JINSA Report #817October 15, 2008
Missing Mandates III (Gaza)If there were elephants in the Levant, they would be in Gaza - or maybe they are in Gaza, but no one will talk about the implications of having them there. Certainly they wouldn't be the only thing with implications no one will discuss.
Missing Mandates III (Gaza)If there were elephants in the Levant, they would be in Gaza - or maybe they are in Gaza, but no one will talk about the implications of having them there. Certainly they wouldn't be the only thing with implications no one will discuss.
As earlier noted, the American general in charge of training Palestinian security forces declared that Gaza was not in his mandate, and his troops will - at best - only secure the West Bank.
Among the Israelis, several commanders and senior civilians talked about the growing Hamas military capability and said the IDF would - someday - have to "deal" with it. No one thought the "lull" was anything more than an opportunity for Hamas to improve its position. "Massive smuggling," mining and organizing human shields for defense, as well as improved missiles and commandos for offense were noted. Hamas fighters have been training in Iran and taking lessons from Hezbollah on the transformation from terrorist to guerrilla army command structure.
Hamas is putting increasingly large number of Israelis under an increasingly intolerable threat.
Asked by a member of the JINSA delegation in Israel why the IDF didn't take offensive action before Hamas executed a mega-terrorist attack, the deputy commander of the Gaza region said he had no mandate to do so - it would take a government decision. Later, a senior IDF official said Israel "didn't want to be responsible for 1.5 million Palestinians and no one would relieve Israel of that burden of occupation" if they returned to daily control of Gaza.
Consequently, we saw a new, large, empty facility that was supposed to serve as a transit point for Palestinians to work in Israel, and we were briefed on the myriad international aid organizations with which Israel works to bring services into Gaza because Hamas has co-opted and corrupted the economy. An enormous amount of Israeli money and human ingenuity are spent bringing food to Gaza (including use of a grain conveyor belt that sends food into Gaza from Israel because Hamas won't accept the food directly). These are things Israeli can do, so they do them.
Excising Hamas from Gaza or creating effective security control of the Gaza Strip that might make international aid less important (or superfluous) is something the IDF cannot do because there is no mandate to do it. The government, meanwhile, is looking for a "negotiated solution" to the Palestinian-Israeli problem, talking with Abu Mazen/Fatah on the West Bank only, studiously ignoring the implications of the elephant known as Hamas.
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