Caroline Glick: Who leads Israel?
Israel has a problem with its security brass. And this week we received several reminders that the situation needs to be dealt with.It's not the 'occupation,' it's the Jews
Since the Hamas regime in Gaza announced in March that it was planning to have civilians swarm the border with Israel, through this week’s Hamas-Islamic Jihad mortar and rocket assault on southern Israel, the IDF General Staff has been insisting there is only one thing Israel can do about Gaza.
According to our generals, Israel needs to shower Hamas with stuff. Food, medicine, water, electricity, medical supplies, concrete, cold hard cash, whatever Hamas needs, Israel should just hand it over in the name of humanitarian assistance.
Every single time reporters ask the generals what Israel can do to end Hamas’s jihadist campaign, they give the same answer. Let’s shower them with stuff.
The fact that the Palestinian Authority is blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza makes no impression on the generals. For months now, PA chief Mahmoud Abbas has refused to pay salaries to Hamas regime employees or pay for Gaza’s electricity and fuel. Hamas, for its part, destroyed the Kerem Shalom cargo terminal two weeks ago, blocking all transfer of gas and food to Gaza. And this week it blew up its electricity lines with a misfired mortar aimed at Israel.
Hamas’s determination to use civilians as human shields for its terrorists is a pretty clear message that it does not care about the people it controls. But for whatever reason, it didn’t register with the General Staff. As residents of the South were rushing to bomb shelters every 10 minutes or so on Tuesday, generals were briefing reporters that Israel must give them medicine.
Look at any news site in the world, and in almost all of them, you'll find the Gaza Strip reported as a territory "occupied" by Israel.MEMRI: Saudi Writer: The Arab League Summits Are Completely Pointless; Palestinian Leaders – First And Foremost Jerusalem Mufti Al-Husseini And PLO Leader Arafat – Damaged The Palestinian Cause The Most
Here's the reality: Israel withdrew from Gaza in the summer of 2005, under the misguided assumption that the Palestinian Authority would have jurisdiction there.
But that was not to be the case. Six months after Israel's withdrawal, Hamas won the Palestinian election and the following summer staged a violent coup. The fact that Hamas was preparing for war prompted Israel to monitor the border crossings between Israel and Gaza, knowing very well that Hamas was less interested in the welfare of the residents of Gaza than in obtaining weapons and building defenses.
The facts are readily available to anyone who looks, but that never seems to matter. We are consistently described as occupiers. Incidentally, the Egyptians also monitor their border crossings with Gaza, but no one ever pulls the "occupier" label on them. That's reserved only for the Jews.
Let's reiterate: The "occupation" is not a claim, it is a perception, and it is founded on the notion that Jewish sovereignty over any part of the Land of Israel is abhorrent. In the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, Israel relinquished control over the vast majority of the Arab population in Judea and Samaria. They have a Palestinian government with a Palestinian flag and a Palestinian national anthem and Palestinian budgets. They are supposed to vote in Palestinian parliamentary elections. Most of the territory isn't populated, and Israel has a historical right to it as a nation.
In an article in the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that was published two days after the Arab League summit in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, Saudi writer Mash'al Al-Sudairi argued that these conferences are pointless because over the years they have produced almost nothing. While the Palestinian issue topped the agenda at all of them, he said, "all of them have concluded with nothing... [because] the Arabs are incapable of fighting and incapable of making peace." He accused Palestinian leaders, first and foremost Jerusalem grand mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini and PLO leader Yasser Arafat, of damaging the just Palestinian cause, criticized the boastful anti-Israel slogans used by the Arabs at these summits, and praised the two Saudi peace initiatives – Crown Prince Fahd's, in 1981, and King Abdallah's, in 2002, for breaking through the "all or nothing" approach.
The following are translated excerpts from Al-Sudairi's article:
"In advance of [every] Arab League summit, I break out in hives writing on any political issue – particularly on the Palestinian issue, an extremely just issue that is handled in the worst possible way. To date, there have been 41 [Arab League] summits, from the 1946 Inshas summit in Egypt to the most recent Al-Quds Summit [in April 2018, in Saudi Arabia].[2] Heading the list [of subjects] at [all] these summits has of course been the Palestinian issue; all of them have concluded with nothing. Unfortunately, the Arabs are incapable of fighting and incapable of making peace, and this is their complex tragedy.
"We must admit frankly that the ones who damaged the [Palestinian] cause more than anyone else were some Palestinian leaders and some Arab leaders. Enumerating them one by one, [Jerusalem grand mufti] Amin Al-Husseini, during World War II, naively gambled on Hitler with the entire weight of the Palestinian issue. He said in a speech: 'The Arabs are the natural friends of Germany because they have common enemies – the British, the Jews, and the Communists – and they [the Arabs] are willing to participate in the war.' But Hitler had no position on these statements. Al-Husseini remained in Germany, receiving a monthly salary of 150,000 marks, but the moment Germany's defeat became clear, he fled to Cairo; he was the one who tried to combine the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nazi ideology. This position of Al-Husseini brought the rage of Britain, Russia, and the U.S. down upon him, and he added fuel to the fire by opposing the [1947 U.N.] partition resolution giving the Palestinians 49% of the territory – such that as soon as the State of Israel was declared, Russia and the U.S. were the first to recognize it.