(Ha'aretz) S. Daniel Abraham - For Israel to accept or declare a cease-fire at this time will achieve nothing other than guarantee another war with Hamas in a year or two or three. That is because nothing about Hamas will have changed. Before this war it was committed to the destruction of Israel and to murdering as many Israeli Jews as it could and this commitment remains paramount to Hamas. The only thing that will stop it is the total disarming of Hamas, a terrorist organization that has hijacked a country. The U.S. learned this lesson seventy years ago when it confronted equally implacable enemies - the Germans and the Japanese - toward whom only one strategy could be effective: complete demilitarization. A world that is largely indifferent to the fate of Jewish lives can protest against Israel all it wants. But no country would allow another country - one which repeatedly announces its desire to destroy her - to go on shooting missiles at her, and infiltrating terrorists past her borders. What Israel is doing now is an act of self-defense, and if innocent Gazans die it is by accident on Israel's part and by intention on Hamas' part. The writer is founder of the Center for Middle East Peace in Washington.
2014-07-25 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive