Trusting in Foreigners

JERUSALEM—How to solve the problem of Hamas in the Gaza Strip? As the Israeli town of Sderot continues to suffer a rain of Kassams, Israel’s leaders may be considering a desperation move.

It’s a move that didn’t work so well for them the first time they tried it—at the conclusion of the Second Lebanon War.

The Second Lebanon War was, in fact, devastating for Israel. As the Winograd Commission’s final report recently confirmed, Israel entered it with uncertain and hence unattainable goals, quickly got stuck, and then fell back on the international community to bail it out.

But it’s that last part that, on Sunday, an Israeli defense official suggested Israeli leaders might be discussing using a second time—this time in Gaza.

“We are talking about the Second Lebanon War model,” the official told the Jerusalem Post. “To go to war and tell the world that if they want a cease-fire and for us to leave then they will need to send a force to replace us.”

This might sound like rhetoric—but there is reason to believe that serious thinking in Israel will increasingly gravitate toward this kind of solution.

First let’s ask: What happened when they tried this strategy in Lebanon?

On July 13, 2006, in response to Hezbollah’s cross-border raid and rocket attacks, Israel launched an air campaign designed to destroy Hezbollah. But weeks went by with no letup in the barrage of rockets. Finally Israeli leaders took a terribly clumsy, two-pronged strategy: they launched a ground campaign, while simultaneously looking to the international community for a political solution. On August 11, Olmert accepted the draft resolution of a United Nations cease-fire. The next day, Israel launched an all-out ground assault—apparently in order to improve the terms of the cease-fire. It was ugly: Hezbollah was deeply entrenched and well armed. Thirty-three soldiers died. Both international condemnation and internal division within the Israeli government and military grew—and Hezbollah stood its ground. Finally, Israel concluded 34 days of operations seeking protection from an international peacekeeping force, hoping the terrorists would oblige the United Nations and stop firing missiles.

Israel accepted a toothless cease-fire that has allowed Hezbollah to come back stronger than before. Hezbollah has re-grouped and re-armed right under UN forces’ noses, and is in fact in better shape than before the Second Lebanon War. While more 9,500 UN soldiers watched, tunnels and trenches were redug; aid and supplies flowed in; telecommunication lines were restored; weapons and missile stocks were replenished. The mandate under which the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (unifil) operates fails to stipulate that UN troops should use force to stop these activities. Just one year after the war, the UN political affairs director at Israel’s foreign ministry, Ron Adam, admitted: “The fact is that the situation is as it was before the war when it comes to the issue of arms and weapons of Hezbollah.” In addition to using villages and civilian houses to stash weaponry, Hezbollah is stashing weapons in 19 or 20 areas from which unifil is restricted, classified as “nature reserves,” Mr. Adam said.

The Lebanon war is not the only example of how ineffective international forces are in securing Israel’s interests. In fact, Israel’s reliance on international intervention has yet to prove effective. International “observers” tend to do just that: observe terrorists re-arming.

Look at the Gaza-Egypt border. When Israel vacated the Gaza Strip in 2005, it was reluctant to relinquish jurisdiction over the Rafah border crossing, Gaza’s only crossing with Egypt. Even when Israel controlled it, Rafah had a history of gun-running, arms dealing and terrorist smuggling. So Israel granted control of the Rafah border crossing to the Palestinians under European supervision. During that period of EU monitoring, of course, Hamas managed to smuggle into Gaza massive amounts of weaponry—enough to empower its coup against Fatah in June. In addition, hundreds of terrorists entered Gaza after receiving training in Iran, not to mention cash, which flowed in unrestricted—to the tune of $68 million in 2006.

Oh, and once Hamas took over, the European observers quickly and conveniently disappeared.

Several months later, Hamas blew open the border. Now—quite audaciously—Europe is pushing to resume its monitoring mission not only in Rafah, but also possibly on Gaza’s border with Israel.

The international observers that monitored the Palestinian elections in January 2006, of course, simply watched as Hamas won the votes to take over the government.

Since Hamas took over Gaza, it has launched almost 2,000 rockets and mortar rounds against Israel. The pressure is increasing on the Israeli government to take more forceful action against it. Earlier this month, two young Israeli brothers were seriously wounded in a rocket attack, increasing the pressure for retaliation even more.

Apart from Prime Minister Olmert’s plan to provide bomb shelters for 8,000 Israeli homes near the border, it appears the Israeli government is getting closer to taking stronger measures. On Sunday, Israel conducted a raid in the Gaza Strip to hit terrorist infrastructure.

That’s where the Second Lebanon War model comes into play. “Israel is considering a large-scale incursion into the Gaza Strip during which it would present an ultimatum to the international community for the deployment of a multinational force as the only condition under which it would withdraw,” according to defense officials (Jerusalem Post,February 18).

The Jerusalem Post reports that a major reason the Israel Defense Forces have so far been reluctant to recommend a major operation in Gaza is the lack of a clear exit strategy.

Israel today is more concerned about an exit strategy than a winning strategy.

Is there any reason to believe, though, that a multinational force in Gaza would be any more effective than the international force currently in southern Lebanon? There, more than just allowing rearmament, the multinational force essentially provides a sanctuary for the terrorist group to do so. It ties Israel’s hands from intervening.

Since when have the Jews been able to rely on the international community to protect them? They have been betrayed and persecuted perhaps more than any other people ever.

The Jews once recognized that reality. That is why they built one of the most powerful militaries in the world. That is why Israel obtained a nuclear deterrent. That is why, in the wars Israel has had to fight for its survival, it has gone the extra mile—achieving signature victories that drove home the lesson to enemy aggressors that it is just not worth attacking Israel.

Clearly, today that deterrent effect is gone. After slowly eroding through 13 years since Oslo, it was shattered with the Second Lebanon War.

Now, in Israel’s present weakness, victory isn’t even the goal anymore.

There is a biblical prophecy about the downfall of the Jewish state that strongly suggests it will occur after the Jews invite foreign peacekeepers to contain an out-of-control melee in the Holy Land. It speaks of a time shortly ahead of us when Jerusalem will be surrounded by armies—not Arab armies, but European armies, most likely there at the behest of Israeli leaders (this sequence of events is thoroughly explained in our booklet Jerusalem in Prophecy).

This event is one of the principal signs Jesus Christ gave to His disciples that His return was imminent (Luke 21:20, 31). Christ’s prophecy is absolutely certain to occur, and likely quite soon.

When one hears Israeli leaders talking about building their policies for containing enemies around leaning on the help of international peacekeeping forces, it conjures to mind that chilling prophetic scene.