Yoav Limor, clevelandjewishnews.com; original article contains links; see also (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)
Image (not from article) from, with caption: Israeli soldiers on Tuesday on the Israeli side of the fence between Israel and Gaza.
Excerpt:
The tense events of the past week on the Israel-Gaza Strip border did not go quite as planned, but overall, Israel can look back at them with relative satisfaction.
Hamas failed to meet almost all of the objectives it set for itself for the volatile week that comprised the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem and the “Nakba Day” march, marking the “catastrophe” of Palestinian displacement during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. The masses did not rush the Israeli border; no Israeli casualties were noted among soldiers or civilians and none fell prey to the terrorist group’s abduction plots; Palestinians across the West Bank did not stage mass riots in solidarity with Gaza; the Arab world remained mostly indifferent to the images from the border; Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas held his ground with respect to the stalled Fatah-Hamas talks; and nothing was accomplished with regard to resolving the dire issues plaguing the coastal enclave.
Hamas’s failure ran even deeper, because it repeatedly failed to draw the masses into the fray on the border. On Monday, 40,000 Palestinians arrived at the security fence to protest the relocation of American embassy to Jerusalem, which is nothing to sneeze at and certainly a challenge for the military, but still short of the 100,000 goal the terrorist group was boasting it could deliver to the border. Hamas’s plan to stage a million-man march the next day on May 15 (“Nakba Day”) fizzled quickly as only a few thousand protesters showed up and made sure to keep a reasonable distance from the border.
But the Israeli accomplishment is incomplete, not only because Hamas has been left battered and bruised and therefore dangerous and bloodthirsty. The Israel Defense Forces met its primary objective, namely to prevent a mass breach of the border and terrorist attacks in the Gaza sector, but it failed to meet its two secondary objectives: minimizing Palestinian casualties and preventing Gaza from making headlines worldwide.
The military says the issue of casualties was unavoidable, as the demonstrations were violent, and terrorists used them to try to carry out attacks. The fact that, by Hamas’s own admission, 50 of the 60 Palestinians who were killed were its operatives, indicates that the Israeli troops used their discretion and operated selectively, using standard crowd control measures such as water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets before resorting to live fire.
But even defense officials admit that the high number of casualties was hard to swallow and certainly difficult to explain—an area in which Israel repeatedly fails, even when on paper it has a clear-cut case.
It is unclear why Israeli public diplomacy [JB emphasis] fell asleep at the wheel. Hamas made no secret of the nature and objectives of its “March of Return” campaign and Israel had weeks of weekly riots to prepare an organized campaign that would explain that no other country in the world would tolerate such an attempt to breach its territory.
On the ground, as always, the system was reactive instead of proactive and methodical, and found it difficult to present an alternative to the international community’s natural instinct of supporting the weaker party, certainly given the images coming out of Gaza. As usual, only U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley came to Israel’s defense, while our own leaders expressed their frustration in the form of a diplomatic squabble with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. ...
No comments:
Post a Comment