Gaza Strip must be neutralized

The disloyal criticism of Israel’s fight against terrorism by Western European citizens and governments reveals the helplessness of Europeans who are unable, unwilling or unwilling to do anything against the very Islamic terrorism that is taking European life by storm.

It is also important to mention that the Israeli defensive action and control is also welcomed by the Palestinian Authority and by Mahmoud Abbas’ circles who also perceives the influence that terrorist groups from Gaza can achieve in Judea and Samaria as a threat.

In recent hours the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet have launched Operation Shield and Arrow against Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organisation funded and motivated by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Like Hamas, terrorism is the real misfortune that hits ever harder at Palestinian Arab civilians who are used as human shields or have to live with the rocket bases themselves mounted on residential buildings.

The Gaza Strip represents the ideal construct in many people’s imaginations of what a Palestinian state can be. Not a few within the wider political activism wish for greater Hamas and Islamic Jihad intervention in the territories under the control of the Palestinian Authority since the signing of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad has launched more than 500 attacks against Israeli civilians, and in the five months of 2023 alone they have been part of a spate of armed or rocket attacks against Israeli populations in the south in particular. In response, Israel has launched an attack that appears to have put the organisation’s top leadership back in check: Jahed Ahnam, one of the financiers of Palestinian terrorism operating in southern Gaza; Khalil Bahitini, responsible for the attacks against Israel over the last month; and Tarek Az Aldin, also a financier and operative in the attacks.

In recent months, the Jewish state has suffered a string of attacks and threats that are being replicated with increasing force in a region where peace and normalisation agreements want to be undermined by violence. As has not been seen in other phenomena of international politics, there is a strong Palestinian Arab activism in Europe, the United States and Latin America, as multiple and heterogeneous as it is marginal, fighting any kind of normalisation between Arab states and Israel.

In the operation launched tonight, collateral damage and the death of Arab civilians are again reported to have taken place. In what is reported in the Palestinian media as two children dead in the middle of the operation, it is only worth remembering that for Palestinian society, raising children is not synonymous with the future of their community, but rather a guarantee to extend the armed conflict and ensure, as Arafat wanted, that it is Palestinian children who will succeed in unfurling the PLO flag in Jerusalem.

There is no other conflict in which public opinion and the media, even some very prestigious ones, have such a one-sided reading of the facts. Israel has the right to defend itself and thereby also prevents waves of terrorism from reaching more frequently outside a region where radicalisation ravages people’s minds and lives. The indirect benefit to much of the world is as important as it is unknown or ignored by many.

A region in which terrorism is definitively silenced and armed groups operating against Israel and threatening Arab civilians succumb to the power of force that alone can balance an asymmetrical struggle is still possible. Quick and accurate strikes are the possibility of obstructing, at least for a time, the response capacity that will come from the Gaza Strip and that will surely put Israel on alert in the coming hours.

Countries that have suffered first-hand from Islamic terrorism and those threatened by it must support Israel’s quest for existence and to repel the threats that spring up and flow swiftly through the same channels as ignorance, bad faith and the insistence on accusing the victim of being the perpetrator.

Terrorism is an ideology and it is everyone’s commitment to contribute to the ideological fight against a germ that, sooner or later, will hit all countries equally hard.