Sunday evening—after Hamas launched over 600 rockets into Israel, leaving four dead and dozens injured—the two sides appear to have agreed upon a cease-fire. David Horovitz comments:
The root of this round of violence, as of those that have preceded it in the twelve years since Hamas violently seized control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, is that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and their sponsors have no tolerance for the presence of the Jewish state. . . . Israel has no presence in Gaza, no quarrel with Gaza, and would like nothing more than to see Gaza thrive.
But Hamas has other ideas. Thus while Gaza’s citizens suffer in poverty, it subverts any and all potential resources to its terror machine. It sends Gazans to the border in endless riots under the banner of a “return” to today’s Israel. And the “concessions” that it seeks to leverage from Israel, in this and all previous rounds of violence and full-scale conflict, are the same: to loosen Israel’s security grip on Gaza in order to bring in the money and the weaponry to cause greater and greater harm to Israel down the line.
Does this mean that Israel will inevitably have to reconquer the Gaza Strip (with the danger of considerable loss of life), oust Hamas’s military forces, and try to marginalize its extremist ideology? Well, for there to be an end to these relentless rounds of conflict, somebody is going to have to supplant the Islamic extremists. The problem Israel faces is that it does not wish to retake control and responsibility for Gaza, and its two million or so Palestinians, but sees nobody else prepared to do so.
And that will remain the reality however this current round of violence plays out, however high the toll of death and widespread the trauma and devastation. Hence Israel’s talk of reasserting its deterrent capability, and restoring calm, rather than strategic change.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/this-round-of-conflict-with-hamas-may-worsen-but-still-wont-solve-root-problem/