Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas Read online

  Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel’s Just War Against Hamas

  Copyright © 2014 by Alan Dershowitz

  Many chapters in this book were originally written and published as op-eds in various publications. Where this is the case, the date of original publication is given below the chapter title.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. For information, please contact RosettaBooks at [email protected], or by mail at One Exchange Plaza, Suite 2002, 55 Broadway, New York, NY 10006.

  First edition published 2014 by RosettaBooks

  Cover design by Peter Clark. Cover photo by Ziv Koren / Polaris.

  ISBN EPUB edition: 9780795344282

  www.RosettaBooks.com

  This book is dedicated to all the innocent victims of Hamas’s dead baby strategy—Palestinians and Israelis alike. It is also dedicated to the brave Israeli soldiers who gave their lives in an effort to protect these civilians.

  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

  Acknowledgments

  This book was originally stimulated by my visit to a Hamas terror tunnel that was arranged by my dear friend and go-to guy in Israel, Danny Grossman. I was accompanied by two other dear friends, Tom Ashe and Dr. Michael Miller, who, along with their spouses, Joanne and Alisa, helped me develop this book. My wonderful wife, Carolyn, who also accompanied me to the tunnel, provided her usual support, encouragement, and insight. Our tunnel visit was enabled and personally guided by “R,” a high ranking figure in the Israel Security Agency, which quietly fights for Israel’s defense around the clock. I also acknowledge the assistance of Sarah Neely, Nicholas Maisel, Stella Frank, my son Elon, and the gang from “the porch.”

  Introduction

  On June 13, 2014, the commander of the southern region for the Israel Security Agency (ISA), together with the commander of the Gaza Division of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), took me into a Hamas tunnel that had recently been discovered by a Bedouin tracker who serves in the IDF. The tunnel was a concrete bunker that extended several miles from its entrance in the Gaza Strip to its exit near an Israeli kibbutz kindergarten.

  The tunnel had one purpose: to allow Hamas death squads to kill and kidnap Israelis. The commander told me that Israeli intelligence had identified more than two dozen additional tunnel entrances in the Gaza Strip. They had been identified by the large amounts of earth being removed to dig them. Although Israeli intelligence knew where these entrances were, they could not order an attack from the air, because they were built into civilian structures such as mosques, schools, hospitals, and private homes. Nor could Israel identify their underground routes from Gaza into Israel, or their intended exit points in Israel. Israeli scientists and military experts had spent millions of dollars in an effort to develop technologies that could find the underground routes and intended exits for tunnels that were as deep as a hundred feet beneath the earth, but they had not succeeded in finding a complete solution to this problem.1 The planned exits from these tunnels in Israel were also a Hamas secret, hidden deep in the ground and incapable of being discovered by Israel until the Hamas fighters emerged. At that point it would be too late to prevent the death squads from doing their damage.

  I was taken into the tunnel and saw the technological innovations: tracks on which small trains could transport kidnapped Israelis back to Gaza; telephone and electrical lines; crevices beneath schools and other civilian targets that could hold explosives; and smaller offshoot tunnels leading from the main tube to numerous exit points from which fighters could simultaneously emerge from different places.

  As soon as I went down into the tunnel, I realized that Israel would have no choice but to take military action to destroy them. Israel had a technological response—though imperfect—to Hamas rockets. Its Iron Dome was capable of destroying approximately 85 percent of Hamas rockets fired at its population centers.2 Moreover, it could attack rocket launchers from the air with sophisticated, GPS-guided bombs. But it had no complete technological answer to these terror tunnels. Subsequently, the media reported that Hamas may have been planning a Rosh Hashanah massacre during which hundreds of Hamas terrorists would simultaneously emerge from dozens of tunnels and slaughter hundreds, if not thousands, of Israeli civilians and soldiers.3 If this report were true, as many in Israel believed it was, the Rosh Hashanah massacre would have been the equivalent of a hundred 9/11s in the United States. Even if it was an exaggeration, the tunnels certainly provided Hamas with the capability of wreaking havoc on Israeli citizens. There were other repor
ts as well of planned attacks through the tunnels. As one resident of Sderot put it: “We used to look up to the sky in fear, but now we are looking down at the ground.”4

  To me, the only questions were when Israel would act, how it would act, whether it would be successful, and what the consequences would be. Could any nation tolerate this kind of threat to its citizens? Has any nation in history ever allowed tunnels to be dug under its border which would permit death squads to operate against its people?

  I discussed these issues with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a dinner in his home several days after my visit to the tunnel, and it became clear that the Israeli government had been concerned about the security threats posed by these terror tunnels ever since the tunnels were used to kidnap the young soldier Gilad Shalit and kill two of his compatriots.

  Ironically, it was while we were in the tunnel that we learned that three Israeli high school students had been kidnapped. Their kidnapping, which Hamas subsequently acknowledged was done by its operatives, and their murder, was the beginning of what turned into Operation Protective Edge, which ended with the destruction of most of the tunnels. This book is about that operation and why Israel was justified—legally, morally, diplomatically, and politically—in responding to the dangers posed by the tunnels and the rocket attacks that preceded and followed their discovery. It is also about why so many in the media, academia, the international community, and the general public seem to blind themselves to the dangers posed by Hamas and blame Israel for actions they would demand their own governments take, were they faced with comparable threats.

  Indeed, the United States is now leading a coalition of nations in an effort to destroy ISIS, employing many of the same military tactics for which some of these nations blamed Israel.

  I believe that the “blame Israel” reaction has serious consequences, not only for Israel but for the people of Gaza, and for the democratic world in general. Blaming Israel only encourages Hamas to repeat its “dead baby strategy” and other terrorist groups to emulate it. This strategy, which has worked effectively, operates as follows: Hamas attacks Israel either by rockets or through tunnels, thereby forcing Israel to respond, as any democracy would do, to protect its citizens. Because Hamas fires its rockets and digs its tunnels from densely populated civilian areas, rather than from the many open areas of the Gaza Strip, the inevitable result is that a significant number of Palestinian civilians are killed. Hamas encourages this result, because it knows the media will focus more on the photographs of dead babies than on the cause of their death: namely, the decision by Hamas to use these babies and other civilians as human shields. Hamas quickly produces the dead babies to be shown around the world, while at the same time preventing the media from showing its rocket launchers and tunnels in densely populated areas. The world is outraged at the dead civilians and blames Israel for killing them. This only encourages Hamas to repeat its dead baby strategy following short cease-fires, during which they rearm and regroup.

  In 2009, I published a short book entitled The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza. Very little has changed since that time, except that Hamas has built many more tunnels, and that the reach and sophistication of its rockets has increased.

  I am writing this book to warn the world that unless Hamas’s dead baby strategy 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 “to a theater near you.” Hamas repeatedly employs this despicable and unlawful strategy because it works! It works because despite the material losses Hamas suffers in its repeated military encounters with Israel, it always wins the public relations war, the legal war, the academic war, and the war for the naïve hearts, if not the wise minds, of young people. And if it is indeed winning these wars—if its dead baby strategy is working—why not repeat it every few years? That’s why cease-fires between Israel and Hamas always mean that Israel “ceases” and Hamas “fires”—perhaps not immediately, while it regroups and rearms, but inevitably. And if it works for Hamas, why shouldn’t other terrorist groups, like ISIS5 and Boko Haram, adapt this strategy to their nefarious goals, as Hezbollah has already done?

  The only way to end this cycle of death is to expose the Hamas dead baby strategy for what it is—a double war crime whose ultimate victims are civilian children, women, and men.

  I have only one weapon in this war: my words. During the course of Operation Protective Edge I have tried to make the case for Israel’s just war against Hamas’s double war crime strategy. I have written more than two dozen op-eds, participated in several debates and television interviews, and have spoken to numerous audiences. With this book, I seek to reach a larger audience and influence the most important tribunal in any democracy: the court of public opinion.

  The book is divided into two parts. The first covers the run-up to the recent war in Gaza from the end of Operation Cast Lead (December 2008 – January 2009) to just before the beginning of Operation Protective Edge (July – August 2014). The second deals with Operation Protective Edge and its aftermath.

  My goal is to show that Israel’s military actions in defense of its citizens have been just, and that they have been conducted in a just manner. They are no less just than the military actions being conducted by the United States and its allies against ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other terrorist groups. And they have been carried out at least as justly, with a lower percentage of civilian-to-combatant casualties.

  Yet Israel has been unjustly condemned from too many corners, thus encouraging Hamas to continue its despicable and unlawful dead baby strategy. For the sake of justice and peace, the world must stop applying a double standard to the nation-state of the Jewish people.

  Alan M. Dershowitz

  New York, NY

  September 2014

  PART I

  Prelude to

  Operation Protective Edge

  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.6

  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.”7 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 s
igned 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.”8 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.