Short and Sharp Tactics Needed...

From National Review Online, July 07, 2006, by The Editors ....

....Israel must soon decide what its tactics are to be in Gaza. So far the government has been in favor of playing it long. This contributes nothing to the rescue of the young hostage, Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Delay is also allowing Palestinian gunmen to mobilize, to prepare ambushes and lay explosive devices.

Hamas is devoting its energies to firing Qassam rockets of improved design, capable of reaching the Israeli town of Ashkelon. A suicide bomber was arrested before he could detonate himself, and Israeli intelligence claims to have received no fewer than 90 warnings of other terrorist plans. Israeli forces so far have reoccupied three of the Gaza settlements evacuated earlier, now a devastated wasteland from which Hamas fires its Qassams.

To push ahead and do what has to be done to protect Israelis and free Shalit is obviously fraught, and furthermore reveals that the Palestinians took the uprooting of Israeli settlements from Gaza as an invitation to do their worst. (Has it ever been more obvious that what the Palestinians want is not a state of their own but to destroy Israel?)

In the light of this dilemma, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is going to have to revise his intention to pull settlements out of the West Bank, for that would leave a firing-ground for terrorists yet closer to Israeli population centers. Moreover, playing it long will raise tensions among all the parties composing Olmert’s governing coalition.

Short and sharp has always stood Israel in good stead in the disasters the Palestinians persist in bringing down on themselves....