I srael’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summed it up the other day
when he said, “We use our rockets to protect our women and children; they
[Hamas] use their women and children to protect their rockets.”
Some time ago, the Left adopted the Palestinians as their pet oppressed
minority group so there is nothing that Israel might do that will be okay
with them, except to commit suicide, that is, cease to exist — which is the
stated policy of Hamas. Every time Israel refuses the suggestion that it
cease to exist, the Left becomes inflamed. They cannot imagine why Israel
would prefer to fight for its existence than to roll over and die.
The Palestinian leadership doesn’t really want to talk about any
resolution to the enduring crisis in which Israel is granted the right to
exist. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for negotiation, and so they
have literally painted themselves into a geographical corner of the region
called the Gaza Strip where one of their other policies is to grow the
Palestinian population in the hopes of eventually wiping Israel off the map
by sheer demographic pressure. The political Right Wing of Israel is using
exactly the same tactic in the contested West Bank. All of that is tragic, of
course, because when the oil age comes to an end the entire region of the
southern Levant will probably support one-twentieth of the population of all
ethnic groups.
The New York Times reported that street protests against Israel
had broken out in London and Paris, giving the impression that some broad
national sentiment was being expressed when, in fact, the protesters were
from the large Muslim communities that these nations had foolishly invited to
immigrate there. Has anyone in the West still failed to notice the pugnacity
of Islam in our time? Islam does not want to co-exist with the West anymore
than the Palestinians want to grant Israel the right to exist.
Luckily for the West, there is enough animosity between the Islamic
factions to distract Islam from its mission to defeat all the great-and-small
Satans cluttering up their world. All this is happening as that world lurches
into the twilight of the oil age, which until lately had given so much
financial leverage to Islam. Really, the entire Middle East, including
Israel, has overpopulated itself so severely that the only plausible outcome
is the desperate fight over what’s left. A hundred and fifty years ago a mere
half million people inhabited the place that is now Israel, and more than 90
percent of them were Arabic. Then came the great Industrial explosion of
activity, migrations, and soaring birth rates thanks to fossil fuels. When
that phase of history concludes, the population there will go down
accordingly.
Over millennia, Israel or Palestine or the Levant (take your pick) has
been under the dominion of rotating empires: Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the
Egyptian Mameluks, the Turks, Great Britain. Who owns what has been an
expression of a particular slice of time, and the current time is no different.
As a geographical crossroads of trade and cultures, the region is one of the
most fought-over places in the world and may continue to be as long as human
beings are around. Hamas and the Palestinians in effect declared war on
Israel by lobbing rockets out of Gaza and now Israel is answering. The
Palestinians have got the war they asked for and they are trying to
manipulate world opinion by mingling their war machine in the heart of their
population center of Gaza City. Their choice.
The other hot zone in the world right now, Ukraine, got hotter the past
week when somebody or some faction shot down a commercial Malaysian airliner.
The question that no news organ has so far raised: why are any
commercial airlines routing their planes over a war zone? Especially a war
zone where other airplanes have been shot down recently. Just how dumb has
the human race become?
And as sad as this incident may be, what business is it of the USA to get
involved over a downed flight of a foreign airline that originated in the
Netherlands and was carrying passengers overwhelmingly of Dutch nationality?
Our presumption to involve ourselves in this is flat-out insane. It’s the
kind of behavior that leads to world wars.
