Question - Until when will Gaza remain a bone in Israel’s throat? - by Martin Sherman

One of the few areas in which Gazans have shown expertise and enterprise, ingenuity and innovativeness is in honing their production and procurement of weaponry, with which to assault the Jewish state.

Martin Sherman..
JNS.org..
08 November '19..

“Israel need not necessarily take control of the Gaza Strip, but it must take control of the situation.” — Jerusalem Post editorial, Nov. 3, 2019

“I would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won’t happen, and a solution must be found.” — Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Sept. 3, 1992


“ … beyond the furrow that marks the border, lies a surging sea of hatred and vengeance, yearning for the day that the tranquility blunts our alertness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call for us to lay down our arms.” — Moshe Dayan, at the funeral of Roi Rotberg, of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, killed by terrorist gunmen from Gaza, April 28, 1956

The Israel Defense Forces swept triumphantly into the Egyptian-ruled Gaza Strip in early June 1967 and pulled out ignominiously in mid-August 2005—erasing every vestige of Jewish presence there that had been lovingly and laboriously developed over the preceding four decades.

Gaza has been an almost constant source of consternation for Israel, well before it took over the Strip in 1967 (see opening excerpt). However, matters took a sharp turn for the worse, when, following the Oslo I Accords (1993) and the pursuant Gaza-Jericho Agreement (1994), facilitating PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s entry into Gaza on July 1, 1994 to the cheers of jubilant crowds, whose expectant hopes of future prosperity and security were soon to be dashed.

Since then, in large part due to Israel first reducing and then totally withdrawing its presence on the ground, Gaza has evolved from being a terrorist nuisance to a threat of emerging strategic dimensions. Indeed, this week the Israel Broadcasting Corporation (Kan 11) ran an exposé on the ongoing global efforts by the external arm of Hamas to acquire advanced, high-quality weapon systems to intensify the battle against Israel.

Indeed, one of the few areas in which Gazans have shown considerable expertise and enterprise, ingenuity and innovativeness is in honing their production and procurement of weaponry, with which to assault the Jewish state—attaining military capabilities seemingly inconceivable when Israel embarked on its poorly conceived policy of transferring control of Gaza to the Palestinian Arabs.

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