The Post improves

After using its editorial pages to criticize and undermine Israeli claims for several days the Washington Post comes out today with two excellent defenses of Israeli actions.

First is Ephraim Sneh’s Why Israel is bombing Gaza. Sneh, though a former general, is also one of most dovish members of the Israeli government. The op-ed seems to be a statement of the Israeli government’s position. Sneh starts off with an excellent timeline:

In September 2005, Israel vacated Gaza, dismantled all the settlements in the Gaza Strip and did not leave a shred of a presence there.

In January 2006, rule over Gaza passed to the Hamas government under Ismail Haniyeh. Instead of bringing investors to Gaza, the Hamas government brought the guerrilla-warfare trainers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Instead of launching economic projects, this government launched rockets every day at Israeli towns and villages across the border. They smuggled in vast amounts of explosives, weapons and rockets; they prepared themselves for battle.

In June 2007, in a brutal and bloody military coup, Hamas took control of Gaza and soon killed or chased out the leaders of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement. Gaza became nothing less than a military base for Iran.

After making the case that even Palestinians in Gaza have tired of Hamas rule (something we don’t usually read in the news sections) Sneh writes what Israel is demanding:

Yet there is another way. Those demanding a cease-fire must produce a comprehensive solution, a “package” containing the following elements:

· Full dismantling of the military power of Hamas in Gaza, including destruction of all stockpiles of rockets and missiles.

· Transfer of control over border-crossings between Gaza and Egypt and between Gaza and Israel to the Palestinian Authority government of Salam Fayyad.

· Until the elections to the Palestinian parliament and the presidency in January 2010, Gaza is to be run by a civilian administration appointed by the government in Ramallah.

· Augmented Egyptian supervision of the border between Gaza and Egypt.

· The return of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

While I’m not crazy about trusting Fatah, this is a pretty tough set of demands. The third one means that Hamas is an illegitimate government and must be treated accordingly. I don’t have a problem with that. (And I wouldn’t have a problem if Israel demanded the surrender of Haniyeh and the rest of the Hamas leadership for trial either.) However, I can’t imagine that Hamas would approve that. And of course, the chorus of “but they were democratically elected, how can you claim that you respect democracy if you oppose the results of free and fair elections?” I suppose the response to that is “Hamas used its time in office to engage in terrorism rendering itself illegitimate. If you feel that Hamas ought to remain in power despite having engaged in such activity it means that you support terror against Israel.”

The second op-ed is Hard Truths about the Conflict by Robert J. Lieber. In the middle of the op-ed Lieber makes four points; the second and third are especially good.

Second, what we are witnessing is not a “cycle” of violence. The IDF airstrikes are a reaction to the unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks against the Jewish state. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 in the hope that the Palestinians would use the opportunity to prepare for an eventual agreement and a two-state solution in which they would live side by side in peace with Israel. Since then, there have been more than 3,500 such attacks aimed at areas of southern Israel, including over 200 launches since Dec. 19, after Hamas chose not to extend a six-month truce. The expanding range of these missiles now covers an area populated by as many as 700,000 Israelis.

Third, Israel and Hamas have profoundly different aims. Israel has accepted the principle of a two-state solution as the basis for ending the conflict. Hamas, by contrast, rejects this. Its language of “resistance” or “ending occupation” (even though no Israelis, civilian or military, other than the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, have “occupied” Gaza for the past three years) is but a veiled expression of Hamas’s actual objective: destroying Israel and creating an Islamist Palestinian state in its place. Credulous observers may see more peaceful purposes, but Hamas leaders periodically reassert these objectives, whether in the Hamas covenant or, in the words of a prominent Hamas cleric, Muhsen Abu ‘Ita, speaking on Al-Aqsa TV and calling for “the annihilation of the Jews here in Palestine.”

The points about the threat to Israel and the sincerity of Hamas are both important and too often get lost in media efforts to equate Israel with Hamas.

While it doesn’t undo the damage the Post has done the past few days, still it’s encouraging that the Post has finally opened its op-ed pages to a debate.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.