To again borrow from one of my favorite (perhaps apocryphal) Einstein aphorisms: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Someone ought to relay the message over to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.
It is long past time for Israel to take decisive action, cease the pitiful cycle of perpetually “mowing the grass” in Gaza, and once and for all muster the courage to order a full-on land invasion to extirpate the Sunni supremacist Hamas terror regime that is in power there.
The lamentable tale of how the status quo came to be is a familiar one. Under the guidance of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — who, for most of his illustrious military and political career, was famously hawkish on the issue of relations with the Palestinian-Arabs — Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Israel physically uprooted Jewish “settlers,” dismantled Jewish cemeteries, and even left behind many greenhouses to help the Palestinian-Arabs in Gaza maximize their chances of forming an ascendant “Singapore on the Mediterranean.”
The unilateral withdrawal proved to be the single most profound strategic blunder of Sharon’s career. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the time was merely a prominent legislator within Likud, left his cabinet position in direct protest of Sharon’s plan.
The rest, as they say, is history. Following the withdrawal, Palestinian-Arabs in Gaza democratically elected Hamas to lead their new government. Hamas, which is the Palestinian-Arab offshoot of the international Muslim Brotherhood movement, is a U.S./E.U.-recognized terrorist group that espouses militant Sunni Islamism and boasts an organizational charter that calls for the murder of every Jew in the world. Fatah, the “moderate” mildly less genocidal Palestinian-Arab movement headed by kleptocratic chieftain and noted Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas (who is currently in the fifteenth year of his four-year term), initially put up a fight in Gaza against Hamas.
Hamas prevailed. And Israel, the only beacon of morality and bastion of liberal Western values in a region beset by Jew-hating genocidal aspirants, ruthless dictators, and seventh century-yearning would-be caliphs, has paid a dear price. That price has taken the form of three full-scale wars (in 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014) started by the sharia supremacist jihadists of Hamas, innumerable other rockets fired indiscriminately at civilian areas all throughout the Jewish state, fiery kites sent to destroy Israeli farmland and wildlife, elaborate terror tunnels built to try to murder innocent Jews and/or capture Israeli soldiers, and sundry other woes that no other sovereign nation on Earth would possibly in its right mind countenance. Furthermore, Palestinian-Arab civilians in Gaza are themselves continually subjected to a terrorist regime that would rather build terror tunnels and use them as human shields than they would invest in jobs or feed their populace. Hamas even works in coordination with other sharia supremacist terrorist groups in Gaza, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad — which, like Hamas, is backed by the terrorist Iranian regime.
Try as the Israel Defense Forces might to keep on “mowing the grass” when the “infidel”-loathing jihadists of Hamas flare up in impulsive paroxysms of “anti-Zionism” Jew-hatred, the status quo in Gaza is completely unsustainable. No other sovereign country on Earth would deal so passively with such a cancerous threat living on its border — with its biggest civilian centers under constant fear of city-wide sirens signaling the incoming threat of crude Iran-manufactured rockets fired haphazardly from a bordering terroristic death cult. Indeed, no sovereign country on Earth should have to deal with such a threat. If the Sinaloa Cartel or Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion ever decided to shoot terrorist rockets at Texan or Arizonan ranchers, the United States would (rightfully) send in M1 Abrams tanks across the Rio Grande tomorrow.
Israel cannot be any different. Much as the global Left, moral relativists, Jew-haters, and jihad apologists would prefer it to be so, Israel simply cannot be held to a standard any different than that faced by any other sovereign nation on Earth.
It is long past time for the Israeli government to commence a full-on, comprehensive land/air invasion to hunt down and permanently root out every last one of the Hamas leadership there. Israel surely has no interest in formally re-annexing Gaza — calamitous as Sharon’s withdrawal was, the Israeli government could not be any less interested in now re-absorbing the radicalized Arab populace there. And while the Israel Defense Forces would no doubt suffer high and tragic casualties as a result of a prolonged land invasion, one is forced to consider the tradeoff of inaction — the continuance of the status quo. And that status quo is truly terrible for all parties involved.
Yes, the world would howl and shriek. The Jew-hating ignoramuses of the “international community” — best embodied by that wretched hive of Western values-hating scum and anti-Semitic villainy known as the United Nations — would cry out in agony against Israel’s “militarism.”
Whatever. Let them do it. Because there is no chance that, if Netanyahu and the Israeli government forcefully made the case of the necessity for such a comprehensive invasion to Trump, that Trump would not abide and enthusiastically support it. Of course he would do so. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton are two of the most emphatically pro-Israel leaders to ever serve in a high position of power within the Executive Branch of the federal government. And Trump himself has proven himself to be, by any measure, the most stridently pro-Israel President of the United States since the founding of the modern Jewish state in 1948.
The time is now for the Israeli government to take such a move. Israel ought not to wait until we get closer to 2020, when a radical Israel-hating Democrat could ascend to the White House. This simply must be commenced with Trump as president. The time is now.
This madness has truly gone on way too long. It is time for Netanyahu and the Israeli government to heed Einstein’s advice. Stop this insanity. Stop the self-perpetuating cycle of the unsustainable status quo. Keep calm, muster courage, and go in guns fully blazing to send Hamas straight to Hell.