NEWFANE — According to Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013, “The war against Israel has passed through three phases.”
“The first was the attempt to annihilate Israel by conventional means,” he says. “It began with Israel's birth in 1948, when Arab armies nearly captured Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and ended in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israeli forces came within artillery range of Cairo and Damascus.
“The next stage, starting in the early 1970s, sought to cripple Israel through terror. Suicide bombers nearly paralyzed the country, but by 2005 they too were defeated.
“That is when Israel's enemies launched the third, and potentially most devastating, campaign: to isolate, delegitimize and sanction Israel into extinction.”
Oren notes that the West Bank represents a complex historical, humanitarian, and security situation. Unfortunately, Palestinian leaders turned down Israeli offers of statehood in 2000 and 2008 and have now abandoned peace talks in favor of reunification with Hamas.
They aspire to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza from which all Jews have been expelled.
* * *
Outside of the West Bank, in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel, Jews and Arabs mix freely and increasingly live in the same neighborhoods.
Arabs serve in Israel's parliament, in its army, and on its Supreme Court. And though discrimination in Israel, as in America, remains a scourge, there is no imposed segregation. Go to any Israeli mall, any restaurant or hospital, and you will see Arabs and Jews interacting.
But this is not the perspective of the information about the current crisis between Israel and Gaza.
Instead, we get a daily, unverified casualty count in Gaza from the Gazan Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas.
The Ministry of Health counts everyone not in uniform as a civilian. However, most Hamas fighters don't wear uniforms. It strains credulity to believe that 80 percent of the casualties are civilian but just so happened to be overwhelmingly fighting-age men. Also, given that approximately 1.6 million people are densely crowded into Gaza and that the Israel Air Force has flown more than 2,000 sorties, the number of casualties is incredibly low.
If the civilian casualty count is anything to go by, Israel deserves to be commended in Gaza, since the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warns civilians with leaflets, phone calls, and SMS messages of a pending attack on a specific area.
Hamas, while digging bunkers for their leaders and tunnels to attack Israel at a huge cost, gives their civilian population no shelters. By contrast, Israel not only has civilian shelters everywhere, but also spent a huge amount with U.S. support for the Iron Dome air-defense system that is very effective at protecting civilians as well as giving a red- alert alarm to warn civilians to take cover.
Perhaps the worst thing is that Hamas fires missiles from populated areas and stores their missiles in mosques and schools (including United Nations Relief and Works Agency schools).
Israel has reportedly discovered at least 30 tunnels, and has destroyed several of them by employing bulldozers. IDF excavation of the tunnels has resulted in the seizure of tons of Hamas supplies, as well as the discovery of plans for future operations.
Clearly, the network of tunnels - misappropriating 800,000 tons of cement that might otherwise have been used by the Palestinians for building homes, shopping malls, parks, schools, hospitals, and libraries - indicates that Hamas had been preparing for an ongoing conflict for at least a year. According to the reports, each tunnel has arteries, veins, offshoots, and offshoots of the offshoots in intricate and complex arrangements.
* * *
As the death toll rises, the deaths of children are firmly in the spotlight - and rightly so. It pains all reasonable people to hear of children dying as the consequence of war. Hamas and its supporters display gruesome pictures of dead and wounded children in order to gain sympathy for their portrait of Israel as the villain intent on killing Palestinians.
In response, Israel cites the need to stop Hamas from firing thousands of rockets at its own children, who are being forced to live in bomb shelters, as well as the need to eliminate the tunnels that Hamas dug into Israel to carry out terror attacks against Israelis. One tunnel opening was found underneath an Israeli kindergarten.
But who built those tunnels?
The answer is Hamas, of course - using some of the same children who are now trapped under fire in Gaza. They are also directly exploiting and endangering Gaza's youth in these tunnels' construction and operation.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza's tunnel phenomenon in the summer of 2012, reporting that “[a]t least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials.” The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies.”
It should be noted that Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas has journeyed to Qatar, the only country, apart from Turkey, that is actively supporting Hamas in this conflict.
The only other people who actually are supporting Hamas are the western liberal intelligentsia and the Muslim rabble. Egypt - which proposed a ceasefire, which Israel accepted and Hamas rejected - is not supporting Hamas and the Arab League, and most of the other Arab countries have kept a low profile.
They acknowledge that the loss of Palestinian civilian life is largely due to Hamas and its tactics.
* * *
Can a ceasefire agreement emerge, one acceptable to both sides? At present, no!
To save face, Hamas is insisting that Israel must stop the naval blockade of Gaza. That Israel cannot do because Hamas would import weapons and missiles.
Hamas wants Egypt to open the Rafah crossing. Egypt's president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, will not do so for the same reason.
Another Hamas condition is that Israel should release arrested Hamas operatives and allow free transfer of people between Gaza and the West Bank, something that Israel will certainly not allow.
While Israel's conditions for a ceasefire have not been spelled out, it accepted the Egyptian ceasefire proposal. But its conditions must ultimately include the destruction of all offensive tunnels and the destruction of all missiles in Gaza.
Hamas will not agree to this and they continue to fire missiles over Israel all the time.
So the fighting will continue until the IDF has done sufficient damage to Hamas that it will be forced to sue for a ceasefire to avoid further damage and the loss of its control of Gaza. When that might happen cannot be predicted, but it will take some time.
So, before taking a position on Israel, please keep things in perspective.