Melanie Phillips: The West’s lethal error in the war against Israel
In any moral universe, a set of people bent upon exterminating another would be treated as pariahs by the international community and their rights would be considered forfeit.West Point: Gaza’s Underground - Hamas’s Entire Politico-Military Strategy Rests on Its Tunnels
Yet America is even now insisting that the “route to peace” is through a Palestinian state that must be ruled by a “revitalized” and “reformed” P.A.
There’s zero chance of any such reform. Such a state would merely revitalize the capacity of the Palestinian Arabs to inflict yet more genocidal attacks on Israel.
America and Britain remain wedded to the “two-state solution” because they refuse to acknowledge that this conflict is not over a division of land. Instead, it is a war of annihilation against the Jewish homeland that has lasted for almost 100 years.
Moreover, the reason the conflict still endures is the behavior of the West itself.
Led by Britain in the 1930s, the West has consistently rewarded and incentivized Arab aggressors bent on destroying Israel, while it has prevented Israel from taking the measures necessary to see off the threat once and for all.
The essential prerequisite for any solution is for the West to withdraw support for Palestinian aggression and unequivocally back Israeli self-defense. Deprived of both Western funding and validation, the Palestinian agenda would fall apart.
Instead, the West continues to promote the murderous fiction that there are “good” Palestinians who deserve a state of their own—which would be a terror state with Israel at its mercy.
The West’s lethal error goes even deeper. America and the U.K. have failed to realize that, just as Hamas can’t be divorced from the Palestinians but are part of the same genocidal entity, so the war against Israel is merely the most neuralgic element of a civilizational war between the Muslim world and the West.
That war was declared in 1979, when the Islamic revolution in Iran galvanized and radicalized Sunni as well as Shi’ite Muslims across the world, helping to create al-Qaeda.
The new Iranian regime declared war on the West and has prosecuted that war ever since with virtually no pushback. Instead, Western appeasement has helped finance and bolster Iran’s terrorism, proxy wars and quest for hegemony.
That catastrophic strategy, combined with the West’s continued financing and support of the Palestinian agenda, enabled the Hamas pogrom and onslaught on Israel from multiple fronts in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Judea and Samaria.
This already metastasizing conflict is feared to presage a world war in which Russia and China join Iran against a West which has shown such lamentable enfeeblement in the Middle East.
Britain and America do not only insist that “bad” Hamas is different from the “good” Palestinians. They similarly claim that al-Qaeda, ISIS and other radical Islamists are merely rogue actors in an otherwise unthreatening Muslim world.
Both Britain and America have accordingly failed to recognize how jihadis intent upon conquering the West for Islam—as Hamas has said is its own ultimate aim—have tunneled into British and American democratic structures and institutions as devastatingly as they have tunneled into Israel from Gaza and Lebanon.
As a result of myopia, muddled thinking and moral cowardice, America and Britain are not just aiming to ensure that an Israel they protect from outright annihilation will nevertheless continue to twist in the murderous Islamist wind. They have also advertised to the enemies of civilization that the West itself is ripe for conquest.
For the first time in the history of tunnel warfare, however, Hamas has built a tunnel network to gain not just a military advantage, but a political advantage, as well. Its underground world serves all of the military functions described above, but also an entirely different one. Hamas weaved its vast tunnel networks into the society on the surface. Destroying the tunnels is virtually impossible without adversely impacting the population living in Gaza. Consequently, they put the modern laws of war at the center of the conflict’s conduct. These laws restrict the use of military force and methods or tactics that a military can use against protected populations and sites such as hospitals, churches, schools, and United Nations facilities.Violent Pro-Palestine Demonstrations Are Not a Bug
Almost all of Hamas’s tunnels are built into civilian and protected sites in densely populated urban areas. Much of the infrastructure providing access to the tunnels is in protected sites. This complicates discriminating between military targets and civilian locations—if not rendering it entirely impossible—because Hamas does not have military sites separate from civilian sites.
Hamas’s strategy is also not to hold terrain or defeat an attacking force. Its strategy is about time. It is about creating time for international pressure on Israel to stop its military operation to mount.
Hamas is globally known for using human shields, which is the practice of using civilians to restrict the attacker in a military operation. The group wants as many civilians as possible to be harmed by Israeli military action—as one of its officials put it, “We are proud to sacrifice martyrs.” It wants the world’s attention on the question of whether the IDF campaign is violating the laws of war in attacking Hamas tunnels that are tightly connected to civilian and protected sites. It wants to buy as much time as is needed to cause the international community to stop Israel. Its entire strategy is built on tunnels.
The tactical challenges Hamas tunnels present to Israel are thereby compounded by strategic challenges. To deal with tunnels at the tactical level, Israel has demonstrated some of the world’s most advanced units, methods, and capabilities to find, exploit, and destroy tunnels. From specialized engineer capabilities and canine units to the use of robots, flooding to clear tunnels, and both aerial-delivered and ground-emplaced explosives, to include liquid explosives, to destroy them. Arguably, no military in the world is as well prepared for subterranean tactical challenges as the IDF. But the strategic challenge is entirely different. To destroy many of the deep-buried tunnels, the IDF has required bunker-busting bombs, which Israel is criticized for using. And most importantly it has required time to find and destroy the tunnels in a conflict in which Hamas’s strategy is aimed at limiting the time available to Israel to conduct its campaign.
Hamas’s strategy, then, is founded on tunnels and time. This war, more so than any other, is about the underground and not the surface. It is time based rather than terrain or enemy based. Hamas is in the tunnels. Its leaders and weapons are in the tunnels. The Israeli hostages are in the tunnels. And Hamas’s strategy is founded on its conviction that, for Israel, the critical resource of time will run out in the tunnels.
Remarkably, many of these demonstrators, and the organizations that pay them and routinely bail them out, are also being supported by wealthy nonprofits such as the People’s Forum, and taxpayers (to the tune of $9 million in NYC). The highly politicized intersections of identity politics, wealthy domestic and foreign funders, and government backing certainly helps explain why these demonstrations have been allowed to continue, month after month, despite open calls for genocide and the destruction of public and private property, and the disruption they inflict on the lives of ordinary citizens.
Despite the volume of pro-Hamas protests—or maybe because of it—84% of Americans continue to support Israel over the terror group. Predictably, there’s also been a mounting backlash to the disruption inflicted by the protesters. “They antagonized people so much that they frightened people, to the point that they were not hearing what they were protesting about,” said Fernando Romero, president of Hispanics in Politics, after protesters interrupted a Jan. 5 event in Las Vegas where Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., was speaking and had to be escorted out a back door. In a viral video posted online on Jan. 8, a Black New Yorker was seen exiting his van and shoving protesters blocking traffic in New York City, yelling, “You can’t do that! It’s against the law! I have a daughter in Brooklyn … I have to get home!”
The trajectory of anti-Israel protests across America suggests a deeper, more unsettling trend. Far from a legitimate expression of opposition, they’ve morphed into a troubling display of ideological extremism and physical violence cloaked in the guise of social justice and backed by wealthy domestic radicals and by foreign states like Qatar, the primary global sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood. The reckless tolerance of this continuing level of radicalism and disruption does a profound disservice to the principles of democracy and civil discourse. Whatever one believes the rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Arab conflict to be, allowing violent demonstrators calling for genocide and supporting terror organizations like Hamas and the Houthis to own the streets of Western democracies sends a very dangerous message—one that threatens the fabric of a society built on liberal values and legitimate dissent.