Some Lessons From The War With Hamas

By: Steven Plaut

Published: September 4th, 2014

• Nice fences do not stop missiles, rockets, and mortars.


• Unless the Israeli military controls the ground on the other side of fences, those fences achieve nothing.


• Complete removal of Israeli forces and Jewish settlers from an area merely signals Israeli weakness and invites escalated Arab terror and aggression.


• Hamas (and Hizbullah and ISIS) cannot be defeated with air strikes. There is no effective alternative to ground invasion and ongoing military control of the ground retaken.


• Goodwill gestures by Israel increase terror. They do not win Israel friends in the West but rather encourage outbursts of anti-Semitism.


• Terror is caused not by Israeli settlements but by the removal of Israeli settlements.


• Terror is caused not by Israeli military occupation but by the removal of Israeli military occupation.


• The Likud is too cowardly to defeat Hamas.


• The Israeli Left will oppose every conceivable act of Israeli self-defense.


• Arab terrorists do not morph into statesmen.


• It is impossible for two sovereign entities to exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.


• No matter how many concessions Israel makes, the world will always justify Arab terrorism because there will always be still one more capitulation Israel failed to make.


• No matter how nice Israel is to its Arab citizens and no matter how many affirmative action programs it implements, Israel will always be accused of being an “apartheid regime.”


• Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is not an apartheid regime.


• The real enemy of Israel is not Arab fascism but Jewish leftism.


• Israeli niceness and flexibility fan anti-Semitism.


• Much of the world has no qualms about seeing Jewish civilians murdered by terrorists.


• Many people around the world would not raise an eyebrow if Israeli Jews were shipped off to concentration camps in cattle cars – except perhaps to demand improved rail service.


• Israel bashers do not care about dead Arab civilians, other than as a useful tool with which to bludgeon Israel.


• Most Arabs will never accept an independent Israel within any set of borders, no matter how small. Hence reducing Israel's territory does nothing but signal weakness and destructibility.


• The vast majority of Israeli Arabs and nearly all Israeli Arab politicians support terrorism and wish to see Israel destroyed.


• The only country on earth expected to respond to the murder of its civilians by turning the other cheek is Israel.


• The only country on earth that has spent years trying to defeat aggression and terrorism by turning the other cheek is Israel. It failed.


• Israeli leftists, rather than learn from the failures of their policies and “ideas,” will always complain that their policies have not been applied thoroughly enough.


• No matter how Israel responds to aggression and terrorism, it will always be denounced as a "disproportionate" response. The only "proportionate" response is complete capitulation by Israel.


• If an Israeli coughs in the general direction of Gaza, it’s considered a disproportionate war crime and an act of genocide.


• Those who claim anti-Zionism is different and distinct from anti-Semitism tend, on close inspection, to be anti-Semites themselves.


• The only people on earth whom the Left believes should be denied the right to self-determination and self-defense are the Jews.


• The moral and legal responsibility for every Arab civilian killed or injured in Gaza rests squarely on the shoulders of the Arab terrorists and their Western amen choruses.


• There is no moral or legal reason for Israel to refrain from attacking terrorists and murderers when they hide among civilians.


• There are no non-military solutions to the problem of terrorism.


• There are no significant differences between the anti-Israel agenda of the Palestinian Authority and the anti-Israel agenda of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood, and ISIS.


• One cannot buy off anti-Semites and Islamofascists with trade concessions and subsidies.


• One cannot make peace by pretending that war does not exist.


• The only way to stop terrorism is to kill terrorists.


• No terrorist has ever murdered anyone after he was executed.

About the Author: Steven Plaut is a professor at the University of Haifa. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.