French Humanitarianism
UPDATE: VOA now reporting: Ceasefire rejected. Allah be praised.
Israel has rejected an immediate 48-hour cease-fire with Hamas, saying it will push ahead with its military assault on the Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials say Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his defense and foreign ministers made the decision after discussing the French-proposed truce during a meeting overnight.
Earlier:
Is there a reason why anyone would take this French idea of a 48-hour humanitarian ceasefire … or any French war advice whatsoever … seriously? Ha’aretz kicks off the news on the disturbing splits between PM Olmert and Defense Minister Barak, Barak and top Israeli command, and long-term ceasefire considerations:
The cabinet is reconvening to discuss a French proposal for a 48-hour “humanitarian” cease-fire, after failing late Tuesday night to reach a decision. The cabinet is also reportedly discussing whether to expand the Israel Defense Forces operation in the Gaza Strip.
Tuesday’s meeting followed a day in which a Hamas rocket struck Be’er Sheva for the first time and the Israel Defense Forces completed preparations for a possible ground operation in the Gaza Strip. The Education Ministry announced that schools in Be’er Sheva would not open Wednesday.
In discussions with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Tuesday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak recommended seeking an exit from the fighting within the next few days, using one of the various international initiatives currently being worked on.
Barak also favors the French proposal for a 48-hour truce that would be used to examine Hamas’ willingness to agree to a long-term cease-fire, in addition to its stated purpose of providing humanitarian assistance to Gaza’s population.
What’s to explore? Hamas loves ceasefires. Here’s an idea. Barak doesn’t want the job, fire him and get someone who does. As for the French, hate to keep bringing it up, but their idea of ceasefires and peace historically involves Germans all armed up and ready to march through Belgium, if they aren’t in Paris already.
Olmert and Livni are said to be less enthusiastic about the French proposal.
“There’s no such thing as a ‘humanitarian cease-fire’,” an Olmert aide said Tuesday. “Gaza is not undergoing a humanitarian crisis. We’re constantly supplying it with food and medications, and there’s no need for a humanitarian cease-fire.”
If you want to be kind to the Palestinian people, destroy Hamas. The only reason for a ceasefire would be, much as was done in Fallujah, to give honest people a chance to exit, so you can kill the rest. Seeing as that is not entirely practical, moving 1.3 million people, the best thing to do is advice them to keep their heads down, and to helpfully point out the Hamas positions, Hamas fighters and most of all the Hamas leaders who are responsible for their misery.
When Olmert visited IDF Southern Command headquarters in Be’er Sheva Tuesday, most of the senior officers with whom he met urged him to authorize a ground operation. People at the meeting said their impression was that Olmert agreed.
…
IDF troops have been massed along the Gaza border awaiting a ground operation for two days already, exposing them to rocket and mortar fire. And on Monday, a mortar shell killed a soldier at the Nahal Oz base. In addition, the bad weather provides cover for Hamas rocket-launching crews, because it is hard for Israeli aircraft to spot them through the clouds.
Palestinians had fired more than 50 rockets at Israel as of Tuesday evening, lightly wounding two Israelis. For the first time, a Katyusha rocket hit Be’er Sheva, 37 kilometers from Gaza. Ofakim and Rahat, both 25 kilometers from Gaza, also suffered their first Katyusha strikes Tuesday.
…
The Prime Minister’s Office and defense officials also worked on finalizing Israel’s terms for a permanent cease-fire. These include a complete cessation of all rocket and mortar fire from Gaza by all Palestinian organizations; a ban on armed men approaching the border fence with Israel, since there were several incidents near the fence during the six-month truce that collapsed this month; complete Israeli control over the Gaza border crossings; Egyptian efforts to stop the weapons smuggling into Gaza from the Sinai Peninsula; and some kind of supervisory mechanism to ensure that Hamas is meeting its commitments.
A cease-fire will not be conditioned on the return of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, but Israel hopes a truce deal would increase the chances of concluding a prisoner exchange with Hamas.
It’s their country, their persistent terrorism problem. Hate to sound like a broken record, but I’d condition a ceasefire on the destruction of Hamas.
JPost indicates the Barak soft-on-Hamas thing is a bigger problem than Ha’aretz indicated:
The idea for a 48-hour suspension was first raised by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner in a phone call with Barak on Monday. Barak initially rejected the offer, but in a second conversation on Tuesday told Kouchner that he would reconsider and raise it in talks with Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
News of Barak’s decision took the IDF - which continued to mass forces outside Gaza on Tuesday ahead of a planned ground operation - completely by surprise, and Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi released a statement saying the IDF was not behind the move.
JPost report suggests some advantages to a ceasefire … allowing Hamas to break it legitimizes the ground assault, and the weather isn’t good over the next couple of days, anyway. Those sound like pretty weak defenses. We all know who the onus falls on once Israel agrees to stop shooting, and that the internationalist view of a Gaza ceasefire includes regular rocketfire into Israel.
A Hamas spokesman said Tuesday evening that the group was conditioning a cease-fire on an opening of Gaza’s borders. The spokesman, Mushir al-Masri, spoke after news broke of the Israeli defense officials’ recommendation.
I’m sorry, did someone ask him? Hamas’ idea of a ceasefire is all Jews into the ocean now, please. Fortunately, someone in Israeli government seems to recognize that. JPost again:
Regarding the humanitarian cease-fire idea, (an official in the Prime Minister’s office) said that “Israel will not accept a solution that is neither sustainable nor real, and that would ultimately be a mirage. We want a sustainable and real solution that entails freeing the southern part of the country from the fear of missile attacks.”
According to the official, Hamas was “hit, and hit hard, but it has to come to the realization that continued rocket fire on Israel is much more painful for them than for us.”
The official said the prime minister had no intention of allowing Hamas to regroup so it could come back and fire another day.
Meanwhile, quick news quiz, what is wrong with this picture:
In addition, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana held a conference call and issued a statement in the name of the Middle East Quartet calling for an “immediate cease-fire that would be fully respected.”
OK, some quick commentary. George Jonas at Canada’s National Post:
Following a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday, President Shimon Peres spoke to the press. “Nobody in this world understands what are Hamas’s goals and why it continues to fire missiles,” Peres said. “This shooting has no point, no logic and no chance.”
I hesitate to say that I understand something about the Middle East that Peres doesn’t, but Hamas’s goals seem clear to me. The first is the destruction of the Jewish state. The second is to make it seem right.
This one is quite possibly the most idiotic commentary to date. Israeli David Grossman at NYT:
So let us stop. Hold our fire. Let us attempt to act against our usual reflexes. Against the deadly logic of military power and the dynamic of escalation. We can always start shooting again. The war will not run away, as Mr. Barak himself said two weeks ago. If we demonstrate that we can do this, we will not lose international support. We will gain even more if we invite the international and Arab communities to intervene and mediate …
True, Hamas will then enjoy a moratorium in which it can reorganize, but it has had long years to do that anyway, so another two days will not make much difference. In contrast, such a calculated cease-fire could lead Hamas to change its mode of response.
It’s a hope/change agenda … something at last check, even Barack Obama has given up on.
Here’s Alan Dershowitz at the Christian Science Monitor:
There have been three types of international response to the Israeli military actions against the Hamas rockets. Not surprisingly, Iran, Hamas, and other knee-jerk Israeli-bashers have argued that the Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli civilians are entirely legitimate and that the Israeli counterattacks are war crimes.
Equally unsurprising is the response of the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, and others who, at least when it comes to Israel, see a moral and legal equivalence between terrorists who target civilians and a democracy that responds by targeting the terrorists.
And finally, there is the United States and a few other nations that place the blame squarely on Hamas for its unlawful and immoral policy of using its own civilians as human shields, behind whom they fire rockets at Israeli civilians.
The most dangerous of the three responses is not the Iranian-Hamas absurdity, which is largely ignored by thinking and moral people, but the United Nations and European Union response, which equates the willful murder of civilians with legitimate self-defense pursuant to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.
Yeah, but most thinking and moral people long since stopped thinking the UN and the EU are either thinking or moral. That’s the disturbing part … how few thinking, moral people there seem to be in the world. It’s like French humanitarianism. An oxymoronic contradiction in terms when the unwillingness to kill terrorists and the eagerness to negotiate with them only leaves terrorists in control, and prolongs the suffering of the people who are supposed to benefit from the theoretically humanitary disengagement.
Gateway with art on pro-Palo protests, British embassy firebombed, Palo flag raised in Tehran, and a pro-Israel demonstration in New York where they, you know, held signs and stuff.
Hot Air: What do you get for the terrorist organization that has everything? A French ceasefire proposal!
Israel Matzav and Israelly Cool with running news, vid, commentary. Michael Totten mulls what a proportionate response would look like.
Soccer Dad and Boker Tov, Boulder! mulls the dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure and what the heck everyone had in mind, anyway. Why all the fuss about Israel following the Road Map?
Related, not so different, Malkin: good news from Gitmo.
Topics: Israel, Palestinians
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:20 am on Wednesday, December 31, 2008
3 Responses to “French Humanitarianism”
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December 31st, 2008 at 11:07 am
I hope they don’t stop. I hope Israel keeps going until every last Hamas soldier is dead or incapacitated for life. That’s the only “cease-fire” that will work.
December 31st, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Why would Israel agree to a ceasefire when previous ceasefires were of a unilateral nature?
January 1st, 2009 at 6:32 pm
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