NO HOLDS BARRED: Rwandan troops are the solution for Gaza
Both Israel and Rwanda are nations that have experienced unimaginable genocides. Both have unique security situations.
By SHMULEY BOTEACHA RWANDAN soldier runs with his unit during a training mission.(photo credit: REUTERS)
What to do about Gaza and Hamas? How can Israel avoid a war of attrition with Hamas endlessly firing rockets and Israel being forced to respond? Many Israelis want the Jewish state to reoccupy Gaza. The truth is that Israel should have never dismantled the Jewish communities there in the first place. My children were some of the last to plant trees in Gush Katif on Tu Bishvat, Jewish Arbor Day, in 2005. The Jewish communities in Gaza were a civilizing influence on a strip of land that would later succumb to the barbarism and tyranny of Hamas. I remember eating the luscious green peppers and apples that Jewish settlers grew right out of the sand dunes in Gaza green houses. What a change from the infiltration tunnels and murderous rockets which are the only exports of Gaza today.But that ship has sailed. A military occupation without the support of local Jewish settlements will be challenging.Then there is the idea of the Palestinian Authority taking control.Forget it.Mahmoud Abbas has not set foot in the Gaza Strip for years, and it’s because he knows he’d be killed as fast as a Jew would be.He’s hated in Gaza and has zero influence. Hamas is his mortal enemy.As for the UN, Israel isn’t going to trust the pathetic, impotent, ineffective peacekeepers of a hostile international body which spends most of its time condemning the Jewish state.But there is one possibility: Rwanda. Israel has a special relationship with Rwanda, as I have written on many occasions. Both Israel and Rwanda are nations that have experienced unimaginable genocides. Both have unique security situations.To prevent another genocide, both take aggressive action against enemies amassed on their borders, and both come under constant criticism from a do-nothing UN that has little sympathy for nations which have sworn to never again allow the mass slaughter of their citizens.Israel’s genocidal enemies are Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran, the first two of which are pressed right up on its border. Rwanda’s Hamas is the FDLR, comprised of those who perpetrated the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi, and their ideological and biological descendants.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame, like Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, has been clear that he will not tolerate the terrorist incursions of the FDLR. He has taken aggressive action to fight it, and has gone so far as to push to remove Congolese governments who grant sanctuary and safe harbor to the genocidaires. For all this he has come under massive UN criticism.He does not much care. He will quite simply never allow another genocide.Israel too, under successive prime ministers, has made it clear it will not allow genocidal terror regimes to infiltrate its borders with fighters, rockets, or tunnels. And we see how much condemnation has come Israel’s way.Which is why one of the only countries in the world that understands Israel and its security requirements is Rwanda. And it just so happens that Rwanda is one of the world’s largest contributors to UN peacekeeping missions.Rwanda ranks sixth in the world in terms of contributing troops and police to the UN’s peacekeeping forces. As of this writing, Rwanda fields more than 4,000 troops, over 400 police, and 13 military observers to countries as varied as Darfur, South Sudan, Haiti, Liberia, Abyei and Guinea-Bissau.And Rwanda just added another 850 troops to the UN mission in Central African Republic due to the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground there.With one of the strongest armies in all of Africa, Rwanda has the troops necessary to implement a muscular mission in Gaza that goes beyond ineffectual peacekeeping and pathetic bystanding and actually attempt to implement a demilitarization of Hamas.What President Kagame remembers more than anyone else is the abandonment of his people by UN peacekeepers under Kofi Annan in 1994. Even as the UN commander in Kigali General Romeo Dallaire of Canada pleaded with Annan for permission to disarm the Hutu Interahamwe militia, Annan ordered him not to intervene, thus condemning nearly one million people to being hacked to death with machetes. The UN’s response to Annan’s criminal dereliction of duty was to promote him to secretary general.Kagame has never forgotten this.When I was invited by the president to speak at the 20th anniversary of the genocide this past April at Amohoro National Stadium, I watched as hundreds of performers reenacted the abandonment of Rwanda’s Tutsi by the United Nations, right in front of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The president did not care if he offended the sensibilities of an ineffectual international body that dares to condemn him even as they continue to allow Arab children in Syria to be gassed, Yazidis and Americans to be beheaded in Iraq, and Hamas to fire rockets from UN schools in Gaza.It just might be that Israel would trust President Kagame with a UN peacekeeping force in the way that it would not, and should not, trust any other UN peacekeeping nation, with the exception of the US, which is not going to send troops.Now why would President Kagame want to enter the quagmire of Gaza? Firstly, Rwanda is Israel’s ally in every way. The president has a genuine attachment and affection for the Jewish state and may wish to help.Second, Rwandan troops in Gaza forcibly implementing the destruction of Hamas rockets and tunnels would help the world understand Rwanda’s similar challenge and the need to demilitarize the FDLR terrorists. Rwanda providing a solution to Hamas would stymie much of the unfair international criticism that Rwanda receives for battling the FDLR.Third, this tough task would help provide on-the-job training to Rwanda’s already formidable army in the tough task of demilitarizing a genocidal terrorist entity.And if Hamas resists, and begins attacking Rwandan troops, then the whole world will finally see the truth: Hamas are hardcore killers with an unquenchable thirst for blood. They break every agreement they enter into. They have no “occupation” issue with Israel, which completely evacuated Gaza in 2005.Rather, they are an organization that glorifies death, both of Israelis and Palestinian children whom they offer up as human sacrifices to feed their death-cult blood lust.And they must be stopped.The author, “America’s rabbi” whom The Washington Post calls “the most famous rabbi in America,” is the founder of This World: The Values Network, the world’s leading organization promoting universal Jewish values in politics, culture and the media. The international best-selling author of 30 books, he has recently published Kosher Lust: Love is Not the Answer. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.
