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January 7, 2009
The Evolving Drama in the Middle East
The world is now witnessing the reappearing drama of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with each of the parties playing their assigned role. In the background are the contemporary Sirens, the media organs who have only one lyric in their musical composition: proportionality. The United Nations stands in high dudgeon as it sends thunderbolts at Israel that reflect its considerable bias.
Hamas is the true villain who in Orwellian fashion has become the victim. One certainly gets the impression in this drama that no one has read Othello. The vicious acts precipitated against civilian population in Israel are a direct violation of the UN rule of distinction (attacking civilian populations intentionally instead of military targets). Hamas started this war as if it is Iago and then begs for international sympathy.
Israel has the right, that every nation possesses, to defend itself. It doesn’t have to rationalize or prevaricate. All the nation has to do is destroy the threat that challenges its very existence. It should be tone deaf to the ludicrous protestations of Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, who condemned Israel’s disproportionate use of force. [There is that word again. What, after all, is proportionate force?]
One of the leading characters in this drama is the two-faced Mahmoud Abbas, the self-proclaimed moderate, who for months has been urging the Israeli government to take action against Hamas and when it does, he issues a statement condemning Israel. Presumably he still has to mollify the militants in his Fatah camp.
The other actors in the Middle East read from their scripts with monotonous repetition. Egypt is publicly upset, even though conversations in back channels suggest it is very happy with Israeli actions. Saudi Arabia is appalled, yet can barely conceal its exuberance at the prospect of defeat for one of Iran’s proxies.
Leftists of various stripes on both sides of the Atlantic play their role as useful dupes. If they had the capacity to examine conditions dispassionately, they might realize that Hamas represents a fascist and totalitarian ideology. But instead they can be found in Union Square Park or the Champs Elysee handing out literature which targets “Israeli aggression” and the “ventriloquist” United States that has sold sophisticated weaponry to the aggressors.
Remarkably, the so-called aggressor is treating wounded Palestinians in its own hospitals. Moreover, Israel has allowed a convoy of trucks into Gaza so that food and medical supplies can be delivered. And Israel has permitted electricity to be continued so that Gazan lights can stay on. What other nation at war has treated its enemies with this kind of humanitarian concern? Yet Israel gets no credit. In fact, the more it does to prevent collateral damage, the more risks it takes in mitigating unnecessary bloodshed, the more media Sirens sing of disproportionate violence.
By contrast, Hamas has placed its rocket launchers directly in population centers. It has gone into hospitals and shot those suspected of giving intelligence to the IDF. It has refused to treat wounded Gazans. And it has used the termination of the ceasefire to fire dozens of rockets into Israeli population centers in an effort to trigger a response. Yet Hamas is the victim, alas even the martyr as far as the UN and world press are concerned.
How does one explain this casuistry? For one thing Israel is seen as an ally of the United States and in the warped view of western intellectuals Israel, ipso facto, is wrong. Facts need not stand in the way of an ideological judgment.
Second, there are many in the Middle East who will never countenance the existence of the Jewish state. Despite Israel’s democracy, successful economy, rule of law and remarkable spirit, it is anathema to Arabs who live in tyranny, privation and backwardness.
And last, despite a reluctance to raise the issue of sheer bigotry and racism, it cannot be denied. Generation after generation of Arab and Persian children read in their textbooks and hear in sermons at their mosques and madrassas that Jews are the persecutors and exploiters. Even worse, they are told that Jews are the progeny of monkeys and pigs, that they are less than human.
At some point these lies, this blood libel, has had an effect. There are literally millions in the Middle East who believe it is appropriate to kill Jews and, those at the UN and media panjandrums, are complicit in these crimes as they avert their gaze to the criminal acts against Israel.
If this is Act II in this latest drama, my hope is that the IDF, will avoid the usual prevarication, will destroy every rocket site in the Gaza strip and will say that self defense has nothing to do with proportionality, but has everything to do with survival.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Herbert London is president of Hudson Institute and professor emeritus of New York University. He is the author of Decade of Denial (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2001) and America's Secular Challenge (Encounter Books).
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