“Israel should tell the Americans that we are stopping the supply chain to Gaza. Not to starve the Israelis in Gaza, but as leverage to save our abductees. This is also a humanitarian matter.” This is what former MLA head Giora Eiland says in an extensive and thorough interview with the Ma’ariv supplement, which will be published in full on Friday.
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According to Eiland, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is wrong in the way he conducts the talks on the abductee issue – and this is mainly in regards to dealing with the demands made by the sympathetic American administration of Joe Biden. “The main point in the war is the narrative, the story, which if you get it wrong, you can no longer correct,” says Eiland, “Unfortunately, Israel is acting in the light of a wrong narrative in relation to Gaza. There is a terrible and terrible organization in the Gaza Strip, Hamas, and we are fighting against it, and this statement repeats itself 17 times a day about how bad Hamas is and how much they need to be beaten and how much there are two million Gazans who got into the campaign against their will and therefore we have nothing against them and we need to provide them with food and fuel and humanitarian aid. But nothing is further from reality than this false description.”
Benjamin Netanyahu (Photo: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
“A narrative is set on the first day. And the first day was two days before Biden arrived in Israel. The real story is that in 2007 Gaza became a de facto state, it has a clear territory, an effective central government, an army and an independent foreign policy. And this state is strikingly similar in the processes it went through to Nazi Germany The government came to power in democratic elections, and from the moment it came to power, the entire Gazan nation is mobilized in favor of the leader Yahya Sinwar and his murderous ideology. In every kindergarten there is a toy class and a bomb class, in every medical clinic there are doctors and rockets, and the entire education system directs the young to worship martyrdom and kill Jews.”
But it doesn’t interest Biden, he is the one who demands humanitarian aid and is responsible for supplies that Israel cannot move forward without.
“I have a lot of experience in these matters and I say with responsibility that there is a possibility of turning American opinion from one end to the other. Netanyahu and Dermer think they know the Americans, but that is not true, they speak great English but their acquaintance is superficial and populist. We, with a complete lack of personality, have accepted the notion that there is an organization Terrorism and all the rest there are good citizens, because that is what happened in Iraq with ISIS, but ISIS is not like Hamas, which has existed for decades in the hearts and minds of Gazans.
“The Americans say, ‘Fight like we fought in Mosul.’ But in Mosul there were brat groups who shot anyone who opposed them and created a lot of terror in the cities, but from a military point of view they were not a significant threat. In contrast, Hamas established in Gaza the most fortified target in the history of wars. There are the most standard weapons there Modern and in crazy quantities, of course also an arms industry, full recruitment and quality equipment for every fighter from palladium shoes to helmets and means, just like a commando fighter of the special forces and hundreds of kilometers of tunnels. This is a really amazing ability, so in order to explain to the Americans the war in Gaza, we must remind them of The battle of Okinawa against the Japanese in World War II when the Japanese fortified themselves in tunnels and underground bunkers and were willing to die and used the Japanese residents as human shields and as a result hundreds of thousands were killed and from there it was a short way to an atomic bomb. I say to the Americans, take this battle, multiply it 10 times and then understand the capabilities of Hamas”.
“No one talked about it with the Americans on the first day, and since then it’s been a slippery slope. Right now, Israel is at war with Gaza, and contrary to any historical precedent, it supplies the enemy country with not only food and water, but also fuel that reaches Hamas. This is how the enemy’s breathing space is extended.” .
What do you suggest?
“I connect the humanitarian aid to the matter of the abductees. Even if it is considerably late, Israel needs to say both to itself and to the Americans a sentence that seems to me to be so factually and morally correct: we fear that our abductees will die, and if they are alive, who knows how they will return, and therefore, if not Renewing the implementation of the deal under the conditions of the previous deal which was reasonable, ten abductees a day in exchange for aid trucks, we are stopping the supply chain. Not in order to starve the residents of Gaza, but as leverage to save our people. This is also humanitarian, and if for the whole world it is very important that the supplies arrive to Gaza, that the world will exert all possible pressure on it in order for this to happen.”
The full interview will be published on Friday in Ma’ariv