Despite the announcement of a cease fire, an indisputable outcome of our recent presidential election is that a slim majority of Americans have effectively told Israel, “You’re on your own.” The Obama voters issued knowingly or unknowingly a repudiation of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who made the unusual decision to refrain from neutrality and endorse Romney. “Bibi” must have sensed that he had nothing to lose, that his country would receive no direct military intervention from a re elected Obama Administration despite the fact that Israel is, once again, facing existential threats from untold numbers of Islamic brigades bristling for war.
It’s been observed that the Islamic world could not produce the cell phones with which their people plot to kill us. Similarly, the very existence of a Hamas-led Gaza is just one more example of why it is pure folly for the US or any other consortium of Western powers to attempt to broker peace treaties with ruthless Islamists who do not even accept Israel’s right to exist.
In 2005, Israel ceded Gaza to its avowed enemies, the Palestinians, and forcibly extricated its own Jewish settlers who had risked life and limb to live there and who had magically made the desert bloom. Many of the Gazan Jews had had mastered both desalinization and hot house technologies and, in a few short years, had produced bountiful food crops on a once barren strip of land that desert nomads who had crossed the region for millennia would have never imagined possible in the wildest dreams.
I remember seeing, very briefly, the tragic coverage of Israeli soldiers taking their own outraged, sobbing citizens out of their Gazan homes. In what is a perfect metaphor for the suicidal pathologies that infect the Muslim world, we learned that the Gazans then stormed the abandoned Jewish settlements and burnt down the homes and high-tech hot house farms.
At that time, many western pundits on both the left and right including Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal argued that Israel was smart to withdraw from Gaza because it would test an idea—could Israel buy peace thought giving away some its land. To Stephens’s credit, he now admits he was wrong.
“In 2004, the last full year in which Israel had a security presence in Gaza, Gazans fired 281 missiles into Israel. By 2006, that figure had risen to 1,777.”
Moreover ‘the Strip” had become a terrorist haven, home to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Ansar al-Sunna an avowed al Qaeda brigade.
From 2009 to the present Gaza has fired over 8,000 missiles into Southern Israel. To put this in perspective, this is twice the number fired by Germany during the London blitz. Its withdrawal from Gaza yielded much less security for Israel and a regime that is more radical and more emboldened than ever before. As Stephens puts it, “As strategic failures go, it was nearly perfect.”
So my readers will forgive me if I am not optimistic that this temporary cessation of violence means anything.
Perhaps Netanyahu is postponing a ground war for now, turning his eyes east, and contemplating an even more strategic mission, his attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. And while he does so, he must have watched the debacle in Benghazi and realized how little support he can count on from the Obama Administration. He must realize that if the Obama team cannot figure out how to act decisively to save four Americans calling for help in a terror attack, what will it do support the out-of-favor nation of Israel in its gravest hour of need?
Well, there are still the basics to contend with ~
Israel, more than any other country in the world, should know better than to create a diaspora for another country. Especially out of feelings of entitlement, hatred, superiority, and bias. Does any of this sound familiar?