Before the next war starts
The IDF is capable of taking over and flattening Gaza; but then what?
Please go ahead and write down the names of the politicians, public figures, and journalists who are prompting the government and the IDF to enter Gaza. These people, the very same ones, will be asked the following questions after the next war (yes, it will be a war): Why did we go in? Who needed it? These same people will of course ask for the heads of Olmert, Barak, and Ashkenazi to roll, because “we need personal accountability.”
Indeed, there is no arguing that the situation in Sderot and the Gaza region is intolerable, impossible, and cannot continue. It is also true that there isn’t, never was, and never will be another country in the world that would allow for even one day its sovereignty and its people to be targeted like that. It is also true that the IDF is capable of wiping Gaza off the face of this earth (and there are some amongst us who even promise to wipe out Iran and its tens of millions of citizens.)
This is all true, but one needs not be a military commentator or retired general in order to realize that a wide-scale military operation, a euphemism for war, will bring maybe several months of quiet in its wake, but after that we’ll again face the storm.
We are talking about 1.5 million people who have nothing to lose. They are armed to the teeth; even following the occupation, or liberation, of the Six-Day War they possessed many weapons.
We can occupy and flatten Gaza, and then what? There’s nobody like our Arab neighbors when it comes to restoration. Anyone who served in the territories can tell you about how quickly razed homes are rebuilt. Sometimes within two to three days. Hundreds and maybe thousands of Palestinians will be killed, and then what?
They’re not short on manpower
Currently there are about 10,000 terrorists in Israeli detention facilities; most of whom, please note, were not even born when the first Intifada broke out in 1987. This is already the 3rd or 4th round following those stone-throwing kids. Some say that almost 500,000 Palestinians have been through our detention and interrogation rooms, yet they are still firing Qassam rockets at Sderot and Gaza-region communities. They’re not short on manpower.
At this time some good Jews must be sitting out there and saying: Why is he talking nonsense? Our IDF will already find the timing, way, and method; just issue the right orders. Do you remember Entebbe? Do you remember Ehud Barak in his commando days dressed as a woman in Beirut’s alleyways? Just give the IDF the order, and its troops will emerge out of the chimneys, appear out of sewage pits, go directly into the strongholds of terror and kick their butt. Just give them the order already!
Yet these days are gone. Today, the IDF is realistic, it knows the limits of power, and also knows that the politicians will issue the order if, heaven forbid, the number of casualties as a result of an attack from Gaza will be intolerable (usually that means double digits.) The IDF already knows, for example, that the Second Lebanon War happened and everything, or almost everything, is back to the way it used to be, with the exception of 166 Israelis who didn’t make it back home.
Zionism is premised, among other things, on breaks between fighting, patience, wars of no choice, and building, building, and more building of a nation that has almost no equal in the world. Between the wars and terror attacks that have been persisting since the end of the 19th Century, the Jewish people bit its lips and built a glorious home; the State of Israel.
This is no comfort to the civilians living in Sderot and demanding a solution, but this is the truth; apparently the politician who would utter it has not yet been born.
