Our World: The government's plan for Gaza
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST Jun. 9, 2008
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The Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government is marching the country into
another military confrontation with an Iranian proxy army. As was the case
in the last confrontation with an Iranian proxy army two years ago, the
country's leaders are fully committed to Israel's strategic defeat in the
current one.

Tuesday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and
Defense Minister Ehud Barak will meet ahead of Wednesday's security cabinet
meeting to determine their preferred course of action in Gaza. As media
reports and statements by the three's surrogates over the past several days
make clear, Israel's political leaders oppose launching a military campaign
aimed at defeating Hamas's Iranian directed, financed, trained and armed
army and dislodging Hamas's jihadist regime from power.

Indeed, as their actions and statements over the past several months make
clear, what Israel's political leaders really aspire to is a cease-fire
agreement with Iran's Palestinian proxy regime. Under the proposed
cease-fire, Hamas will suspend or scale back its illegal missile war against
Israeli civilians in the South. In return, Israel will effectively accept
Hamas rule of Gaza. Israel will allow Hamas to continue to build up its
military forces in Gaza and have open access to the Sinai.

In light of Hamas's negotiations with Fatah towards the reestablishment of a
Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority unity government, such a cease-fire
will also entail an end to the economic isolation of Gaza. Since they would
be formally governed by Fatah - Israel's "peace partner," Gazans will be
allowed to use Israeli ports and even build their own seaport and perhaps
reopen their airport in Rafah. The debate in the West over whether or not to
negotiate with Hamas will effectively end - with an international embrace of
Hamas as Fatah's partner.

For the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government, a cease-fire is attractive
politically. By providing a temporary respite from the jihadist missile
attacks against southern Israel, the cease-fire will suspend the local
media's coverage of the grave and gathering threat to Israel's security in
the South. And the lull in media coverage of the Iranian threat in Gaza will
provide breathing room for the scandal-ridden and deeply unpopular
Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government as it seeks desperately to avoid new
general elections.

Gifted politicians that they are, Olmert, Livni and Barak know that if they
decide Tuesday to reject the IDF's pleas to conduct a military campaign to
dislodge Hamas again and opt instead to sign the Egyptian-mediated
cease-fire deal with Iran's Palestinian army, they will be properly accused
of political opportunism and cowardice by the media and their political
opponents. So to sign on to a deal with Hamas, they need military cover.

As The Jerusalem Post reported last week, that smokescreen will likely be
what Olmert, Livni, Barak and their surrogates refer to as a "medium-sized
military option" against Hamas. The aim of their preferred military approach
is not to defeat Hamas. They just want to "send it a message." In plain
English, what their preferred military option involves is committing IDF
forces to battle in numbers insufficient to defeat Hamas. IDF forces will be
killed in battle and in the end, Hamas will still control Gaza. But in their
public speeches, Olmert, Livni and Barak will claim victory arguing that now
that they have "sent Hamas a message" they can sign the cease-fire
agreement.

For their part, the local media will justify the government's decisions and
agree to present them to the public as a strategic achievement. The media
can be expected to do so for two reasons. First, they will not wish to upset
the families of the soldiers who will die in the campaign by noting that
their lives were sacrificed for nothing. And second, the leftist media is
uninterested in general elections which will bring Likud to power and so
they will work to block them by collaborating with the government in its
attempts to pretend that the "medium-sized military operation" was a good
idea.

As for the political opposition, as was the case in the Second Lebanon War,
they will be unwilling to criticize the government while Israeli forces are
risking their lives in battle. Afterwards, they will fear being castigated
by the government and its media flacks as "unpatriotic" or "warmongering" if
they criticize the outcome of the "medium-sized military operation" that
will leave Hamas and Iran strengthened and free to expand their control to
Judea and Samaria.

In short, Olmert, Livni and Barak are about to decide to sacrifice the lives
of IDF soldiers in order to delude the public into believing that signing a
cease-fire agreement that leaves Hamas in charge of Gaza and in a position
to take over Judea and Samaria is a strategically sound policy.

This drastic assertion could be easily attacked as delusional and even
paranoid if we hadn't been here before. But we have.

Two years ago, Israel was the victim of naked aggression when Hizbullah
forces launched an unprovoked attack on an IDF patrol, killed three soldiers
and abducted Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser while pummeling northern Israel
with Katyusha rockets and short-range missiles. Although Olmert at the time
declared war against Hizbullah, he, Livni and then defense minister Amir
Peretz refused to order the IDF to defeat Hizbullah.

They refused for weeks to launch a ground campaign. They refused for weeks
to call up reserve units. Interested in "sending a signal" to Hizbullah
rather than defeating its forces, for four weeks they ordered the IDF to
conduct operations with no operational logic in which IDF forces were killed
in battles that had no strategic purpose.

Then, after squandering some 30 days of fruitless fighting, reacting to the
public outcry against his incompetence, Olmert belatedly ordered a ground
assault of South Lebanon. He ordered IDF forces to move in helter-skelter
and attempt to complete an operation that was planned to take more than 96
hours in 48 hours. Most egregiously, the entire operation was launched after
the UN Security Council had passed resolution 1701 defining the terms of
Israel's cease-fire with Iran's Lebanese proxy army.

That is, even if the campaign had been successful, it would have had no
impact on the outcome of the war which had already been determined - with
Israeli support - in New York. And yet, to assuage the public demand for
victory, the Olmert-Livni-Peretz-Yishai government launched the last minute
"medium-sized" 48-hour attack in which 33 IDF forces were killed in a battle
for nothing.

Resolution 1701 left Hizbullah intact and provided the illegal army of jihad
with unprecedented political legitimacy. Under the cover of 1701, Iran and
Syria have rebuilt Hizbullah's forces, which in turn have reasserted their
military control over South Lebanon.

Just last week Barak warned that Hizbullah is setting up fortified positions
along the border. He also said, "The Syrians are working in intimate
cooperation with Hizbullah, and they are in large part responsible for the
transfer of weapons and supplies to Hizbullah. The ultimate responsibility,
as far as we're concerned, lies with Hizbullah on the one hand, and with the
Iranians and the Syrians on the other." Barak's statements came two weeks
after Hizbullah effectively overthrew the pro-Western Saniora government and
through the good offices of the Qataris, forced the March 14 democracy
movement to sign the Doha agreement, which transfers control of the country
to Hizbullah. Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah was then quick to announce
his army's subservience to Teheran.

The Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government responded to Hizbullah's violent
takeover of the Lebanese government by rewarding it. As Michael Young of
Beirut's Daily Star wrote recently, Hizbullah is presenting its swap of dead
IDF soldiers' body parts for Hizbullah spy Nissim Nasser as a first step
towards a massive Israeli release of Hizbullah and Palestinian terrorists
from its prisons in exchange for Regev and Goldwasser.

Such a prisoner release will play directly into Hizbullah's hands. It will
effectively justify Hizbullah's decision to go to war with Israel two years
ago to the Lebanese public. Such justification is essential as Hizbullah
moves forward towards gaining internal Lebanese acceptance of its role as
ruler of Lebanon.

Beyond its effective support of Hizbullah, the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai
government is strengthening the Iranian-controlled axis by conducting
negotiations toward the surrender of the Golan Heights with Syrian President
and Iranian proxy Bashar Assad. Here too, Israel is signaling to Assad that
his decision to cast his lot with Teheran was a wise one.

The international consequences of Israel's behavior have already been
unmistakable. This week both French President Nicholas Sarkozy and British
Foreign Minister David Miliband visited Lebanon and accepted Hizbullah's
demand for control over Mt. Dov on the Golan Heights. Israel seized the
strategically vital area which controls the approaches to the Galilee in the
1967 Six Day War from Syria. Hizbullah claimed that it is continued Israeli
control of the area that justified its war of aggression two years ago.

This all brings us back to the situation in Gaza. In his post-Doha address,
Nasrallah urged Hamas to follow his successful model of war against Israel
both in order to hasten Israel's destruction and to facilitate the extension
of the terror group's control to Judea and Samaria. And of course, that is
precisely what Hamas has been doing for the past two years.

The Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government's political opponents have claimed
that with the ongoing corruption probes against the prime minister, the
government lacks the political legitimacy to conduct a military campaign in
Gaza. This is a false assertion. As Israel's elected leaders, the
Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government has a duty to defend the country and
the only way to do so is to launch a military campaign in Gaza.

The problem is that the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government is incompetent
to successfully carry out such an essential campaign. As in Lebanon two
years ago, so in Gaza today, the type of campaign that this government will
launch will only endanger Israel still further.