What They Are Saying

Historian Victor Davis Hanson writes on RealClearPolitics.com March 13 that nothing Hamas does causes it to lose international sympathy:

"Gaza erupted in celebration last week to the news that a Palestinian had murdered Jewish religious students in Jerusalem. And almost daily, terrorists send rockets from Gaza into nearby Israeli cities, hoping to kill civilians and provoke Israeli counter-responses -- and perhaps start another Middle East war.

"This is not the way some imagined Gaza 21/2 years after the Israelis withdrew both civilians and soldiers from the territory in September 2005. At the time, the Palestinian Authority controlled Gaza, but in early 2007, Hamas took over in a violent civil war, claiming legitimacy after once winning a popular election.

"Gaza has plenty of natural advantages. It enjoys a coastline on the Mediterranean with sandy beaches and a rich classical history. There is a contiguous border with Egypt, the Arab world's largest country and spiritual home of pan-Arabic solidarity.

"The Palestinians are a favorite cause of the oil-rich Middle East, and would seem to be in store for at least a few billions that accrue from $100 a barrel oil. In short, an autonomous Gaza might have been a test case in which the Palestinians could have crafted their own Singapore, Hong Kong or Dubai.

"Instead, despite Palestinian rule of Gaza, Hamas has continued its civil war with the P.A., and looters have ruined the infrastructure that was left by the United Nations and the Israelis. Mobs crashed the border crossing with Egypt. Hamas-led terrorists have launched more than 2,500 mortar rounds into Israel, and more than 2,000 Kassam rockets.

"We all now know the familiar Gaza two-step. The Israeli Defense Force responds to Hamas rockets with targeted airstrikes against terrorist leaders or small-rocket factories. Hamas makes certain both these targets are intermingled with civilians in the hopes of televised collateral damage.

"Hamas counts on the usual sympathetic European and Middle Eastern media coverage and commentary. Terrorists deliberately trying to murder Israeli civilians are seen as the moral equivalents of Israeli soldiers trying to target combatants who use civilians as shields. To the extent that the IDF kills more of the terrorists than Hamas kills Israeli civilians, sympathy goes to the 'refugees' of Gaza.

"This tragic charade continues because Hamas wants it to continue. Its purpose is to make life so unsure and frightening for nearby affluent Israelis that they will grant continual concessions, hopefully leading to such wide-scale demoralization that the Jewish state itself will collapse and disappear. In that regard, the last thing Hamas wants is calm and prosperity in Gaza, which would turn the population's attention toward living rather than killing and dying.

"Hamas in Gaza also feels that the war is not static -- and that it is already winning on all fronts. As Europeans, Middle Easterners and the United Nations lecture Israel about 'inordinate' or 'disproportionate' responses, the terrorists' smuggled missiles increase in range, payload and frequency of attack.

"Hamas has gained powerful patrons in Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah. Both provide terrorist training and weapons as long as Gaza serves as a useful proxy in their own existential struggles against Israel.

"On the world front, we've reached a new threshold in which evoking the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews has become commonplace and almost acceptable. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly brags about hoarding the body parts of captured Israelis. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad openly talks of Israelis in Hitlerian terms as 'filthy bacteria' that should be wiped off the map.

"Palestinians in Gaza can enshrine mass murderers and praise terrorist killers without much worry that the world will be appalled at their grotesque spectacles -- much less cease its sympathy and subsidies."

Worried About War With Iran? As Far as Israel's Concerned, It's Started

Author Yossi Klein Haleviwrites in The New Republic (www.tnr.com) on March 11 that Iran is behind the current upsurge in violence:

"Immediately after the massacre of eight students in a yeshiva library in Jerusalem, speculation began within the Israeli security establishment and the media about who had dispatched the lone murderer. Was it Hamas? Hezbollah? Perhaps a new, unknown organization claiming to act on behalf of the 'liberation' of the Galilee? In fact, the speculation was pointless. Regardless of the affiliation of the actual perpetrator, the ultimate responsibility for this attack, as for almost all the terror attacks on Israel in recent years, lies with Iran.

"The Palestinian struggle is no longer about creating an independent state. It is about being a front-line participant in the Iranian-led jihad to destroy Israel, evolving from a nationalist to a religious war. The thousands of celebrants in Gaza who, following the yeshiva massacre, offered prayers of thanksgiving in the mosques and distributed candies to passers-by weren't only indulging in feelings of revenge for Israel's recent military incursion but heralding the coming jihadist victory over the enemies of God. A real solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict can only be reached by dealing with its primary instigator: Iran.

"Hamas is an integral part of the Iranian war against Israel. Iran has trained hundreds of operatives and continues to fund individual members of Fatah's Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade. Its goal is twofold: to extend its influence in the Arab world and to transform itself, via proxies, into a frontline confrontation state with Israel.

"The jihadist war against Israel has shifted from one front to another -- suicide bombings inside Israeli cities until 2004, Katyushas on Haifa in the north in 2006, and now, Katyushas on Ashkelon in the south. All are battles in the same war. So far, it is a war without an all-encompassing name, and that linguistic failure reflects a larger Israeli failure to treat this as a unified conflict.

"We still refer to the suicide bombings of 2000-04 by the Palestinians' misnomer, 'the second intifada' -- which falsely implies a popular uprising, like the first intifada, rather than the orchestrated slew of terror attacks that it was. Awkwardly, we call the 2006 battle against Hezbollah 'the Second Lebanon War,' a name that places the conflict in the wrong context -- the first Lebanon war against Palestinian nationalist terrorism in the early 1980s, rather than one more front in the Iranian war against Israel.

"In contending with Hezbollah and Hamas, Israel is trying to treat the symptoms, rather than the cause.

"But a viable Palestinian state living peacefully beside Israel will not be possible without disconnecting Iran from these groups who are attacking Israel on its behalf. This may require destabilizing the Iranian regime -- hopefully through intensified sanctions against its nuclear program, and by military force against its nuclear installations if sanctions fail. Without stopping the momentum of the Iranian-led jihad against Israel, the appeal of Hamas among Palestinians will grow. So long as the international community tries to create a Palestinian state without seriously confronting the jihadists, Iran and its proxies will continue to make peace impossible -- not by 'derailing' negotiations, but by making those negotiations irrelevant."