How we empower Hezbollah & Hamas

On Friday Islamic terrorists attacked a mosque during Friday prayers in northern Sinai. After first bombing its children’s creche, the mosque was surrounded by some 20 gunmen reportedly carrying ISIS insignia. They left over 300 dead, some 30 of them, tragically, children.

This latest terror attack underlines the need – in Donald Trump’s words - to eradicate radical Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth. How refreshing that statement is after 8 years of Obama not even identifying the RIT enemy that has tormented the West since 9-11.

But it also underlines the glaring truth about the so- called ‘Middle East Peace Process’.

In the 40 years since the peace agreement with Sadat, every piece of territory that Israel vacated has been turned into a terror base.

In May 2000, when the IDF vacated South Lebanon, Hezbollah guerrillas ran gleefully to the Israeli border where they have remained ever since. It is now one of the biggest rocket bases on the planet with a stockpile of over 100,000 missiles ready to be launched from a network of bunkers and tunnels which have been created as part of Hezbollah’s one-billion-dollar military budget financed mainly by Iran.

Until 2000 Hezbollah was just another Arab terrorist group, attacking airplanes and embassies, and the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. But it was Israel’s Lebanon retreat which launched Hezbollah into the big league. Now they are part of the Lebanese parliament, holding 57 of the 128 seats. And yet America continues to supply massive military assistance to Lebanon’s armed forces, effectively arming the same Hezbollah which truck-bombed 241 US marines in 1983.

In 2005, Israel vacated the Gaza strip only to see it taken over by Iran’s other proxy, Hamas. With its own stockpile of rockets and tunnels, Hamas has tormented southern Israel for 12 years, drawing it into two ugly wars and evoking anti-Semitic demonstrations in capitals and campuses across the world.

And now we see the wages of our Sinai sin. Another Israeli vacuum filled with terror. The Sharm-el-Sheikh I used to drive to in the 1970’s is now a ghost town, desperate for the tourists scared away by aircraft downed by ISIS missiles. Northern Sinai now a terrorist enclave which the Egyptian military government struggles to control.

This latest terror attack, beyond its toll on human life and the suffering of hundreds of bereft families, poses a real and present danger to Israel. With each attack, Egypt’s military rulers request ever more reinforcements to be brought into what was supposed to be a demilitarised Sinai. The agreement with Sadat was that Sinai would be a demilitarised buffer zone, so that there could be no surprise attacks like Yom Kippur 1973. But by now, Netanyahu’s repeated concessions to President Al-Sisi – for armoured forces to combat ISIS - has worn down that treaty. 

The danger is that, if Sisi is overthrown, a Muslim Brotherhood government will have easy mobilisation of an attack force against Israel.

So, the lesson in all of this is to ensure that Judea and Samaria, on the West Bank of the Jordan river, do not become the next vacuum for an Iranian proxy to fill. The very idea of this is national suicide.

Ironic that Friday’s heinous attack is attributed to the Islamic terror group Ansar Beit Al Maqdis.

Translated this means:  “Supporters of the Beit Mikdash”

We all know what that means.

It was always ours.

Let’s keep it that way.

Every inch.