Knesset rep lays out the case for Gaza military ops
By Seth Mandel
Feb. 15, 2008

After two Palestinian suicide bombers may have crossed into Israel from Gaza via Egypt for the Feb. 4 attack in Dimona, officials have been confronted with the multi-faceted threat that territory presents.

"The situation in Gaza is really grave, and it's much beyond only the misery of the inhabitants of Sderot," MK Dr. Yuval Steinitz, a Likud member and a current member of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, told participants in an on-the-record teleconference Feb. 7. The teleconference was organized by the American Friends of Likud, based in Manhattan.

Steinitz said that the thousands of rockets Palestinians have fired at the southern Israeli town of Sderot are only part of the serious security challenge the territory poses to the Israeli government. He spoke of a "dramatic shift" toward a situation similar, if not identical, to the situation in Israel's North preceding and during the Second Lebanon War in 2006.

"This bears strategic implications to have an Iranian outpost, not far away in the North, in Lebanon, but this time in the middle of the Negev," Steinitz said, referring to the Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah, which touched off the war with a cross border murder/kidnapping raid. "Unfortunately, the Israeli government doesn't seem to understand the real scope and nature of the evolving problem in Gaza."

One of the imminent dangers, Steinitz said, is the location of the weapons possessed by Hamas -- the ruling party in Gaza, which also serves as the aforementioned Iranian satellite cell. Gaza, which sits along Israel's southwest border, abuts central Israel at its most northern point. This, along with the increased range of Iranian-supplied rockets, puts Israel's largest city, Tel Aviv, in harm's way, according to Steinitz.

In order to properly assess the situation, Steinitz said we must look at the contentious "disengagement" agreement, in which Israel removed its military outposts and Jewish communities in Gaza in 2005, relocating them east of the Gaza border. The agreement involved the Israeli and Egyptian governments.

"The main mistake that we made during the disengagement was the delivery of the responsibility for the Philadelphi corridor and the border area between Gaza and Egypt, to the responsibility of the Egyptian troops," Steinitz said.

The Philadelphi corridor, or Philadelphi Route, was established as a sort of buffer zone to stop drugs and weapons smuggling from Egypt into Gaza. Under Egyptian stewardship, however, the corridor has been a major source of smuggling tunnels.

Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Steinitz said, made the case for Egyptian stewardship of the border area by arguing that the Egyptians would simply shoot any Palestinian trespassers.

"Rather than shooting them, they were cooperating with them for the last two years and very large quantities of arms and weapons and munitions and explosives came through Egypt into Gaza, with the generosity of the Egyptians," Steinitz said.

The Philadelphi corridor agreements, authored by then-Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, "[don't] deserve the paper they are written upon -- [there is] nothing left of those agreements," Steinitz said.

Which brought Steinitz to the crux of the teleconference: What to do now.

The government, Steinitz said, is conducting the same mistakes it made in Lebanon. Instead of capturing most of the land south of Lebanon's Litani River and destroying Hezbollah's infrastructure, Steinitz said that the government ordered the IDF to cherry-pick rocket launchers for most of the conflict. In Gaza, Steinitz said, the government must defeat Hamas.

"And we have the capacity to do that, the IDF," Steinitz said. "It's not that easy, it's not that simple, it's complicated, we would have casualties. But this is a must if we want to survive in this region."

Steinitz advocated a massive ground incursion into Gaza, the difficulty of which he admitted, but argued that casualties would soon mount on both sides if the terrorists in Gaza get the weapons they need. The current "cat and mouse" games the IDF is being force to play, Steinitz said, amount to "tactical success, but strategic failure."

Steinitz said he advocated for a ground incursion into Gaza before disengagement as well. The IDF, he said, has not gone into the dense urban neighborhoods in places like Gaza City, as they have in the West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron.

There is still terrorism based in those cities, he said, but the infrastructure is simply not there because of the IDF's military maneuvers in those towns.

Steinitz also talked about the demilitarization of the Sinai -- a hallmark provision of the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace agreement. Without even fighting terrorism, Steinitz said, the Egyptians are breaking the demilitarization in small ways. For example, the original plan was for Egypt to deploy 8,000 troops in the Sinai with 400 armored carriers. The Knesset made sure that was reduced to 800 troops. Recently, however, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni agreed to let the Egyptians double that number, he said.

"This is ridiculous," Steinitz said. "Because if the Egyptians need more manpower there, which might be the case, according to the peace agreement they can deploy 10,000 or 20,000 policemen. But they insist on soldiers, not policemen, in order to break the demilitarization of Sinai."

Steinitz said that Israeli politicians on the right and the left predominantly agree that Israel cannot try to solve one strategic problem -- Gaza -- with another -- inviting the Egyptian army back to Sinai.

Steinitz was asked if the government, led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, has a plan to deal with Gaza.

"Not at all," he responded. "Honestly, I tell you, they're not even improvising."

By way of comparison, Steinitz again referenced the government's conduct during the Second Lebanon War, which was recently reviewed by a committee headed by retired judge Eliyahu Winograd. The Winograd report, Steinitz noted, explained two legitimate strategies for the Second Lebanon War: a very strong, short air attack followed by a ceasefire; or a massive ground invasion designed to eliminate Hezbollah.

"So the Winograd committee said both reactions were legitimate, but the government didn't choose either one of them," Steinitz said. "The government did zigzag between the two strategies all along the war for four weeks."

This is what is happening Gaza, Steinitz said. Yet, he warned, Hamas surely has a strategy, and they hope to turn the tide in their war against Israel, which he said the IDF is currently winning.

Likud officials have made clear that they would like new elections, in which the party chairman and former Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu would run for the premiership. Gaza has become a top issue for the party, and Steinitz offered the party's stance on military ops in Gaza.

"We will conduct completely different defense policy vis-a-vis Gaza," he said. "I think that it won't be too long before we go to a defensive operation, not in order to deter Hamas, but in order to defeat this evil regime, this Iranian outpost."