Fighting Fire with Fire

Israeli and foreign news and intelligence sources report that following direct Israeli cautions about Hamas activities in Turkey, in a clearly in-your-face decision, Mr. Erdogan met Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas in an internationally publicized official event.  It is also reported that Turkish intelligence agents maintain close contact with the group’s operatives in Istanbul. To eliminate any doubt, Turkish President Erdogan asserted, “We will keep on supporting our brothers in Palestine.”

Turkey agreed in a US-brokered 2015 deal with Israel to stop Hamas planning attacks from its soil but has consistently failed to honor the agreement, Israeli officials said. Hamas is considered a terrorist group by the EU and US. Its armed wing has been designated a terror group by the UK. In February Hamas assigned a Palestinian to assassinate Jerusalem’s mayor, an Knesset member from PM Netanyahu’s party or Israel’s chief of police. The plot failed. In another case, a Hamas operative offered to pay $20,000 to the family of any would-be suicide bomber. However, a Turkish diplomatic source of course officially denied Hamas was planning these attacks from Turkey, adding that Hamas is “not a terrorist organization” but a legitimate Palestinian political party. However, there are transcripts of Israeli police interrogations with the would-be assassin and others that show senior Hamas operatives are using Turkey’s largest city to direct the operations in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

 Turkey has proved such a welcoming environment for Hamas that the group’s deputy leader, Saleh al-Arouri, who has a $5 million (£3.8 million) US government bounty on his head, travels freely to the country without fear of arrest. This week a relaxed Arouri posed for photographs with other Hamas leaders in Istanbul. “We reject all claims that Turkey is being used for anti-Israel activities,” a source said. Amid the increasingly dire humanitarian and economic situation in Gaza, large numbers of Palestinians are leaving the Strip and traveling through Egypt to Turkey to start new lives. An estimated 35,000 left in 2018 and did not return.

So then, what is the solution?

Retaliation doesn’t work. Cutting off aid (except all humanitarian aid) doesn’t work. The leaders aren’t there to suffer! and the money to pay poor Gazans to suffer and carry on with the primitive but effective attacks is provided by Turkey and others. Limitation of fuel for electricity or other necessities only punishes the poor who are then an easier target for recruitment of suicide bombers and terrorists. The power and wealth of the leadership must be, if not eliminated, then at least be diminished. And here we enter the quagmire of political, both national and international, concerns. Here we enter the world of humanitarianism and the calculation of the human cost of any effective solution while trying to identify those who are willingly active in terrorist activities for monetary, emotional, political, spiritual or other reasons.

In spite of the casual – even official – use of the word “war” to describe modern armed conflict/warfare, there have been no real definitive wars since WWII. Most of the military conflicts that a normal person might term ‘warfare’ have been designated ‘conflicts’, ‘actions’, etc. And, worse, even the few that were officially named “wars” (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan) there are no clear losers, no clear winners. No country or terrorist group has paid the ultimate price for carrying out an military/armed attack on another nation from within or without since Hitler’s Germany and the Axis powers. North Korea? Vietnam? Lebanon? Since there are no winners, no losers and only armistices with some artificial borders, they have become wars of attrition from without and from from within. Frequently, there are no state armies involved, but organizations of resistance, terrorists, against a government’s security forces trying to stop the intermittent attacks. 

The few who pay the price are never the official network of powerful instigators and supporters. The perhaps well-intentioned humanitarian groups even thwart minimal efforts to stop the chaos. Whole populations are fleeing, many with nowhere to go because the wealth and power of the UN and the EU, as well as non-governmental organizations do not permit dethroning the murderous conquerors (or leaders) of their respective countries. And when some of these murderers cloak their militancy in a spiritual guise, their fanaticism often gains untold thousands of followers and destroys the lives of millions.

Perhaps there is a solution, but if so, no one is currently willing to even consider it by any known means unless or until it clearly becomes defense against national annihilation. The terrorists and extremists are willing to torture, maim, kill the innocents little by little, a ‘few’ at a time and even into the thousands by any means in order to win. Most in power today are unwilling to pay that price. 

And if a solution is found, who indeed has the ABILITY and the WILL to implement it?

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