Commentary Though it is being widely attacked as an unjustified use of force, the announced Israeli intention to take control of Gaza and eliminate Hamas as a terrorist organization is eminently justified by Hamas’s outrages against Israel. It is also the only possible way of bringing peace to the Arabs and the Jews of the area. There is perhaps some symmetry in the fact that these biblical lands provide—even in the 21st Christian century, and more than 5,000 years after the identifiable origins of the Jewish people—a place of severe contention and of almost impenetrable hypocritical posturing by a great many nations of the world. The neighbouring Arab powers make the usual formulaic statements of sympathy for the Palestinians, but because the Palestinian extremists are affiliated with terrorist insurgent organizations in their own countries, they will not receive any Palestinian refugees.
The Arab powers generally regard the so-called Palestinians (Arabs in the old League of Nations Palestine Mandate that did not become citizens of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, or Israel), as materialist sharpers, as they think of the Jews and the Christian Lebanese. Led by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, they kept the Palestinians in desperate detention camps that were nurseries for terrorism, to maintain them as a goad and provocation against the Jewish state and to distract the Arab masses from the misgovernment most of them were inflicting upon their peoples. Today, the leading Arab countries are silently encouraging Israel to destroy Hamas but refusing to run the risk of accepting one Hamas terrorist voluntarily into their countries. Hamas was set up as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood that has been conducting an insurgency against the British and then the government of Egypt since the Brotherhood was founded in the 1920s. This did not prevent the Egyptian government from facilitating the resupply of Hamas through the tunnels from Egypt into Gaza for decades. With the events of the last two years, the political circumstances of the area have changed drastically. The paymaster of the terrorists, Iran, has been profoundly humiliated and militarily defeated. It is under heavy boycott, and its trillion-dollar investment in becoming a nuclear military power has been destroyed. The United States has made it clear that it will continue to destroy that program at intervals if necessary. Iran has practically no navy or air force, and its missile-launching ability has been severely degraded. Its army is essentially the agency that, by riveting itself with the official police on the backs of the entire population, has prevented the oppressed Iranian public from evicting the much-hated and failed Islamic regime of the country. Iran does not have the means to go on financing Hamas and Hezbollah. Even though approximately 80 percent of the Hamas-trained terrorists have now been killed, Hamas has made it clear that it intends to continue to govern Gaza, which it has done since it narrowly emerged as the largest party in the election that George W. Bush demanded in 2006, as did Hezbollah in the contemporary Lebanese election that Bush also demanded. The U.S. president was inspired by the under-researched belief that democratic elections would never produce the elevation of undemocratic parties, and therefore all the world’s trouble spots needed was elections to ensure that there would be no more wars. |
Hamas’s assumption of the government of Gaza and the generous supplies provided by Iran enabled it to engage in continuous terrorist harassment of Israel. Extensive research by a commission of the British House of Lords has revealed that the Hamas high command believed that their invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, would provoke a general Arab revolt within Israel and that Hamas would actually be able to threaten Jerusalem itself, and shake the Israeli state to its foundations. The ostensible goal was undoubtedly to prevent the extension of the Abraham Accords to Israel and Saudi Arabia, but once set on this course, the ambitions for the invasion, massacre, and hostage-taking were substantially amplified. Since no Arab power will knowingly accept any possible Hamas adherents, and Hamas will never acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and premeditatedly went to war with Israel, the only hope for achieving a durable peace for the Arabs and the Jews is for the state of Israel to physically exterminate the terrorist apparatus of Hamas. This has always been the only acceptable end to this war and the only one that offered anything other than a continuation of frequent barbarous outrages by Hamas, with most of the world taking the dishonest position that “Israel has a right to defend itself,” meaning to expel the invaders but not take the steps necessary to ensure that such acts of war are not committed again.
Israel is pursuing the justified policy and the only one capable of producing a lasting resolution, but in order to be successful, it will have to alter its traditional vulnerability to being held for ransom by hostage-takers. The honour of the Jewish state surpasses the life of any individual, and if Israel can be blackmailed with hostages, there will never be peace. Given how many of the hostages Hamas has already murdered, and how they use the people as shields and steal their food to sustain their authority, the military option is the likeliest method of retrieving the remaining hostages. The announcement by the French, British, and Canadian governments of their intention to recognize a Palestinian faction as the legitimate government of the sovereign Palestinian state is especially irritating. They have selected the 89-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, who has had one of the longest and most eventful terrorist careers in the region and is now the head of the Palestinian Authority, which is despised by most Palestinians as corrupt and ineffectual. Abbas promised a great many reforms and unprecedented democratizing events to be worthy of this honour. After France got clear of the Algerian war, the French have generally felt that it is their destiny to be the champion of the Arabs among the Western powers. This action encourages Hamas. The conduct of the British is more reprehensible. In the dark days of World War I, the foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, made his famous declaration promising a homeland for the Jews in Palestine without compromising the rights of non-Jews or of the Jews in other parts of the world. It was just mealy-mouthed casuistry to boost support for the Allied cause in the United States. In the light of Britain’s sabotaging of the efforts of hundreds of thousands of victims of anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s to emigrate to Palestine, the ambition to be helpful to Jews not in the Middle East was a bit rich, and the UK is one of the last countries Canada should be emulating in its policy on Israel. Israel will finish the war with whatever American diplomatic support is required, and then there will be a chance to create a Palestinian state. |