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Overview
At a time when Israel is under persistent attack—on the battlefield, by international organizations, and in the court of public opinion—Alan Dershowitz presents a powerful case for Israel’s just war against terrorism.
In the spirit of his international bestseller, The Case for Israel, Dershowitz shows why Israel’s struggle against Hamas is a fight not only to protect its own citizens, but for all democracies. The nation-state of the Jewish people is providing a model for all who are threatened by terrorist groups—such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram. Having himself been in one of the Hamas terror tunnels, Dershowitz explains why Israel had no choice but to send in ground troops to protect its civilians against Hamas death squads.
Dershowitz wrote this book to warn the world that unless Hamas’s strategy of building terror tunnels and firing rockets from behind human shields is denounced and stopped—by the international community, the media, the academy, and good people of all religions, ethnicities, and nationalities—it will be coming soon “to a theater near you.”
Covering all the hot-button issues—from the BDS movement, to the rise of anti-Semitism, to the charge of war crimes, to the prospects of peace—Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel’s Just War Against Hamas is a must-read for all who care about Israel, peace in the Mideast, human rights, and fairness.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780795344282 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 02/12/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 253 |
| Sales rank: | 396,236 |
| File size: | 656 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Operation Protective Edge — The Historical Context
"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This truism, by philosopher George Santayana, well describes the current situation in the Middle East in general and Gaza in particular. Israelis and Palestinians have been condemned to repeat the tragedies of the past because history is neglected or misunderstood. That is why it is necessary to place the recent events in Gaza into a brief historical context.
On October 2, 2001, only three weeks after the terror attacks of September 11, President George W. Bush announced that the United States supported the creation of a Palestinian state. It was a major milestone for the Palestinian cause, since no previous American administration had officially acknowledged a Palestinian state as an explicit goal of US foreign policy. The announcement was all the more remarkable given that the US was still reeling in the wake of 9/11, and that Palestinian extremists were still using terror against Israelis to achieve their goals. The American announcement came just months after Yasser Arafat had rejected an offer of statehood by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton.
Bush's announcement offered a unique opportunity to Palestinians to end the violence and begin building a new future. Hamas's response came a few weeks later, when it fired the first Qassam rocket at the Israeli town of Sderot, a city with a population of approximately 20,000, of which some two dozen were killed, hundreds wounded, and thousands traumatized. The Hamas website proudly proclaimed: "The Zionist army is afraid that the Palestinians will increase the range of the new rockets, placing the towns and villages in the [Zionist] entity in danger." It was only the first of thousands of rockets that Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations would fire in their relentless effort to kill Jews and destroy the peace process.
Rocket and mortar fire from the Gaza Strip peaked in late 2004 and early 2005. There was a brief halt in March 2005, in the aftermath of Mahmoud Abbas's victory in the Palestinian presidential elections, and an agreement signed by the various Palestinian factions in Cairo to halt violence. Hamas and other organizations merely used the lull to rearm, however. In August of that year, Israel carried out its disengagement from Gaza, voluntarily withdrawing thousands of settlers and soldiers, leaving twenty-one communities behind and completely ending the Israeli presence there. The hope was that Palestinians would use the end of Israeli occupation to build Gaza's economy and prepare it for political independence, along with the West Bank, as part of a Palestinian state. Private donors stepped in to buy the Israeli greenhouses that had been left behind and hand them over to the Palestinian Authority. James Wolfenson, the former head of the World Bank, contributed $500,000 of his own money to the purchase. But almost immediately after the disengagement, Hamas and other terror organizations destroyed the greenhouses and renewed their rocket fire, launching a barrage of rockets at the Israeli towns of Sderot and Ashkelon. The immediate trigger was an accident during a Hamas victory rally, in which a truck filled with weapons exploded in a Gaza refugee camp, killing nineteen Palestinians. There was little media focus on, and no demonstrations against, these largely civilian deaths.
Rocket fire continued throughout the months that followed, though Israel was no longer occupying Gaza. In November 2005, Israel signed an agreement with the Palestinian Authority to open the Rafah Crossing on the Egypt-Gaza border. The agreement was part of an effort to encourage trade and economic development in Gaza, and to increase the responsibilities of the Palestinian government for the welfare of the Palestinian people. And, indeed, the Rafah Crossing remained open throughout the first half of 2006. The border remained open despite Hamas's victory in the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006, which caused deep worry in Israel and throughout the international community. The Middle East Quartet — comprised of the European Union, United Nations, United States, and Russia — warned the new Palestinian government that further aid would be conditional on its "commitment to the principles of non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations." Hamas considered and rejected each of these conditions. That decision, in turn, prompted the Quartet, and Israel, to cut off financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority, though Israel continued to supply electricity and water to Gaza.
Hamas quickly resumed its attacks. In February alone, forty-seven rockets were fired. By June, Hamas and other groups had launched hundreds of Qassams, as well as an Iranian-made Grad rocket. On June 25, Hamas launched an attack inside Israel, having tunneled under the border near the Kerem Shalom (Vineyard of Peace) border crossing. In the ensuing battle, Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit, killing two Israeli soldiers in the process and injuring others. Following the tunnel attack and kidnapping, Israel attacked terrorist targets in Gaza and closed the Rafah Crossing. The closure was not an attempt to punish Palestinians for the elections result five months before, but was the direct consequence of Hamas's attack on Israel.
Even after Hamas abducted Shalit, the Gaza borders were not completely closed. The Rafah Crossing was open for twenty-four days over the next six months, and some movement of people and goods — albeit restricted — was allowed. Throughout this time, rocket fire from the Gaza Strip continued to terrorize Israeli civilians. Still, the international community gave the Palestinian leaders another chance to meet the basic demands it had issued in January 2006. But the two main Palestinian factions — Fatah, which controlled the executive, and Hamas, which controlled the legislature — began fighting openly with each other. After extensive negotiations, the two parties agreed to form a unity government, which was formed in March 2007. But the rockets continued to rain down — reaching a record high of 257 in May 2007 — and in June 2007, Hamas launched a military coup against the Fatah executive, driving its leaders out of Gaza and killing over one hundred of their fellow Palestinians, including many civilians. Again, the events garnered little media focus and no protest marches. With the entire territory of Gaza under its iron-fisted control, Hamas increased rocket attacks against Israel, with other Palestinian terror organizations joining in. These attacks accelerated dramatically after Israel and the exiled Palestinian Authority leaders — still legally governed by Fatah, in the eyes of the international community — signed an agreement in Annapolis, Maryland, in November 2007, pledging to work toward a two-state solution.
It was only after Hamas's coup, and the heavy rocket attacks that followed, that Israel imposed more extensive sanctions on Gaza. In January 2008 — two years after Hamas took power, and after thousands of rockets and mortars had fallen on Israel's southern towns — Israel began restricting fuel and electricity to Gaza, in accordance with a nuanced ruling by Israel's High Court of Justice. Still, it continued to allow fuel and humanitarian aid to enter, and allowed Palestinians to come in to Israel to receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. Israel did not want ordinary Palestinians to suffer and did all that it could to alleviate their living conditions while reducing Hamas's ability to function as a terrorist regime. And yet Hamas continued to smuggle weapons into Gaza via underground tunnels on the Egyptian border. More than two thousand rockets and mortars were launched from Gaza into Israel in the first six months of 2008. In June of 2008, presidential candidate Barak Obama visited Sderot, and after viewing the rocket residues and meeting with residents, this is what he said:
I don't think any country would find it acceptable to have missiles raining down on the heads of their citizens.
The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if — I don't even care if I was a politician. If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same.
In December 2008, Hamas unilaterally declared that it would resume its attacks with full force — and it promptly did so, forcing Israel to respond with Operation Cast Lead in late December of 2008.
When these facts are examined, it is clear that Palestinian rocket attacks against Israeli civilians were not a response to Gaza's increasing isolation, but the cause. The first rocket attacks began in October 2001, precisely when the world was most eager to create a viable Palestinian state. They continued even after Israel pulled its army and its settlements out of Gaza in 2005. They accelerated after Hamas took power in 2006, increasing dramatically in 2007 when Israel and the Palestinian Authority resolved to renew negotiations toward a two-state solution. And the attacks were renewed in December 2008 when Hamas unilaterally declared that it would refuse to extend a period of calm that had been accepted by both sides.
The sanctions that were imposed on Gaza — not only by Israel, but the world — were the direct result of Hamas's refusal to meet the international community's basic, reasonable demands: stop terror, recognize Israel, and respect previous agreements. Even after Hamas took power in the 2006 elections, the Gaza borders remained relatively open, until Hamas escalated the conflict by abducting Gilad Shalit in June 2006, overthrowing the legitimate Palestinian executive in a violent coup in June 2007, and launching more and more rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians. Hamas brought about the isolation of Gaza because it is neither interested in peace nor in the welfare of the Palestinian people. Instead, it is fanatically committed to the destruction of Israel itself, a goal it pursues using weapons and funding it receives from the Islamic Republic of Iran, for which Hamas acts as a proxy and whose ambitions of regional domination it serves. More recently, Hamas has also been supported by Qatar and Turkey.
Israelis and Palestinians have the same right to live in peace. Hamas and its fellow terror organizations deny that right, and disrupt every attempt to move the peace process forward. That is why Operation Cast Lead, which ended on January 21, 2009, was necessary.
It was against this backdrop that I began to write a series of op-eds during Operation Cast Lead. These op-eds comprised the bulk of my short book, The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza. Following the publication of that book, the Goldstone Report was issued under the auspices of a UN fact-finding mission. It accused Israel of war crimes during Operation Cast Lead and exculpated Hamas from the charge that it used civilians as human shields. It turned a military defeat suffered by Hamas into a legal and public relations victory. Because of its importance, I begin this book with my response to that mendacious screed. The Goldstone Report not only falsified the past; it had a negative influence on the future by encouraging Hamas to repeat its own double war crimes: firing rockets at Israeli civilians from behind Palestinian human shields — and killing and kidnapping Israeli civilians and soldiers through its terrorist tunnels.
CHAPTER 2The Case Against the Goldstone Report — and Why It Still Matters
January 27, 2010
The Goldstone Report is much more scurrilous than most of its detractors (and supporters) believe. According to the report, Israel used the more than 8,000 rocket attacks on its civilians merely as a pretext, an excuse, a cover for the real purpose of Operation Cast Lead, which was to target innocent Palestinian civilians — children, women, the elderly — for death. This criminal objective was explicitly decided upon by the highest levels of the Israeli government and military, and constitutes a deliberate and willful war crime. The report found these serious charges "to be firmly based in fact" and had "no doubt" of their truth.
In contrast, the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict decided that Hamas was not guilty of deliberately and willfully using the civilian population as human shields. It found "no evidence" that Hamas fighters "engaged in combat in civilian dress," "no evidence" that "Palestinian combatants mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from attack," and no support for the claim that mosques were used to store weapons.
The report is demonstrably wrong about both of these critical conclusions. The hard evidence conclusively proves that the exact opposite is true, namely that: 1) Israel did not have a policy of targeting innocent civilians for death. Indeed the IDF went to unprecedented lengths to minimize civilian casualties; and 2) that Hamas did have a deliberate policy of having its combatants dress in civilian clothing, fire their rockets from densely populated areas, use civilians as human shields, and store weapons in mosques.
What is even more telling than its erroneous conclusions, however, is its deliberately skewed methodology, particularly the manner in which it used and evaluated similar evidence very differently, depending on whether it favored the Hamas or Israeli side.
I have written a detailed analysis of the Goldstone methodology, which is now available online. It is being sent to the Secretary General of the United Nations for inclusion in critiques of the Goldstone Report received by the United Nations. This analysis documents the distortions, misuses of evidence, and bias of the report and those who wrote it. It demonstrates that the evidence relied on by the report, as well as the publicly available evidence it deliberately chose to ignore, disproves its own conclusions.
The central issue that distinguishes the conclusions the Goldstone Report reached regarding Israel, on the one hand, and Hamas, on the other, is intentionality. The report finds that the most serious accusation against Israel, namely the killing of civilians, was intentional and deliberately planned at the highest levels. The report also finds that the most serious accusations made against Hamas, namely that their combatants wore civilian clothing to shield themselves from attack, mingled among the civilian populations, and used civilians as human shields, was unintentional. These issues are, of course, closely related.
If it were to turn out that there was no evidence that Hamas ever operated from civilian areas, and that the IDF knew this, then the allegation that the IDF, by firing into civilian areas, deliberately intended to kill Palestinian civilians, would be strengthened. But if it were to turn out that the IDF reasonably believed that Hamas fighters were deliberately using civilians as shields, then this fact would weaken the claim that the IDF had no military purpose in firing into civilian areas. Moreover, if Hamas did use human shields, then the deaths of Palestinian civilians would be more justly attributable to Hamas than to Israel.
Since intentionality, or lack thereof, was so important to the report's conclusions, it would seem essential that the report would apply the same evidentiary standards, rules, and criteria in determining the intent of Israel and in determining the intent of Hamas.
Yet a careful review of the report makes it crystal clear that its writers applied totally different standards, rules, and criteria in evaluating the intent of the parties to the conflict. The report resolved all doubts against Israel in concluding that its leaders intended to kill civilians, while resolving all doubts in favor of Hamas in concluding that it did not intend to use Palestinian civilians as human shields.
Moreover, when it had precisely the same sort of evidence in relation to both sides — for example, statements by leaders prior to the commencement of the operation — it attributed significant weight to the Israeli statements, while entirely discounting comparable Hamas statements. This sort of evidentiary bias, though subtle, permeates the entire report.
In addition to the statements of leaders, which are treated so differently, the report takes a completely different view regarding the inferring of intent from action. When it comes to Israel, the report repeatedly looks to results and infers from the results that they must have been intended. But when it comes to Hamas, it refuses to draw inferences regarding intent from results.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Terror Tunnels"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Alan Dershowitz.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
PART I,
1 Operation Protective Edge — The Historical Context,
2 The Case Against the Goldstone Report — and Why It Still Matters,
3 Finally, A Hamas Leader Admits that Israel Killed Mostly Combatants in Gaza,
4 Goldstone Needs to Recant in Light of the New Evidence,
5 How Goldstone is Making Peace More Difficult,
6 The Phony War Crimes Accusation Against Israel,
7 The Case Against "Universal Jurisdiction",
8 If Israel Killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, Did It Have the Right To?,
9 Israel's Actions in Intercepting the Turkish Flotilla Were Entirely Lawful though Perhaps Unwise,
10 Why Israel Must Remain Strong,
11 Hamas — Not Israel — Killed BBC Reporter's Baby,
12 UN Palestine Vote Poses Major Threats for Israel,
13 A Settlement Freeze Can Advance Israeli-Palestinian Peace,
14 Mideast Peace Talks Should Resume,
15 Terrorists Win with Israel Prisoner Swap,
16 Israel's Right to Self-Defense Against Hamas,
17 The Palestinian Leadership is Responsible for the Continuing Israeli Occupation of the West Bank,
18 Some Hard Questions about the Western European Double Standard Against Israel,
PART II Introduction: Operation Protective Edge,
19 Israel Defends Entire Civilized World,
20 The Current Conflict between Israel and Hamas Shatters Myths,
21 Israel Must Maintain Its Weapons Siege of Gaza,
22 Media Death Count Encourages Hamas to Use Human Shields,
23 Netanyahu, the Reluctant Warrior,
24 Gazans' Real Enemy Is Hamas, Not Israel,
25 Why Doesn't J Street Support Israel?,
26 Hamas's Threat to Israel's Airport Threatens a Two-State Solution,
27 Accusing Hamas of Using Human Shields Is Not Racist,
28 UN Probe of Israel Will Only Encourage Hamas War Crimes,
29 The "Occupation of Gaza" Canard,
30 Qatar and Other American "Allies" Are among the Villains in Gaza,
31 Hamas Uses Cease-Fire to Kidnap,
32 What Should Israel Do? What Would the United States Do?,
33 The Empty Spaces in Gaza,
34 Hamas Exaggerates Civilian Deaths,
35 Supporting Hamas Is Anti-Semitic,
36 Did Israel Have the Right to Destroy Hamas Terror Tunnels?,
37 ISIS is to America as Hamas is to Israel,
38 No One Should Be Surprised at Isis's Brutality because the World Rewards Terrorism,
39 Ten Reasons Why BDS Is Immoral and Hinders Peace,
40 Debate between Alan Dershowitz and John Dugard,
Conclusion,
Endnotes,
About the Author,
What People are Saying About This
The recent operation in Gaza demonstrated once again the lengths to which Hamas terrorists will go to murder innocent Israeli civilians. Not satisfied with suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israeli cities, Hamas built an extensive network of terror tunnels for the purpose of dispatching death squads into Israel. In Terror Tunnels, Alan Dershowitz has focused his internationally recognized expertise and clarity of vision on addressing this evolving terrorist tactic. Dershowitz’s conclusion is unequivocal: Israel has both the right and the obligation to defend itself against subterranean terrorist attacks.