Rumor of war

The Erez crossing between Israel and Gaza was reopened Sunday after being
closed for the weekend, due to an attack by terrorists on the IDF forces
guarding it. The guards noticed that Palestinian workers who normally pass
through the gates, stopped coming around 4 am on Thursday, and that the PA
guards on their side had withdrawn into their posts. So they were prepared
when two terrorists started shooting at them and throwing grenades. The two
terrorists were killed and there were no Israeli casualties. The attack was
carried out by the Aksa Martyrs Brigades and the Popular Resistance
Committees. Israel accused the PA of prior knowledge of the attack.
Last week the IDF killed 10 Palestinian terrorists, three participating in a
planning meeting in a building in northern Gaza, and two in a car driving near
the border, probably on a rocket firing mission. These hits indicate that
Israel has excellent intelligence on these individuals. Yesterday a further
two terrorists were injured when a car was hit by a missile fired from a
helicopter.
This war against the rockets in northern Gaza has managed to keep them
down to about one or two a day. The terrorists participating in these
actions are either from Islamic Jihad or Aksa Martyrs Brigades. Notably
Hamas men are absent from the rocket firings for now, indicating that they
have good discipline. When they say they will keep a ceasefire sometimes they
mean it, particularly now when they want to be seen to be behaving themselves
while they form the PA Government so as to delay the cutoff of funding.
Yesterday two missiles were fired and landed near the southern limits of
Ashkelon. As the terrorists increase the range of their rockets the potential
danger of them hitting essential facilities (docks, power station, factories)
and dense population centers increases.
Likud Chairman Bibi Netanyahu last week visited the heights north of Ben
Gurion airport and pointed out that as the path of the Security Barrier had
been moved west by order of the Supreme Court so as not to inconvenience
Palestinians living there, it will now be possible, if the Kadima Government
of Ehud Olmert withdraws to that line, for any Palestinian terrorist to sit on
those heights and bombard not only the airport, but also the main Tel Aviv-
Jerusalem highway, as well as the Sharon plain from Bat Yam to Hadera.
Does this make any rational sense? It may be that the security fence should
not inconvenience Palestinians if at all possible, but not at the expense of
our survival. Certainly Netanyahu is engaging in election campaigning, but
many people see the wisdom of his views.
Since it was Ariel Sharon who pointed out the danger of allowing these heights
to fall into Palestinian hands when he himself was campaigning for the
premiership six years ago, it now appears that Israeli electors will have a
choice, either to vote for the "old Sharon" in the form of Bibi, or the "new
Sharon" in the form of Olmert. Since things have fundamentally changed with
the election of Hamas in the PA, I think that now we have to go back to the
old Sharon rather than risk the new one.
Consider what will happen once Hamas forms the PA Government and takes
over the security services, and rocket and suicide bombings continue. It will
no longer be as it was, with Israel and the US castigating the PA for not
doing "enough" to stop the terrorists, the PA will be the terrorists! It is
an axiom of international law that any attack emanating from the territory of
a state or entity with a government is responsible for that attack, even if it
tries to claim that it was not in control of the terrorist organization that
did it (this is why Israel periodically attacked Lebanon, even though
Hizbollah was the guilty organization). Under those circumstances Israel will
counter-attack the PA, and will be within its rights as a defensive measure to
destroy and/or capture areas of the PA to prevent such attacks. I believe that
we will soon be in an overt war situation with the PA, and this does not worry
me enormously because in effect we have been in that situation for years, only
the PA under Arafat and Abbas managed to cover up their involvement with
"plausible deniability." That veil will be torn away in the near future, and
things will be out in the open. I am sure that the IDF will be able to
control the PA areas, as long as we don't give topological advantages
to the terrorists that they don't currently have. What is worrying is that,
with a deficit of funds, Iran may step in as the main benefactor of the PA,
and will seek to become an active player in the conflict. That opens up
another can of worms, that I hope we will be prepared for.