Photo Credit: Moshe Feiglin
Moshe Feiglin

We are prattling ourselves to death, blabbing in the television studios and in the military briefings. “When the Hamas terrorists emerge from the underground and see all the destruction, they will understand that they lost.” Really? Does anybody in Hamas really care about the destruction and the casualties?

What was Hamas’s status before this war, and what is its status today – both in the Arab world and the world at large? That is a determining factor.

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Who requests a cease-fire and who dictates its conditions? That is a determining factor.

We must understand that a war that does not have a clear, determined, unequivocal and decisive goal will always be lost. If you do not have a clear goal – don’t go to war.

Israel does not have a strategic perspective as to why it is fighting. That is why we cannot manage to define a clear goal.

And worst of all, we are fighting unethically and thus endangering our courageous sons in battle.

What are we fighting for, and against whom? In the beginning of this war, the stated purpose was to halt the rocket attacks on Israel. Then I heard that the goal is to destroy most of the terror tunnels (at least the ones we know about).

But rockets are not enemies; I cannot remember ever having been attacked by a tunnel. The enemy is fanatical Arab Islam, which seeks to destroy Israel. You can call it Hamas, PLO, ISIS, Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood. You can call it the Islamic Movement of the North or you can call it Ahmad Tibi, the Arab MK. All of them are different arms of the same octopus. All are of the same fanatical Arab Islamic ideology, defined so well by Tibi: “We do not have rights in the land. We have rights to the land.

The only innocents in Gaza are the IDF soldiers. We are not in a police operation to capture a crime family. We are in a national war, fighting for the existence of the state of Israel.

They (our enemies) sanctify slavery and death. We (the Israelis) sanctify liberty and life. They are the savages of the desert who came to Israel looking for work from the Zionists – and we foolishly gave them parts of our homeland. We armed them with the best weaponry and turned them into a sovereign entity that democratically elected Hamas, by a vast majority, as its legitimate leadership. Therefore, as soon as Gaza’s civilians have been given reasonable time to evacuate, any delay in the momentum of battle or any move that endangers the forces of light in their just war against the forces of darkness is patently unethical.

When Israel retreated from Gaza, it turned that strip of land into the southern arm of the Arab Islamic octopus that seeks our complete destruction. It is the arm of the octopus on the threshold of Ashkelon and Tel Aviv. Anything less than decisive victory in Gaza will bring upon us a much more difficult battle against all the other arms of the octopus.

Many Israelis are asking why, despite our knowledge of their existence, we did not destroy the terror tunnels earlier. Hizbullah has an estimated 100,000 missiles aimed at us from the north. When those missiles start to fly, what will we say? After all, we knew about them. So why didn’t we destroy them?

The Gazan octopus arm is a test case, as the rest of the arms are closely watching it. If it is not clear to the northern octopus arm, the arms in Judea and Samaria, the arms of the Arabs who live in Israel and who are now rising up, ISIS’s arms, and Iran’s arms that an attack on Israel brings about the loss of territory from where the attack was staged along with complete liquidation of the local leadership, the following can be expected: a downpour of rockets from the north, nuclear weapons in Iranian hands, ISIS taking control of the Syrian missile arsenal, and a horrific war in conditions much more difficult than those we face now.

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Moshe Feiglin is the former Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. He heads the Zehut Party. He is the founder of Manhigut Yehudit and Zo Artzeinu and the author of two books: "Where There Are No Men" and "War of Dreams." Feiglin served in the IDF as an officer in Combat Engineering and is a veteran of the Lebanon War. He lives in Ginot Shomron with his family.