The next time you hear about an Israeli blockade of Gaza, consider 9/11.
9/11 changed our world forever.
An analogous event changed Israel and the fate of Palestinians in Gaza forever.
By any statistical or sociological measure, 9/11 should not have changed the way the entire world looks at security. The attack on the Twin Towers was a single event. Perhaps there were many other wannabes, but it never happened before. No one ever commandeered airplanes to attack buildings. No one ever engaged in a suicide hijacking. Many aspects of 9/11 were unique.
Yet, we could not treat them as a one off. One single event changed, and had to change, the way the entire world looked at security. The subsequent billions of dollars spent on security and millions (or perhaps billions) of wasted hours in security lines, were the inevitable consequence of a single event.
The same is true at the Gaza border. A single event made tough Israeli security measures at the border inevitable. All it took was a single instance of the kind of event that, alas, repeated itself again last May. It was reported just last week.
Fadi Abu al-Sabah, 35, was arrested in May in the Arab city of Taibeh, in central Israel. Why? He breached Israeli security in an incident similar to earlier ones that changed, and had to change, Israeli security forever.
Al-Sabah was recruited into the Hamas military wing in July, 2018 to establish a lab for the production of explosives to be used in terrorist attacks designed to kill Israelis. Now, get this:
He was trained to manufacture the explosives and how to successfully pass the questioning at the Erez Crossing in order to enter Israel. Prior to entering Israel in May, Sabah contacted a doctor in Gaza and paid her to prepare false documents showing that he could not receive proper medical treatment in the Gaza Strip. Hamas was interested in Sabah, who has a prosthetic limb, because he was in the process of applying for a humanitarian permit to receive medical treatment in the West Bank.
Instead, he used a humanitarian, medical ruse as a cover for the most inhumane action: mass murder.
Al-Sabah ruined it for all of the residents of Gaza, the vast majority of whom do not attempt to carry out terrorist attacks in Israel, just like the 9/11 terrorists ruined it for countless billions of citizens around the world who must now be subjected to inconvenient security measures.
It only takes one.
Everybody at a border has to be screened.
This is what Israel does at its Gaza border.
This is the reason: the attempt to cross the border for terrorist purposes while disguised as seeking humanitarian aid.
Just as countries around the world learned from 9/11 that travel can no longer be a straightforward matter, so Israel learned the same thing about its border with Gaza. And for the same reason: the evil intent of a single person. Once “medical treatment”becomes a guise for planned murders, Israel has no choice. The next time you hear about an Israeli blockade of Gaza, this is the reason.
Copyright © 2019 by the Intermountain Jewish News
