Tuesday, July 11, 2006
The straw that broke the camel's back
Israel's Gaza incursion is being portrayed by the usual suspects in the media as a grotesque overreaction to the kidnapping of a single soldier. Much graver issues are actually involved. Some of the key elements are touched on in an item by Richard Baehr published today.
In spite of pulling out all settlers and troops from Gaza nigh a year ago, says Baehr, Israel's relationship with the Palestinians has - significantly - deteriorated.
Anger and mendacity overwhelmed potential opportunities for good, as in the following case:
Bill and Melinda Gates provided the money to purchase the Israeli greenhouses in Gaza to turn them over to the Palestinians upon the Israelis' disengagement ... so that an enormously productive agricultural business could form the basis of a new Palestinian national economy ... Turn over the greenhouses, is exactly what the Palestinians did, in the first days after the Israelis left, destroying or removing virtually every usable piece of machinery and equipment, either for scrap, or as a futile angry gesture against the former Israeli occupation.
Meanwhile, at the southern end of Gaza:
The Egyptians promised to guard the Rafah crossing ... to prevent smuggling of weapons into Gaza and presumably also to prevent terrorists and their weapons from coming into Sinai from Gaza and continuing the Al Qaeda attacks that have ... damaged the Egyptian tourist economy.
But this effort has also been a disaster. More weapons have come into Gaza from Egypt in 11 months than in the previous 38 years under Israeli occupation. These weapons include strellas that can be fired to bring down jets flying into or out of Ben Gurion Airport, if smuggled into the West Bank.
Since the Israeli withdrawal the Palestinians have fired well over 500 rockets at Israeli towns - that is, at towns in Israel proper, not settler towns in the territories. Says Baehr:
" The rockets now have improved accuracy and longer range, and various terror groups in Gaza are trumpeting that they now have chemical weapons to use against Israel as well."
These trumpeteers have the strong backing, of course, of a Hamas-dominated parliament elected in a landslide victory following the Gaza withdrawal. The Hamas electoral victory, says Baehr,
was not merely a protest against Fatah and Arafat's decades of thievery and corruption, grotesque as this has been ... There were real Palestinian reformers on the ballot, who won but 2 seats out of 132 in the Palestinian parliament, while Hamas won 72. Palestinians knew who they were electing with Hamas and what their agenda was concerning Israel. A vote for Hamas was not a vote for good government and clean streets.
The writer concludes that the present imbroglio is likely to compound and worsen as time marches forward:
Some of the older Palestinians, tired after 50 years of fighting with nothing to show for it, have seemed more willing to compromise, and the new much more numerous younger generation of Palestinians are implacable Israel haters. With a birth rate of 6 children per family in the West Bank, and almost 8 in Gaza, and a median Palestinian age of 15 or 16, this next generation is very large. It was steeped in vicious anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda during the recent intifada, and under the wing of Hamas in much of Gaza and parts of the West Bank, will likely be ready for jihad and war against Israel for as long as their leaders call for it.
What does a country do in the face of such circumstances - continually and indefinitely turn the other cheek? Perhaps, if the country is big and big-hearted enough to do so, but one has to keep in mind that in Israel's case there is not a tremendous amount of cheek left to turn:
More than 60% of Israel's Jews live in a thin strip of land by the coastal plain, less than 75 miles north to south and 10 miles wide, smaller in size than ... Rhode Island.
Further, despite the scattered applause of (some) libertarian elites in the western world when Israel has withdrawn from various territories, there is the reality that the young people of Gaza, Lebanon and many other places interpret such withdrawals as signs of weakness and encouragement to advance and further radicalise a genocidal jihad.
We have seen that Iran-backed Hezbollah swallowed control of southern Lebanon after Israel withdrew from there.
Baehr says 15,000 missiles now point Israel's way from there, with the missile-keepers champing at the bit to let them fly. What happens when their Iranian masters and allies get a nuclear bomb?
What does one do in such circumstances?
There seem to be no good or easy answers, and a strong incursion, led by the new Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - to deal front and centre with an ugly and mortal reality - may be the very best option available.
