I srael has all the proof it needs that world opinion will never consider
its right to exist important. The Obama White House, and a lot of the US News
Media, portray the Hamas-Israel conflict as something like an amateur soccer
match, with the uneven score (40-odd Israeli soldiers killed versus 1000-plus
Palestinians, mostly civilians) showing that the contest is unfair, that
Israel has “gone too far,” that they have entered the same moral zone as
Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, carrying out a “genocide.”
Of course, this is a real hot war, not a diversity training exercise, or a
self-esteem course, or any sort of the kindergarten psychotherapy that has
come to form the basis of American thought and policy. And a vicious world
opinion uses America’s own moral fecklessness the way Hamas uses women and
babies to shield its rocket installations.
Apparently world opinion also doesn’t take seriously Israel’s founding
maxim, “never again,” meaning that Israelis will not passively wait for world
opinion to save them from an enemy that plainly and clearly seeks to
annihilate them, as happened 1933-45. The Hamas organization is explicitly
dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That is not a rhetorical gimmick; it
is its declared unwavering primary goal.
The claim that Israel seeks to annihilate the Palestinians is simply a
lie. Israel seeks to stop rocket attacks and tunnel invasions, and as long as
Hamas is dedicated to those actions, they can expect a forceful Israeli
reaction. The sealed border of Gaza has been part of that reaction, to
counteract the traffic in war materials and the ready supply of suicide
bombers who, Hamas declares, “love death more than the Israelis love life.”
The Hamas war leaders are killing their own people to score public
relations points. The particulars of the Hamas arsenal embedded among the
civilian Gaza population are so firmly established that the facts are hardly
worth rehearsing. Anyway, the world doesn’t care about those facts. Israel’s
will to exist is an annoyance to it.
Of course, Gaza is just one flash point in an Islamic region much more
broadly inflamed in conflict between different Islamic brands and their
political subsidiaries. The main reason (unacknowledged) is overpopulation of
the region due to short-term wealth from oil. With oil production peaking
across North Africa and the Middle East, the world can expect at least a
generation of violent conflict over the table-scraps of Modernity. Even the
Islamic nations with scant oil reserves have been hugely affected by a
half-century of this regional oil wealth. The crack-up in the shadow of this
brief historical episode has been easy to anticipate. World opinion is not
going to stop it.
By the way, where was world opinion a month ago when ISIS was crucifying
and beheading its way out of Syria into central Iraq? World opinion took
those horrors in stride because that’s exactly the kind of behavior that
world opinion now expects from radical Islamic maniacs.
Israel is a sideshow to all that, really, but one that attracts a lot of
attention, with the memory of the Nazi “final solution” lingering on in the
atrophying moral organs of what has been loosely called “the West,” where the
last great world conflagration played out. It is ridiculous, of course, to
compare the lot of the Gaza Palestinians to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Jews locked in the Warsaw ghetto were not firing rockets out of it, nor
did they ever declare that Germany had no right to exist.
The Palestinians will find justice when they find a leadership that is
willing to grant Israel a right to exist and when they stop firing rockets
and sending tunnel commandoes into Israel to wreak havoc. If they started
with that, they could expect a conversation to begin with Israel over new
terms of coexistence. But they have to demonstrate an interest in
coexistence. There’s no evidence of that so far. Why this simple equation is
not understood by world opinion is an abiding mystery.
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