Hillary’s Hand in Hamas’ Terror Tunnels
August 26, 2014 by 24 Comments
The authors are members of the board of the Religious Zionists of America.
Much
has been said and written about the terror tunnels that Hamas built in
Gaza. But too little has been said about who it was that put the cement
into Hamas’ hands, thus making the construction of the tunnels possible
in the first place.
Until now.
In a bombshell revelation, Dennis Ross, the
senior Mideast policy adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from
2009 to 2011, has admitted that it was he who was assigned the task of
pressuring Israel to ease up on its military blockade of Gaza, in the
events after Israel’s withdrawal from that region in 2005.
“I argued with Israeli leaders and security
officials, telling them they needed to allow more construction
materials, including cement, into Gaza so that housing, schools and
basic infrastructure could be built,” Ross revealed in the Washington
Post on August 10. “They countered that Hamas would misuse it, and they
were right.”
Not that Hillary’s State Department had been
acting independently of the White House on the issue of cement. For
example, Vice President Joe Biden told interviewer Charlie Rose, on
Bloomberg TV in 2010: “We have put as much pressure and as much cajoling
on Israel as we can to allow them to get building materials” and other
forbidden items into Gaza.
But now that Mrs. Clinton is attempting to
distance herself from the president’s debacles in foreign affairs,
Ross’s admission shows that it was she who sent her personal envoy to
push for a policy that ultimately enabled Hamas to build the terror
tunnels.
Israeli officials have long been justifiably
concerned about the danger of dual-use items such as cement. On the one
hand, cement could be used for innocent purposes such as home
construction, in the hands of a peace-seeking, trustworthy government.
But in the hands of untrustworthy elements — such as the Hamas terrorist
regime that rules Gaza — it could also be used for other purposes. Such
as terror tunnels.
President Obama recently remarked, in his
much-discussed interview with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times:
“Because Israel is so capable militarily, I don’t worry about Israel’s
survival.” Secretary Clinton evidently shared that dismissive attitude
when she sent Ross on his mission to put cement into Hamas’ hands.
It seems Obama and Clinton forgot that Israel
is the only country in the world that is threatened with annihilation
by a nearby regime rushing to build nuclear weapons. Israel is the only
country in the world that, in the space of just 65 years, has been
forced to fight four major defensive wars and five smaller ones, in
order to survive. Israel is the only country in the world whose
next-door neighbors have built dozens of tunnels into Israel to
perpetrate massacres of civilians.
Today, at least thirty-two terror tunnels later, we know that Clinton, Obama and Ross have been wrong, while Israel is right.
Hamas spent between $1-million and
$10-million to build each of those tunnels, using as many as 350
truckloads of cement and other supplies per tunnel, according a report
in to the Wall Street Journal, quoting Israeli military officials.
And it is “likely that there are additional tunnels” that the Israelis have yet to uncover, according to the Journal’s report.
Instead of lethal purposes, the materials
used for each tunnel could have built 86 homes, or 19 medical clinics,
or seven mosques, or six schools. But Hamas had other priorities.
And Secretary Clinton consciously turned a
blind eye. Just as she turned a blind eye to other aggressive and
anti-peace behavior by the Palestinians, such as the Palestinian
Authority’s sheltering of known terrorists, its payments to imprisoned
terrorists, the anti-Israel and anti-America propaganda that fills the
PA-controlled media, and the anti-Semitic hatred in the textbooks used
in the PA’s schools.
What are the real-life consequences of
ignoring such Palestinian actions? An entire generation of young
Palestinians have grown up incited to hatred of Jews and Israel, and
glorifying terrorists as heroes and martyrs.
What are the real-life consequences of Mrs.
Clinton putting cement into Hamas’s hands? The tunnels into Israel were
used to carry out the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and numerous other
attacks in which Israelis were murdered. They were being prepared to
carry out a mass coordinated attack on Israeli towns and kibbutzim, this
year on Rosh Hashanah.
Imagine a scenario in which a surgeon decided
that she wanted to employ a controversial and risky technique. She was
warned repeatedly that it was too dangerous, but proceeded anyway and in
the process nearly killed the patient. Surely that would be deemed
malpractice. The surgeon probably would be barred from ever again
practicing medicine.
Secretary of Stated Hillary Clinton committed
diplomatic malpractice. Her own top aide has revealed that it was she
who put the cement into Hamas’ hands, even after Israel warned
repeatedly that doing so was too dangerous. And Israel continues to
suffer the consequences.
Another lesson of the Gaza war: Even as we
condemn Hamas’ diversion of cement from the construction of housing to
the construction of terror tunnels, let us not forget that it was
Hillary Clinton who pushed through the policy that made those tunnels
possible.
[Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn are
members of the board of the Religious Zionists of America. This article
is part of a series. To view previous installments, please visit http://www.phillyreligiouszionists.org/lessons-from-the-gaza-war/.]
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