MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Friday criticized Israel’s response during the 2014 Gaza War to repeated Hamas terrorist attacks and rocket launches targeting its territory as ‘not proportional’ after touting his record as a staunch supporter of the Jewish state.
Scarborough made his comments on Morning Joe while the show’s panel was praising the "courage" of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt) for saying that Israel has overreacted to Hamas terrorism during Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate.
"Listen, you would have to search far and wide, at least when I was [in Congress], to find anyone more pro-Israeli than me. I had people on the House floor joke all the time, ‘Hey, if you ever need a key to the city of Tel Aviv, you got it,’" Scarborough said, describing his pro-Israel record.
"But I said it in real time, the attacks weren’t proportional," he added, referencing Israel’s military operations in the neighboring Gaza Strip in 2014 following attacks launched against the Jewish state by the Palestinain group Hamas.
Gaza is governed by Hamas, which the United States, the European Union, and other countries have designated as a terrorist organization and whose founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews worldwide.
"And the thing that upset me as a staunch supporter of Israel was that Hamas was on the run, Hamas was getting weakened by the day, and these [Israeli] attacks, which were not proportional, only played into Hamas’ hands, and strengthened them at the time, and caused a great deal of human suffering," Scarborough said.
The MSNBC host made clear that Hamas is responsible for the conflict by continuously attacking and launching rockets at Israel, which he said has a right to defend itself, before repeating that "the response was not proportional. The response was not in the best interest not only of the Palestinians, who many of them, innocents, were killed but also the Israeli people, who actually had Hamas back on their heels because Hamas doesn’t know how to run anything."
The Gaza War was triggered in the summer of 2014 when Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers using its underground network of tunnels that it had spent years creating to infiltrate Israel’s territory to carry out terror attacks and target civilians.
Israel initiated an operation to find the teenagers, causing Hamas to launch large amounts of rockets at Israel’s cities and infrastructure, although Hamas had been continuously targeting the Jewish state with thousands of rockets since it formally took control of Gaza in 2007.
Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in July 2014 to stop the rocket fire and root out the tunnel network Hamas had created.
The Gaza War gained renewed interest when Bernie Sanders in a recent interview with the New York Daily News editorial board made the claim that Israel killed more than 10,000 innocent Palestinians during the Gaza War, which has since been proven false and also caused intense backlash from Americans across the political spectrum as well as Israelis.
Sanders has since admitted that he got the figure wrong but has stood by his belief that Israel’s response to Hamas was "disproportionate."
It has been reported that Hamas intentionally hid its weapons arsenals during the conflict inside hospitals and United Nations schools to try and force Israeli soldiers to kill Palestinian civilians in order to reach Hamas’ rockets.
Israel took several measures to warn civilians if it was going to carry out operations where they were, such as dropping leaflets, making phone calls, and sending messages over television and radio telling them how to evacuate the area safely on a secure route to avoid being hurt.
Hamas told the civilians to stay where they were, which analysts believe was part of their strategy to make Israel look belligerent on the international stage since the terror group did not have the capabilities to confront Israel militarily.
"You can be pro-Israel and at the same time say, ‘You’re not helping your cause; you’re not helping those of us who have supported you our entire lives," Scarborough said.