How Israel wins

Matthew Continetti:

Slandered, despised, insulted, degraded, Israel is nonetheless winning its war against Hamas. The number of rocket attacks launched by the terror group each day has been halved. The IDF is uprooting the underground tunnels Hamas uses to smuggle weapons, contraband, and terrorists in and out of the Gaza Strip. On Wednesday evening, Israel’s Channel Two newscast carried footage of Hamas terrorists surrendering to the IDF. The jihadists carried white flags. They stripped to their shorts, proving they were not wearing suicide belts. These are facts Hamas does not want you to know, images Hamas does not want you to see.

And you probably won’t see them. Since the evening of July 17, when Israel launched its ground offensive, Western media has been filled with Hamas propaganda. In the United States, the debate over the conflict is invariably couched in terms favorable to Hamas: Are civilian casualties too high? Is it safe to fly into Ben-Gurion airport? Has the IDF targeted schools and hospitals? One MSNBC anchor calls Israel, which abandoned Gaza in 2005, the “occupying authority.” Another praises a “gutsy” Israeli, who refuses to serve in her nation’s military.

On CNN, the Islamist Turkish prime minister says Israel has “surpassed what Hitler did.” A CNN reporter calls Israelis “scum”; a NBC reporter tweets a scurrilous article calling U.S. Jews who join the IDF “America’s Israeli jihadists”; and a writer for Gawker says it’s time to send the Jews back to Germany. Reporters once embedded with military forces. Now the talking points of a military force—the talking points of Hamas—are embedded in the U.S. media.

And yet the immediate danger to the success of this necessary war does not come from the electronic intifada. It does not come from resurgent anti-Semitism, or the United Nations Human Rights Council, or the failure of so many Western elites to recognize the causes of this war, their inability to distinguish between a democratic country struggling to protect its people and a terror state using children as hostages. Hate, law-fare, decadence—they are all challenges for Israel. But Israel can endure them for now. Israel is used to it.

What Israel should not endure is the premature conclusion of hostilities. Disarming Hamas—seizing its rocket caches, collapsing its tunnels, killing and capturing its forces—is vital to Israeli security. And an artificial ceasefire imposed by outside powers, a ceasefire written in terms favorable to Hamas, would undermine the security gains Israel has made to date. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have given no sign that they recognize this fact. Or maybe they understand it all too well: The Obama administration’s top priority is imposing a ceasefire at exactly the moment when Israel’s military success is becoming clear.
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Little good can come from a premature cease fire which allows Hamas to reload and start over.  Israel should be allowed to destroy the tunnels and the missiles and kill or capture the Hamas leadership.  That is best for Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza.  Fortunately, Hamas is resisting the attempts to save it from itself and continues to breach even modest humanitarian cease fire agreements.  By encouraging Hamas to think it can achieve some of its strategic objectives with a cease fire agreement to its likeling Kerry and the US are unnecessarily prolonging the war.