BY PAUL T HORGAN

Israel would cancel the blockade as soon as Hamas returns the hostages that this terrorist organisation has taken. Egypt’s participation in the blockade of Gaza is not due to pressure from Israel but because there is no love lost between Cairo and Gaza, despite ethnic affinities. Egypt has her own Islamist problem and does not want to add to it. There would also be no major military attack on Gaza by Israel if Hamas were to surrender unconditionally. The reason why Palestinian Arabs are contained within Gaza by a previously-assumed-to-be impenetrable barrier is because of their propensity to leave their dwellings to murder Israelis in their beds and cots. As soon as news spread that the barrier had been breached by Hamas, some Palestinian Arabs not directly involved grabbed up weapons to join in the slaughter before being killed while doing so.

Describing containment by Israel as a ‘collective punishment’ is consequently bogus. It is actually a form of collective protection for both sides.

Gaza is not actually overcrowded. Its population density is almost identical to that of Greater London, and it is actually lower than that of either either Singapore or Hong Kong, which were also, like Gaza, British-managed territories. As to why the latter two coastal cities are prosperous economic hubs while Gaza languishes has to be due to the character of the inhabitants.

When Gaza was handed over to Palestinian Arab control by Israel, there were numerous flourishing previously Jewish-owned businesses, notably in agriculture. These were promptly looted and destroyed by the Palestinian Arabs, when they could have been used to drive the economy to greater, or indeed some, prosperity. No major attempt at promoting economic growth in Gaza has taken place ever since. The Palestinian Arabs seem to happy to live on international handouts from the EU and others rather than strive to improve themselves by their own exertions. Their striving lies elsewhere. At one stage the Gaza economy was boosted by bounties handed out by Saddam Hussein every time there was a suicide bomb attack in Israel.

Every time Palestinian Arabs launch their unguided rockets at Israel, they are probably exerting their maximum effort to swamp Israel’s anti-missile systems. If Israel were to retaliate on Gaza with the maximum effort of their artillery and surface-to-surface rocketry, not one building in Gaza would be left standing.

No-one seems to appreciate Israel’s restraint in the face of repeated and extreme provocation.

When Israel now demands that Palestinian Arab civilians leave Gaza City, this is because Israel does not want civilians to be in the way of their planned assault on Hamas, not because of some ‘ethnic cleansing’ exercise. Hamas has a ‘human shield’ policy, embedding their forces into the civilian population such that any attack by Israel will result in civilian casualties. These casualties are not a form of ‘collective punishment’ on Palestinian Arabs but a consequence of Hamas’ own military strategy. Militarily, Hamas’ position is quite hopeless. However defeating Hamas will result in a lot of civilians being killed, especially as Hamas is officially opposing civilians heeding Israel’s call to evacuate.

The situation seems similar to the Soviet assault on the centre of Berlin, or the American assault on the island of Okinawa, both in 1945. In both cases the dire situation of the defenders suggested surrender was the best possible option. However, murderous fanatics were in charge. In Berlin, SS detachments would roam the streets, summarily executing any boy or man not fighting at the ever-shrinking front of the besieged capital. In Okinawa, military authorities actually ordered the civilians to kill themselves rather than be liberated by American Marines. Hamas has a similar kind of grip on the Palestinian Arab civilians, certainly those not utterly taken up with the relentless culture of anti-Semitism.

Hamas is the actual enemy of Palestinian Arabs, not Israel.

There have been calls for Palestinian Arab refugees from Gaza to be evacuated to Europe, as Syrians and Ukrainians have been previously. The problem with this is that Palestinian Arabs in Gaza have received an anti-Semitic education that would not have been out of place in Nazi Germany. Jewish communities in Europe have enough safety issues without introducing into their midst a group of people who have been deliberately indoctrinated from birth to participate and then glorify in their murder. Every time a Palestinian Arab suicide bomber killed Israelis in shops or other crowded areas, Palestinian Arabs in Gaza would take to the streets to loudly celebrate the attack. Children would be given sweets, helping cement the positive association between Jewish deaths and rewards. Some Palestinian Arabs in Gaza publicly celebrated the 9/11 attacks in an identical manner.

Hamas’ policy of human shields has already caused civilian casualties in Gaza, but these have been limited because of the use of precision strikes by Israel. This situation will change once ground units of the Israel Defence Force start to move in to Gaza. There will be vicious house-to-house fighting, and, like it or not, Israel will place a higher value on its own soldiers than it will on Palestinian Arab civilians. Thus if a building is used as a machine-gun nest, or sniper post, it is probable that ground forces will blast the building with artillery. If the building is also occupied by civilians, they will be caught in the crossfire.

Civilian deaths will not be a war crime.

But this is what Hamas wants. This is not just a straightforward military operation, there is a strong political element. The only political dimension to the Soviet assault on Berlin was that the Western Allies had decided not to advance to take the German capital as it would have been a waste of soldiers’ lives for a city that, although planned to be partitioned between the victorious powers and France, would eventually form part of the Soviet occupation zone. The political element of the invasion of Okinawa was that the Japanese wanted to make amphibious assaults on the Home Islands to be so costly in lives that the predominantly American forces would seek a compromise peace rather than invade.

The nuclear bombing of Japan actually save hundreds of thousands of military and civilian lives.

Hamas want to take the lives of as many Israeli soldiers as it can, but requires for its political ends that a large number of Palestinian Arab civilians are also killed. While these civilian deaths will simply be the outcome of these unfortunate people being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Hamas and their willing supporters in the West will denounce the deaths as a deliberate act when this will obviously not be the case. We saw indications of this when a stray Islamic Jihad rocket crashed into a hospital in Gaza and the world’s media (including the BBC that is funded by your TV Licence fee) immediately blamed Israel for the deaths. Hamas is to blame for all the deaths on both sides, as they have initiated a war they cannot possibly win by fighting alone. But then the objectives were exclusively political. Israel has been making great strides in establishing full diplomatic relations with previously-hostile Arab states, and this was leading to the jewel in the diplomatic crown, Saudi Arabia. Hamas was getting marginalised and its people may have realised that they would soon be forced to do an honest day’s work rather than living off of hate. Despite the fact that Hamas and Hezbollah are Iranian puppet organisations, it is likely that Saudi-Israeli talks have stalled. The Middle East has taken a large step back towards destabilisation, entirely due to Hamas.

The invasion of Gaza by Israel was inevitable after Hamas’ terrorist atrocities, and it is likely that Hamas has quite prepared for this invasion with fortified buildings and redoubts, all linked by a network of tunnels. In 1945, the Nazis had a policy of not retreating in the face of Allied onslaught, designating every conurbation as a front-line town to be held to the last. Fighting was bitter, and civilians inevitably suffered, even though the outcome was never once in doubt. All of Gaza is a front-line town. The only town that the Soviets had no difficulty in capturing was Dresden, because the centre had been obliterated in a firestorm after raids by Bomber Command. The civilian cost of the raids was high. 25,000 people were killed, but this figure was heavily inflated by Josef Goebbels, and his Nazi propaganda is still accepted as truth by those that would do down both our proud national history and our armed forces.

It is likely that Hamas will go down the same path of Nazi-style exaggeration and distortion.

What is worse is that major Western institutions and commentators have decided to side with the terrorists by simply ignoring the atrocities meted out to Israeli civilians, or paying these the briefest possible lip service before moving on to spend most of their time to denounce Israel.

Israel’s strategic goal is the elimination of Hamas. After what Hamas has done to Israel, this goal is quite reasonable, akin to the demand by the Allied powers for the Axis states to surrender unconditionally. However, like Berlin or Okinawa, this looks like being a fight to the death. For this, only Hamas is to blame.

And what of the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza?

Well, they voted in Hamas, and such opinion polls as there are suggest that Hamas still attracts majority support. As Abraham Lincoln once said: “Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.” The Gaza War is a direct consequence of popular decisions made by the Palestinian Arabs. There has been no major call by Palestinian Arabs for Hamas to step down. To quote the head of Bomber Command. “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind”. This is a tragedy of their own making.

Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.