UNJUSTIFYING THE MEANS:

There Must No Longer Be An Iranian Terror Base in Gaza (Ephraim Sneh, www.israelhazaka.org.i)

Everyone is now urging a quick end to Operation “Cast Lead”. This operation has been unprecedented in its scale, relative to Israel’s past actions in the Gaza Strip. So is the damage it is leaving behind unprecedented, and that won’t make things easier for us on the diplomatic front. A campaign like this needs to have a strategic outcome that justifies its scale. The needed outcome is for there to no longer be an Iranian terror base 3 kilometers from Sderot and 8 kilometers from Ashkelon.

The government is not doing enough to achieve this goal. As things now stand, the focus of the diplomatic efforts is on the issue of engineering—sealing off the Gaza-Egypt border—and not on the formation of a different reality in Gaza. If there is no one in Gaza to accept the missiles and the money from Iran, the tactical/engineering issue becomes secondary. If we leave behind a Hamas regime in Gaza, it will soon find a way to bypass the obstacles and to rearm.

The immense missed opportunity of the present campaign is that Gaza will evidently remain under Hamas rule. This is not the fault of the IDF, which has done an excellent job, but our political leadership.

What is going to happen? The Hamas chiefs will emerge from their bunkers after the cease fire, will hold a victory march down Gaza’s main streets, and like Hizbollah in 2006 will manufacture an image of victory. “Three weeks of aerial assaults and a ground invasion by the IDF did not break us.”

The Hamas government in Gaza will be the address for the hundreds of millions of dollars that will come in from Iran, but also from other countries, to reconstruct Gaza’s ruins. Hamas will rebuild Gaza and also its own status after having brought about its destruction.