Once again, the Israel Defense Forces have been forced to enter the Gaza Strip to fight for the safety of our citizens. We understand the risks of the current ground operation. Despite the fact that it cost me my position as deputy defense minister, I was willing to pay this personal price and vocally advocate for this operation. It was clear to me that the alternative of leaving Hamas’s rocket operation and terror tunnels intact would have been disastrous for the safety and security of all Israelis.

In addition to our fight with Hamas, it is high time to reassess our relationship with the Palestinian Authority (PA). While we have no desire to control the daily lives of the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria — the historical name for the West Bank — the fact is that we can no longer continue to withdraw our security forces and rely on the PA to ensure the safety of Israelis. Numerous events throughout our region, from Israel to Iraq, have proven time and again that when Western forces withdraw and rely on local despots, militias, or even puppet regimes, the forces of Islamic fanaticism quickly fill the void — and put us all at risk.

Hamas is not a lone organization acting in a vacuum. It is a fellow traveler with extreme forces throughout the Middle East working to overthrow Western-allied governments and replace them with an Islamic caliphate operating under sharia law. Over the past few years, Western diplomats’ high hopes for the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring proved short-lived. Leaders who on the surface appeared Western-oriented turned out to be either frontmen for Islamic extremists or weak leaders who could not hold onto power in this harsh region.

The current situation in Iraq is the latest example of this phenomenon. Our American friends meant well: They defeated an evil dictator with a history of horrid human rights abuses, a proven record of using weapons of mass destruction, and a record of threatening regional stability. In the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the United States invested billions of dollars in rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure and paid an unfathomably high price in terms of American soldiers killed and wounded while attempting to rid the country of Islamist terrorists.

More here.