“It’s like déjà vu all over again,” once quipped the ever-quotable New York Yankees Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra.
Has there ever been a more depressingly apt descriptor for the unrelenting horror of the dastardly duo of Muslim Brotherhood jihadist franchise Hamas and Iran-managed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) teaming up to rain recalcitrant rocket fire hell on Israeli civilians?
This weekend marked yet another deeply tragic and harrowing time for our Israeli allies. Hamas, the genocidal Sunni sharia supremacist death cult democratically elected by a radicalized Gazan populace after then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disastrous unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, combined with PIJ to rain approximately 700 missiles this past weekend upon Israeli civilian infrastructure. Due to a seemingly providential combination of jihadist technological incompetence and Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system having an 80+% success rate, the weekend death toll for Israelis was a mere — still deeply saddening — four.
Internal Palestinian-Arab politics are infamously messy. PIJ, which operates as somewhat of a rogue outfit in the Strip and takes direct orders from the terrorist Shiite regime in Tehran, first initiated this round of rocket escalation. But it is longtime Israeli policy to hold Hamas, which nominally governs Gaza, as solely responsible for all rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. And it is Hamas, furthermore, which shows increasingly strong gains throughout Judea and Samaria, where it repeatedly undercuts the kleptocratic, venal Palestinian Authority (PA) government. Indeed, Holocaust-denying PA chieftain Mahmoud Abbas, who is currently in the 14th year of his four-year term, refuses to hold elections due in no small measure to the fact that he knows Hamas would win them.
The Palestinian-Arabs are a wholly radicalized and generally Jew-hating populace. But don’t take it from me: According to the liberal Anti-Defamation League’s 2014 survey, an astounding 93% of Palestinian-Arabs hold anti-Semitic views. The following video from this past weekend is, as the adage goes, worth (at least) a thousand words:
This is not a healthy culture. Indeed, one cursory glance at the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict ought to axiomatically reveal the Left’s multiculturalist idolatry as the massive lie that it is. All cultures are not, in fact, equal.
The upshot is that it is not at all clear what potentially gruesome horror might succeed Hamas in Gaza. True, some Gazans have recently taken to protesting Hamas quite publicly — but this is still a largely Jew-hating, pro-Islamist civilian population.
And yet, Israel — as a sovereign nation that has a moral duty to protect its civilians against enemy combatants, and which cannot be held to a different standard than any other nation of the world — increasingly has no choice but to act decisively. Indeed, with urban centers such as Tel Aviv now under threat from longer-range missiles, the situation is increasingly dire. In March, I laid out the case for Israel to utterly destroy Hamas once and for all:
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. …
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.
But in addition to the moral and strategic calculation of deciding whether to commence such a comprehensive land/air invasion, it is important to emphasize the timing aspect of such a decision. Specifically, it is imperative that Israel launch such an operation within — at the latest — the next calendar year.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads a right-wing, pro-Israeli sovereignty coalition, was just re-elected to once again lead the Jewish state. As Daniel Polisar recently explicated at the indispensable Mosaic Magazine, furthermore, Israel’s decision to once again hand the reins of government to Netanyahu makes ample sense. A man forever hardened by the tragedy that befell his dear older brother Yoni in Entebbe, Bibi grasps the nature of genocidal, irredentist sharia supremacism in a way that perhaps no other Western leader can. In the bloody aftermath of the Oslo Accords-induced Second Intifada, Israelis trust Bibi to keep them safe. Period.
But not only does Israel have a present leader uniquely capable of summoning the will to plan and execute an extended land/air invasion to extirpate in Hamas in Gaza. From the perspective of American politics, the time to launch such an investigation is also right now. Because while 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 inevitably howl and shriek regardless of any extended extra-territorial Israeli military operation, there can be no serious doubt that this, the most pro-Israel, pro-Jewish presidential administration in a century or more, would enthusiastically have Israel’s physical and proverbial back.
Israel simply cannot risk waiting until the eve of the 2020 presidential election — not with a menagerie of anti-Israel dunderheads competing for the nomination of what is an increasingly openly anti-Semitic Democratic Party. A comprehensive Gaza operation to root out and destroy Hamas simply must be commenced with Trump as president. There is no other choice.
The status quo in Gaza is unsustainable. Israel has the best possible governing coalition to go in guns blazing and systemically eradicate a Sunni jihadist outfit raining perpetual hill on the Jewish state’s civilians. Furthermore, the best possible American president is in office right now — although an election looms next year.
All that is missing is Netanyahu summoning the requisite political will to call the right shot.