Gaza Paradox Gets Deeper

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Getting deeper into Gaza, as the Israeli army has done this week, in order to get out of it, as Prime Minister Sharon plans to do, has its paradoxical aspect. On the one hand, it makes perfect sense. Something has to be done to stop or sharply curtail the Gaza-launched rocket attacks on Israel, especially against the western Negev town of Sderot.


Indeed, disengagement cannot take place unless these attacks are stopped, since every time one of them takes place, the anti-disengagement forces in Israel are strengthened. What is the point of evacuating the Gaza Strip, it quite sensibly is asked, if this simply leads to a different kind of Palestinian violence – long-range rockets and mortars instead of bullets and bombs from close up?


And yet, on the other hand, it makes no sense at all. If the army is going to have to launch an invasion every time a Palestinian shell fired from Gaza kills Israelis, why withdraw from Gaza in the first place? It would be more efficient to keep a steady military presence there, which can be reinforced when necessary. Disengagement will not have disengaged from anything if it can be reversed by the first Palestinian shooting a homemade piece of artillery at an Israeli town or city.


Primitive rockets and mortars – the difference between them is one of trajectory – are the easiest of weapons to make; a pistol or rifle is a complex piece of machinery by comparison. All you need is a metal tube, an explosive to put in it, a projectile to fit over the explosive, a simple detonating device, a donkey cart to transport this device to a rooftop or field, and you’ve got a weapon that will fly through the air for several miles and make a big hole where it lands. Although 90% of the many thousands of inaccurate missiles fired from Gaza have landed without doing any damage, hundreds have struck buildings or public spaces – and since they can be manufactured for a pittance, even a low rate of success adds up.


Moreover, the Palestinians are constantly upgrading the range of their weaponry. The Kassam rocket now in use can travel five miles; an improved model called the Yassin, supposedly on the drawing boards, will have twice that range, exposing the coastal city of Ashkelon, far larger than Sderot, as well. And the bigger the city, the more likely that even a blindly fired missile will hit something.


In a word, if the militant Palestinian organizations are determined to go on attacking Israel from within the Gaza Strip after a withdrawal, there is no possible way to counter this from outside the strip; only soldiers stationed within it, working in close coordination with air support, can spot the Kassam crews in time to destroy them and raid the workshops in which the rockets are produced. And if Israel withdraws from Gaza, it is only a matter of time before long-range weapons of a more sophisticated nature will be smuggled in from Egypt and the sea.


The unavoidable conclusion is that an Israel that wants to get out of Gaza unilaterally will have to deter attacks in advance rather than respond to them on an ad hoc military basis. And the only way to do this is, for a limited number of times, to use force massively and cruelly until the Palestinians decide that it is not worth their while to incur it. “Operation Days of Penitence,” as the current Israeli strike into Gaza is called, is an attempt to do this – and one that is succeeding. Already it has led to pressure from both the Gazan population and elements in the Hamas and the PLO to stop the Kassam attacks. Sooner or later, if Israel persists, that pressure will bear fruit.


Such persistence need not necessarily take the form of ground troops. If Israel were instantly to respond to rocket attacks each time they occurred with heavy artillery fire directed against their source, the effect might be the same. Yes, such fire might land in populated neighborhoods and kill large numbers of innocent civilians – but, unfortunately, only the protests of Palestinian civilians to their own leadership can compel the latter to end the attacks.


What Israel must aim for in Gaza is a situation similar to the one now prevailing in southern Lebanon, where heavily armed Hezbollah forces have refrained from rocketing Israeli civilian targets because they fear quick and devastating retaliation. Israel cannot disarm the Hezbollah, nor can it get the government of Lebanon to do this, but it can ensure, by means of its powers of deterrence, that the Shiite organization’s arms will be unlikely to be used.


As “Days of Penitence” rolls on, the “force solves nothing” critics are as usual claiming that the operation cannot succeed and that only peace negotiations with the Palestinian leadership can quell the violence. But throughout the present Intifada force has in fact solved a great deal – it put an end to Palestinian machine-gun fire on southern Jerusalem from Beit Jalla in the winter of 2001-02; smashed the terror infrastructure in the West Bank in “Operation Wall and Tower” in the spring of 2002; brought about a sharp decrease in Hamas activity after the killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdul Rantisi in 2004, etc. – and it can solve the problem of rockets from Gaza, too. It has to be applied wisely – and harshly.



Mr.Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.


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