By Moshe Phillips

“Gaza Crossing to Egypt Reopens in Step Forward for Fragile Cease-Fire,” celebrated The New York Times on Feb. 2, Groundhog Day. And just like the 1993 Bill Murray film of the same name, it feels like we are seeing the same thing occur yet again.

Only this is real life and far from funny. It’s deadly serious. Opening the Rafah border crossing while Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue to be fully armed benefits the terrorists more than anyone.

Aside from handing Hamas more to brag about to everyday Gazans, it gives the terrorists every reason to hope that they can continue to remain armed. Meanwhile, the leadership of Hamas can see the opening as a sign that they will be able to escape from the Strip.

All of this seems tragically familiar. Dennis Ross is now a pundit, but he served as an American diplomat focused on Israel in the Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Obama administrations. In 2023, Ross said that “the way to end the war in Gaza” would be for Israel to allow the Hamas leadership to leave the territory in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages. He said that he hoped the Biden administration would promote such a proposal. Thankfully, Hamas leaders have not been able to escape.

Those remarks referenced above were made when he appeared on MSNBC on Nov. 21, 2023. At the time, Ross cited a precedent: Israel’s decision in 1982, under U.S. pressure, to allow Yasser Arafat and the rest of the PLO terrorist leadership escape from Beirut.

While on MSNBC (now called MS NOW), Ross failed to tell his viewers what happened after Arafat was allowed to leave Lebanon. The PLO and Arafat did not ride off into the sunset of some quiet and peaceful retirement. He sailed to Tunisia, set up PLO terrorist headquarters there and embarked on 20 more years of deadly terrorism—shootings and stabbings, bus bombings and intifadas. Thousands of Israelis were murdered or maimed in the process.

And now the pressure is on Israel to keep the Rafah crossing open. It appears that this could be only the first part of the effort to get Israel to repeat the tragic mistake made with the PLO, this time with the much more dangerous Hamas terror group. Once again, international pressure is being exerted so that terrorist leaders are rescued, which would leave them with the capacity to orchestrate more Oct. 7-style massacres, God forbid.

Israel’s political leadership has seldom been very good at learning the lesson that far too many foreign diplomats, even Jewish ones like Ross, have bad ideas.

This is, after all, the same Dennis Ross who publicly admitted—on the op-ed page of The Washington Post—that he pressured Israel to let Hamas import concrete. Ross insisted that the concrete would be used to build houses. Israel was afraid it would be used to build terror tunnels. But under Ross’s pressure, the Israelis gave in, despite the danger.

Years later, when the damage was already done and the terrorists had built a vast tunnel network, Ross admitted that the Israelis were right to be worried.

Israeli families paid the price for that grave error. Hundreds of innocent Israelis—and other foreign nationals, including American citizens—were kidnapped and taken to those terrorist tunnels, which were built with the concrete Ross helped bring into Gaza.

Former American diplomats are quoted regularly in The New York Times and appear frequently on television shows, where they are asked softball questions and dish out unsolicited advice on how Jerusalem should conduct itself. They are treated as if the fact that they were involved in past Middle East diplomatic efforts somehow makes them experts on how to bring peace to region today.

Nobody seems to notice that far too often, their diplomacy is an utter failure. Not only did they fail to achieve anything remotely resembling peace with the Palestinian Arabs; they actually made things worse. Much worse.

They pressured Israel to make one-sided concessions that were never reciprocated. They intimidated Israel into setting free hundreds of terrorists in worthless “gestures.” They emboldened Palestinian Arab extremism by covering up the Palestinian Authority’s constant violations of the Oslo Accords. And they helped turn world public opinion against Israel by constantly blaming it as the main obstacle to peace.

And, after all that, now they have the gall to show up on op-ed pages and talk shows, posing as neutral experts, trotting out new proposals that are supposed to magically succeed where every previous proposal of theirs has failed.

Isn’t it time to learn some lessons from history? Isn’t it time to learn from the mistakes of the past? Rescuing terrorist leaders always leads to more terrorism and atrocities.

That’s what happened with Arafat in 1978, when U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his administration stopped Israel from completing “Operation Litani” against the PLO in Southern Lebanon.

That’s what happened again with Arafat in 1982, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and his administration stopped the IDF from destroying the PLO when it was cornered in Beirut.

Having the Rafah border crossing open while Hamas is armed—and when it has pledged to stay armed—must be called out for the utter mistake that it is.