What to Make of the Cease Fire?

By Sherwin Pomerantz

My first response to the question of what to make of the recent cease fire between Israel and Hamas is simply: I don’t know.  And taking into account all of the commentaries I have read and heard over the last few days, this may be the most honest comment you will read.   Frankly, nobody knows but let’s look at some truths.

Truth #1:  It is nice to have some peace and quiet once again and for all of us living in Israel not to have to worry about rockets coming in from Gaza.  No matter how one feels about how this latest activity ended, everyone will agree that quiet is much better than dealing with air raid sirens and rockets.

Truth #2: No one knows whether this latest cessation of hostilities will last.  Actually everyone knows that it won’t last.  Hamas cannot control all of the various elements that operate in Gaza and any further lobbing of rockets into Israel from Gaza will (and should) elicit a military response from Israel. So any thinking person will admit that while cease fires are nice, a cease fire is not peace and, as such, there is simply no way this can last.

Truth #3:  Hamas has not departed from its stated desire to reclaim all of Palestine and to eliminate Israel as a unique political entity.   Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, in an interview last week with Christiane Amanpour stated clearly “How can I accept Israel?  They have occupied my land!”  While he said in the same interview that he is ready to talk about peace based on the 1967 armistice lines, he then goes on to say “Palestine, from the river to the sea, from the north to the south, is my land.”  (http://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-leader-denies-his-group-was-behind-ta-bus-bombing-but-insists-israel-had-it-coming/)  So it then becomes clear that any talk of peace, if it can be achieved, is temporary and simply a step on the road to reclaiming the entirety of what is now Israel.

Truth #4: Egypt’s President Morsi, while having been given credit for engineering the cease fire at the urging of the U.S. on whom he is most dependent for Egypt’s future economic growth, is himself a guiding light of the Muslim Brotherhood, the father of Hamas.  To expect that given his political leanings he will be neutral in any adjudication of breaches of the cease fire is to believe in fairy tales.  His true colors showed themselves in full force on Thursday when he basically took dictatorial control of Egypt’s political structure in an effort to “save the revolution” making himself look more like Mubarak than Mubarak himself. 

So where does that leave us?  At best, in a tenuous position.  On the one hand we have developed a modern technological miracle, a society that is more-or-less democratic in a part of the world that does not know the meaning of the word, and have become a regional economic and military power.   On the other hand our very existence is regularly threatened by political entities on many of our borders intent on seeing us disappear.

The only good news this morning is the fact that envoys of Israel and Turkey are now meeting once again to try to patch up relations between our two countries.  Clearly there are more realities in this part of the world that unite us than separate us and, long term, it will be in our best interests to work together to stem the tide of radicalism that threatens us first but has ramifications for every freedom loving nation of the world.  I hope this effort is successful.

For the moment, things are quiet here and we are grateful for that.  But our preparedness for further military action must never be compromised as that is the only way to ensure the peace, sad as that truth may be.