the beachside city of Ashkelon. Israelis are used to Hamas militants firing rockets almost daily into small Gaza border towns like Sderot.  But Hamas' attack of Ashkelon, a city of over 120,000 people, raised the stakes considerably, creating, as one Israeli military spokesman put it, “a new state of violence.”

Israel responded by firing back at the Palestinian rocket squads in Gaza. Many Hamas terrorists were killed, and, because Hamas launched its attacks from civilian population centers, so too were many Palestinian civilians. 

Predictably, Israel’s counter strike was met by a chorus of criticism from all the usual suspects, who condemned the Jewish State for its “disproportionate” response.  United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon accused Israel of using “excessive force”; Egypt’s intelligence chief protested by cancelling a scheduled visit to Israel; Saudi Arabia compared the strike against Hamas to “Nazi war crimes.” 

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