Exclusive: With Little Fear of Reprisal, Iran Targets Israel
Using Jews and Palestinians as Cannon Fodder
Author: Joel Himelfarb
Date Published: 2008-03-10
With Little Fear of Reprisal, Iran Targets Israel
Using Jews and Palestinians as Cannon Fodder
Joel Himelfarb
Thursday’s terrorist attack at a Merkaz Harav Yeshiva, a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem, in which eight students ranging in age from 15 to 26 were massacred by a Palestinian gunman, cannot be viewed in isolation. Nor can the ferocious battles now taking place between Israel and a veritable who’s who of terrorist organizations who have been welcomed into Hamas-controlled Gaza. These are but the latest battles in Iran’s low-level proxy war against Israel – a war that has been taking place in one form or another since the 1979 Iranian Revolution brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power. The war has taken numerous forms, ranging from attacks on Israeli forces who invaded Lebanon to put an end to rocket attacks and terrorist infiltrations of Israel, to bombings of the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community center in Argentina, to kidnappings of Israeli soldiers from Israeli soil, to assisting Palestinian terrorist groups in targeting Israel.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have made little effort to hide their ultimate goal: wiping out the “Zionist entity.” Ahmadinejad questions whether the Holocaust actually took place, and routinely calls for Israel’s destruction. This kind of genocidal thinking was on display in the wake of Thursday’s massacre in Jerusalem. As Israelis buried their dead, Hamas issued a statement declaring that it “blesses” the attack, and Palestinians celebrated in the streets of Gaza. In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s al-Manar television station called the massacre at the yeshiva a “heroic” operation against an “extremist” school. The Jerusalem home of the killer, a Palestinian with permanent residency in the Israeli capital, “was adorned on Friday with the flags of Hamas, Islamic Jihad [and] Hezbollah,” the New York Times reported.
On Friday, al-Manar posted on its web site a rambling news analysis titled “Merkaz Harav Yeshiva: Stronghold of Zionist Extremism,” that in essence is a justification of the terrorist massacre that took place the day before; the piece, available at www.almanar.com speciously suggests that the yeshiva is part of a Zionist conspiracy dating back to the 1940s, involving rapes, mutilations and massacres of innocent Palestinian women and children. It is the most up-to-date example of the centuries-old blood libel: a pretext for anti-Semites to persecute and kill Jews whenever it was politically convenient for them to do so.
Just as Iran and its rogue-state ally, Syrian President Bashar Assad, supplied Hezbollah with the weapons that enabled them to fight Israel to a stalemate in the summer of 2006, Tehran and Damascus are deeply involved in fomenting the violence between Israel and the terrorists based in Gaza. Both regimes are major arms suppliers for Hamas operatives in Gaza. Tehran has spent tens of millions of dollars (a conservative figure) in helping to turn Gaza into an armed camp since Israel unilaterally withdrew all of its troops and civilian population in August and September 2005.
Aided by Egypt’s failure to police the border, dozens – and possibly even hundreds – of Gazans have left the territory in recent years to undergo military training with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran. Afterwards these men are smuggled back into Gaza to join Hamas’ army, or like-minded terrorist groups including Palestinian Islamic Jihad (which, like Hamas, is headquartered in Syria). These groups, together with organizations such as the Popular Resistance Committees, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, (an affiliate of “moderate” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah organization) are involved in firing rockets and missiles into neighboring Israeli towns.
Even when Israel occupied Gaza, smuggling that occurred between the Egyptian-controlled Sinai and Gaza. But when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza in the late summer of 2005, he relinquished control of the Philadelphi Corridor, an eight-mile wide route along the Egypt-Gaza border. The hope was that Egypt would police the border, but that didn’t happen. Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, said that by November 2006, 33 tons of military-grade explosives had been smuggled into Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal. By October 2007, that number had jumped to 112 tons.
The situation further deteriorated on January 23, 2008, when Hamas destroyed part of the Egyptian border fence, allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flood into Egypt. While many of these people were civilians who crossed the border to obtain foodstuffs, an unknown number of these people were terrorists looking to infiltrate into Israel through the largely unguarded Sinai Peninsula, controlled by Egypt. (The Israeli government believes that an undetermined number of these terrorists may have crossed the border into Israel and are preparing new attacks.) But the most dangerous problem continues to be the smuggling of weapons from Egypt into Gaza through the maze of hundreds of tunnels that terrorist organizations have built deep underground.
“Prior to 2006, the number of Palestinian rocket attacks rarely reached 50 per month,” notes Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations and current president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. “By early 2008, Palestinian organizations displayed a capability of launching 50 rockets per day.” Thanks to Tehran, this situation may be about to get even more dangerous for the civilian population of southern Israel. Recently, Israeli forces discovered in the Western Negev desert the remains of a new 175 mm. rocket of Iranian origin with a range of approximately 17 miles. The Israeli government is worried that Iran may be about to smuggle its Fajr-3 rocket, with a range of 27 miles, into Gaza sometime in the future. The weapon could be smuggled across the border in sections and assembled in Gaza. According to Gold: “As long as the Philadelphi route is open for Hamas smuggling, the risk to Israel will grow as Iran exports rockets of increasing range to the Gaza Strip.”
Between 2001, when the terror rocket-firing firing from Gaza into Israel began, and a few months ago, Sderot, once a town of nearly 30,000 people located less than a mile from Gaza, bore the brunt of the onslaught. Sderot has lost nearly a third of its population. In recent months, Hamas and friends have managed to substantially increase the range of the rockets, enough to reach Ashkelon, a city of close to 120,000 people a few miles up the Mediterranean coast. The port of Ashdod, a city of more than 200,000 is the next target. Gold warns that should Fajr rockets reach Gaza, there is no reason why Hamas cannot pose a threat to Tel Aviv – so long as it is able to continue making qualitative improvement to the weapons arsenal, and so long as Israel fails to launch a massive military operation to wipe out the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza. In all likelihood, this would require Israel to reoccupy at least part of that territory.
But thus far, Israel has recoiled from taking this step because of the casualties it will entail and the political abuse it must endure whenever it defends itself. The much more limited military raids conducted last week are only a small down payment on the military operation that will be necessary to end the rocket terror. And Israel was the target of obscene propaganda from Hamas, Fatah boss Abbas, and Ahmadinejad, all of whom suggested that Israel was guilty of war crimes because the Palestinians suffered civilian casualties in last week’s Israeli raids against missile and rocket launchers – all of which are located in densely populated civilian areas, effectively turning Palestinian civilians into human shields. These Palestinians, like the yeshiva students massacred Thursday in Jerusalem, have become cannon fodder for Tehran’s murderous campaign against Israel.
Ahmadinejad can only be emboldened by the fact that for now at least, he seems safe from Israeli retaliation for his actions. And since President Bush was sandbagged a few months ago with the publication of a National Intelligence Estimate that seemed to whitewash the Iranian nuclear weapons threat, Ahmadinejad may have concluded that he has little to fear from Washington as well.
Joel Himelfarb is an editorial writer for The Washington Times. The views expressed here are his own.
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FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Joel Himelfarb is the assistant editor of the editorial page of the Washington Times.
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