Informed Speculation

I’m trying really hard to remember that there are two sides to every conflict, but the moves of the Palestinians, Iranians, and Syrians regarding Israel are infuriating.  Mort Zuckerman:

Eleven months ago, Israel withdrew from every last inch of the Gaza Strip. They dismantled all military bases, turned over functioning greenhouses that could employ 4,000 people, expelled all 7,500 Israeli settlers at a huge financial and political cost and declared the lines that divide Israel from Gaza to be an international frontier, making Gaza the first independent Palestinian territory ever. Everyone’s expectation was that the Palestinians, so treated, would show the world what they could achieve with freedom. Alas, they have shown all too well. Not one day of peace has followed.

The pattern was set on the very day of Israel’s pullout, when Palestinian forces fired rockets into Israeli towns on the other side of the border. The final straw was the tunneling under the border with Israel, the attack on an Israeli tank and the point-blank murder of two Israeli soldiers and kidnapping of a third.

A few days later, inspired by the rhetorical threats of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah of Lebanon joined Hamas by attacking Israel from the north. They killed eight Israeli soldiers, kidnapped two others and began firing rockets into Israel.

The Palestinians have given the lie to virtually all the scenarios so hopefully envisaged by their friends. They did not construct schools, roads and hospitals; they made no effort to turn Gaza into a thriving state. They elected a radical Islamic Hamas government. They permitted the smuggling of huge quantities of weapons and terrorists while creating new bases for terror. Palestinian society has descended ever more into advanced anarchy.

At first, the Israelis tried nonlethal deterrence – diplomatic warnings, then sonic booms from jets. They failed. It was a sad demonstration of the truth in the metaphor that in the Middle East, the law of wild nature applies: An animal that is perceived as weak invites attack. The Israelis fell back on targeted assassinations against terrorist leadership, despite the unavoidable risk that nonterrorists might be killed since the terrorists – cynically and callously – hide among civilians.

Some suggest Israel should ignore the Hamas and Hezbollah rockets because they are puny and erratic. That’s easy to say from an armchair, but every one of the rockets is intended to kill or maim as many Israeli civilians as possible. The Israeli town of Sderot lost 13 people from rocket fire. That city is now living under siege, and now the Palestinians have begun firing longer-range rockets that have reached larger cities.

The last thing Israel wanted to do was get involved again in Gaza, much less in Lebanon, but Hamas and Hezbollah gave them no choice. Who would doubt the U.S. response if rockets were raining from across the Mexican border into neighboring American cities or Canadian forces simultaneously killed and kidnapped Americans on U.S. soil? And who but Israel would be shipping basic foodstuffs, medicines and chlorine containers for purifying drinking water to avoid a humanitarian crisis in Gaza?

Now we have a death toll that has probably gone well into the three figures in a mere three days, the most serious shooting war involving Israel directly in twenty years, and the prospect of a very ugly, very lethal regional war floating just offstage.  Nicely done…

The Palestinians must learn that not every grievance must be nurtured.  If the South and the North had continued to remember every last injustice of the Civil War, we might have the spectacle of Virginia firing rockets into Washington, D.C., while the U.S. Army moved into Maryland to flush out the rebels…but we did not keep our hearts hard forever.  We had the benefit, it is true, of Abraham Lincoln, and the parallels are not direct – but the world grows weary of the shell game the Islamic radicals are playing.  Yes, we still see the knee-jerk criticism of Israel in some quarters, never mind that the instigation was all Hamas and Hezbollah – but some very unlikely sources are condemning Hezbollah.

Enough is enough for this troubled area? I doubt it…but maybe we’re getting closer…