Yesterday I made the comment that "it often seems as if the core of Islam and Islamist ideology, and the only unifying idea within the Muslim world, is anti-Semitism." Siggy added some useful and helpful history, with links, to the discussion when he posted *UPDATED* Calls To Genocide
Day in and day out, for decades, the Israelis and Jews are bombarded with vicious and vile hate from the Arab world. Day in and day out, Israel is promised destruction, violations of the most heinous kind and ‘rivers of blood.’ We are told that thousands of volunteers are ready to answer a religious call and bring mayhem, violence and death to the Israelis.
The Palestinians, Iranians and Saudis, all outraged at the fact that these Jews will defend themselves, have whipped themselves into a frenzy. They will not tolerate peace agreements that do not allow for the slaughter of Jews. They laughably declare the Israelis to be engaged in ‘genocide’ and Nazi behavior, even as they proudly declare their bigotry and racism and promise to ‘finish what Hitler started.’
Despite our friendly troll's insistence that there is no difference between the specific targeting of women and children for murder by terror rockets and the inadvertent killing of women and children being used as human shields by the Gazan inhabitants of Hamastan, the only reason for aiming rockets at enemy cities is to kill innocents and terrorize non-combatants. The Gazans do this and there is nary a peep of protest from the Arab world and much of the international community. What the Gazans do when they launch their rockets into Southern Israel, and increase their range with their newly imported Iranian missiles, is a war crime.
Elder of Ziyon points out that under current international law, and especially with the current prevailing reading of the Geneva Conventions, self defense against terrorist groups is nearly impossible. Please read his entire exegesis, which explains the various clauses that are problematic and note his conclusions:
It is literally impossible for a nation, hamstrung by international law, to fight against a terrorist foe that flouts that same law.
The only alternatives for Israel are:
* to ignore international law and accept the consequences.
* to be a sitting duck and let Israeli citizens die
* to adhere to the law as much as possible - a slippery slope because there will inevitably be violations in defensive actions and double-standard pressure for Israel to adhere 100%.
Elder's recommendations, while perfectly reasonable, have a possibility of being enacted of approximately zero, which leaves two, almost equally unpalatable, options for Israel.
In today's Jerusalem Post, Alex Sinclair suggests that International condemnation is good for Israel because it will leave to a cease fire with Hamas:
We therefore need to resist the temptation to begin Ehud Barak's "tangible" ground operation. It will not achieve the outcome we want, just as the ground operation in Lebanon did not achieve that outcome either. It will merely result in dozens of Israeli soldiers being killed for nothing, just as the ground operation in Lebanon did. And clearly, we can't continue with the status quo wherein we are attacked and do nothing. A response by air is the only way of responding to Hamas's attacks while keeping our losses to a minimum and reaching a ceasefire most quickly. Air attacks will lead to international condemnation, but that condemnation will also lead to the ceasefire that we - and the Gaza Palestinians - need.
In the same paper, Caroline Glick suggests that the only way to stop the attacks from Gaza is to re-occupy that blighted landscape and rule once again over its blighted people:
In the absence of proxies, Israel has two options going forward. First, it can incapacitate Hamas and second it can try to deter Hamas. To incapacitate Hamas, Israel must launch an operation aimed at cutting off Hamas's logisitical supply lines through the border with Egypt. It must fight Hamas forces on the ground with the aim of defeating them, and it must kill or capture Hamas's senior and mid-level leadership. Given that like Hizbullah, Hamas and its state-sponsors will seek to regenerate any diminished capacities by rearming and promoting new leaders, these operations must be continuous. Consequently, to incapacitate Hamas, and so secure southern Israel, Israel requires a continuous military presence in the Gaza Strip.
...
AS TO deterrence, it is unclear that it is possible to embrace deterrence as a strategy without first establishing a continuous military presence in Gaza. To succeed, deterrence must be based upon a credible threat to exact a cost for aggression that Hamas is unwilling to pay. In sending its leadership to ground while encouraging Gazans to confront IDF forces and "martyr" themselves, Hamas made clear that it views the sacrifice of its leadership as an unacceptable cost for its aggression. And yet, without forces on the ground in Gaza, the IDF lacks the intelligence necessary to conduct a wide-scale and successful assault on Hamas's leaders. So today, Israel lacks the capacity to base its operations in Gaza on a deterrence model.
The international community wants nothing more than to see Israel continue its danse macabre with the Palestinians whose entire state is based on its ability, willingness, and devotion to killing the Jews who they hate so fervently.
If the Arab world insists that the only acceptable outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is genocide, how can this ever end?
The wars could end in the destruction of Israel. This would be an ambivalently welcome development for the Arab world (since they woudl lose their raison d'etre) and an argument can be made that many in the West would find a welcome respite from the tensions with Islam. The world's media could immediately return to their comfort zone of ignoring Arab and Muslim atrocities and a great victory over "colonialist oppression" could be celebrated throughout the left leaning world.
As luck would have it, even Ehud Olmert is unlikely to accommodate such desires, and the destruction of Israel would, in fact, not slake the Arab thirst for the blood of infidels but would rather stoke it. Not an outcome to be desired for most of us.
Alternatively, a Hamas "lucky hit" could kill scores of Israelis; perhaps a school or hospital with multiple casualties would force Olmert's hand. Perhaps if the casualty toll was less than 25-100, a ground incursion into Gaza would follow and after some weeks of fighting, with hundreds dead on both sides, the international community would decide that the Israeli response had reached "disproportionate" levels and a cease fire, with an indecisive outcome fixed, would be forced upon the Israelis.
This means that even in the "lucky hit-retaliation" scenario, eventually we will arrive back at the current status quo, with Hamas conducting a war of atrocity and attrition, Israel retaliating with "measured attacks", as determined by the American Secretary of State and the UN/EU, and the war would drag on. The worst part of such an outcome is that the new status quo would include a higher level of endemic violence than the previously unacceptable status quo. In other words, if 10 rocket attacks, only reaching as far as Sderot, was insufficient provocation for a definitive Israeli response, once a new Hudna was declared and then inevitably broke down, 50 rocket attacks would be the new baseline below which Israel would be restrained from responding "disproportionately."
What could change this paradigm? It seems to me that the only paradigm shifting events that could occur would be a dramatic escalation of Hamas's (or Hezbollah's) attacks. A WMD attack on Israel would almost certainly lead to massive retaliation from Israel. That is the catastrophe (not Holocaust) that would befall the Palestinian people. Would Hamas/Iran take such a step? A more disturbing question: Once having achieved the capacity, could Hamas/Iran stop themselves from taking such a step? The fact that we can ask the question and worry about the response reveals much about the dangerous situation that is day by day worsening in the Middle East.
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