Tell Me Again--Why Is It A Novel Idea To Strike Back At Hamas During Peace Talks?

...Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres deemed the suicide bombings that followed the 1993 Oslo Accord “crimes against the peace process” and the victims, "sacrifices for peace".
Evelyn Gordon

Sacrifice: to surrender or give up, or permit injury or disadvantage to, for the sake of something else.
Dictionary.com

Israel may not have responded militarily to the murder of 4 Israelis by Hamas terrorists, but Al Jazeera reports Israel has responded to rockets fired from Gaza:

Israel has launched a series of air raids against targets in southern Gaza just hours after Palestinian fighters fired a rocket over the border.


Witnesses and Hamas security officials said late on Saturday that Israeli aircraft struck targets including smuggling tunnels running under the border with Egypt at Rafah within hours.

At least three people were wounded in the attacks, medical workers said.

An Israeli military spokesman confirmed the attacks, saying that one was aimed at "a tunnel dug in the direction of Israeli territory" to carry out attacks.

Early on Saturday, Palestinian fighters fired a rocket from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, causing no injuries, the Israeli military said.

Gaza is governed by Hamas, the Palestinian faction which is strongly opposed to negotiations with Israel.

Hamas attacks

Witnesses said one of the tunnels hit by the Israeli raids collapsed, and three Palestinians who were working in it had not yet made it back to the surface.

Another of the strikes struck a former base of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas' armed wing.

The flare-up of violence on the Israeli-Gaza border came just two days after the start of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in the US.

The thing is, that apparently Israel's attack was unexpected. In fact, according to Caroline Glick--Israel has a history of being so dedicated to peace talks that it will sacrifice anything for the sake of peace:

In all likelihood, Hamas was testing the waters. Iran's Palestinian proxy wanted to know whether the regular rules for peace processes have kicked into gear yet. Those rules -- as the families of the hundreds of Israelis murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the peak years of peace processes will attest -- involve Israel giving free rein to terrorists to murder Jews during "peace talks."

Since Yitzhak Rabin first shook Yassir Arafat's hand on the White House lawn 17 years ago, successive prime ministers have opted to not to retaliate for murderous attacks when peace talks are in session. They have justified their willingness to give the likes of Hamas a free hand to murder by claiming that fighting back would be tantamount to allowing terrorists to hold the peace process hostage. Conducting counter-terror campaigns in the midst of negotiations, they have uniformly argued, would endanger the talks and so, Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad must all be given a carte blanche to murder.

Echoing these sentiments precisely, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin all reportedly objected to launching any response to Tuesday's attack. According to the media, the three closed ranks against Netanyahu who reportedly wished to attack Hamas targets in Gaza following the massacre.[emphasis added]

Jeff Jacoby develops this idea further, examining the meaning of the Victims on the road to 'peace'

A persistent myth of the Arab-Israeli conflict is that Palestinian terrorists kill Jews in order to "disrupt the peace process," and that the best response to terrorism is to persevere with negotiations. That explanation for last week's carnage was repeated everywhere, from the White House ("This brutal attack underscores how far the enemies of peace will go to try to block progress") to Israel's opposition leader Tzipi Livni ("[the terrorists had a] "cold, political motive: to prevent the peace process" to the international media.

Palestinian children in Gaza, waving green Islamic flags and making a victory sign, participate in a rally to celebrate the terrorist attack that killed four Israeli Jews near Hebron on Aug. 31, 2010.

But far from opposing a "peace process" meant to push Israel into ever-deeper concessions, retreats, and self-endangerment, terrorists -- whether affiliated with Hamas or with Fatah -- seek to accelerate it.

So now we are left with face-to-face negotiations between Netanyahu and Abbas.

The math should be so simple, considering the fact that beside Abbas's corruption and incompetence--he does not even have a mandate to sit down with Bibi to begin with.

• With Hamas, where both the people and the leaders are your enemy--you oppose them.
• If both the Palestinian Arabs and their leaders were ready for peace--Israel would know what to do then, too.
• But with the Palestinian Authority and Abbas, where words of 'peace' come dripping out--interspersed with incitement again Israel--Netanyahu is following the US lead with nothing meaningful in sight..

The fact that the US has refused Abbas's preconditions, including demands for an extension of a settlement freeze, gives hope that the US also realizes at last how limited Abbas really is.

Now there is hope that Israel is not blinded by these peace talks either, and has not forgotten how to deal with terrorist attacks against its citizens.

Technorati Tag: Mideast Peace Talks.