The Middle East is a tragedy wrapped in a catastrophe. This recent outbreak of hostility is small beer compared to its blood-soaked past but it has served to launch a new wave of liberal handwringing.
Almost without exception, liberals accept that the Israelis are the baddies. They are the ones with the fighter planes, helicopter gunships and tanks tearing through the ghettoes of Gaza.
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The truth is considerably different. The Gaza Strip is a territory controlled by an Islamic fundamentalist faction that has sworn to wipe Israel from the planet. It has been doing its best by launching rockets at Jewish settlements, arming and directing suicide bombers, and ending the uneasy ceasefire.
It knows it cannot beat Israel militarily but that is not its aim. Its aim is to provoke a reaction and for any Israeli incursion to kill innocent Palestinian children. This is intended to incite other Arab nations to collaborate in the cleansing force required to be rid of these dreadful Jews.
The only problem is that Hamas are not freedom fighters. In fact, they are not even sane. They are religious fanatics. Fundamentalist nutters armed with guns, rocket-propelled grenades and rockets. Their idea of a Palestinian state is one that eradicates Israel. They emerged victors after a bloody civil war with the Fatah party in 2006 killing plenty of innocent civilians themselves and now consider that Hamas is the frontline in the fight against the infidel.
Yet these are the people that Minto, the Greens, the Catholic fringe and Kiwi liberals seek to embrace.
The history of the Middle East is labyrinthine but modern Israel was legally established by the United Nations in 1947. In fact, the UN plan was to establish two separate countries a Jewish Israel and an Arab Palestine. It was not a perfect answer but then none were available. It was the best of a bad situation.
To cut a long story short: the Arabs accepted neither solution nor resolution. Israel was a Zionist abomination and a pan-Arab military force instantly massed to invade. They were badly beaten, the nascent Palestine was scrubbed, and hundreds of thousands of displaced Arabs escaped into non-statehood.
Voila the grievance of these past 60 years.
For decades, any genuine solution foundered against the Arab insistence that Israel had no right to exist. That it was the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. That impediment is now, mostly, gone.
But not for Hamas or their backers in Iran. Jews are devils end of story. Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia may accept that Jewish folk are entitled to their place in the sun but as for Hamas-controlled Palestine that’s a different matter entirely.
Nothing less than the repudiation of the Israeli state and the confiscation of all their land will suffice. And so their continuing attacks upon Israeli civilians. And equally so, the expiration of Jewish patience.
This is not to suggest that Israeli actions over these past 60 years meet any antipodean morality test either. There have been inhumane actions and outrageous abuses. But not this time: not in Gaza in 2009. Israel is responding as any nation would were it under continual military harassment.
If Fiji, for example, were to send suicide bombers and rain down rockets on Auckland and surrounds, in protest at past actions, I wonder how long before New Zealand’s patience similarly snapped? Especially if the governing Fijian regime wanted this country for themselves.
Such a scenario seems surreal. We can’t possibly comprehend a thought process so perverse. It is not within our frame of reference.
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Veteran liberal correspondent Robert Fisk has condemned the Israeli incursion as disproportionate. He draws an analogy with the IRA bombing Britain: did England carpet bomb Ireland in return, he asks? The difference being that the Irish government actively opposed the IRA’s leadership and tactics. And that the IRA wasn’t the government, using its institutions to wage a terrorist war on the UK with the ultimate aim of tipping England into the sea.
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The death of innocents in Gaza is regrettable it is sad and it is wrong. But all the more so for being orchestrated by Hamas, in pursuit of their despicable ends.
