15 January 2009
Double Standard or Double-Sided Mirror?
The irony of the intractable conflict between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs is that both sides rationalize their actions by diverting blame from the real author of their dilemma. It was Western (not Arab) anti-Semitism that drove the Zionists to claim a homeland in their long-abandoned Holy Land. It was the West and the USSR (and not the Zionist movement) who used their power to impose a Jewish state on the beleaguered Palestinian people and to secure U.N. endorsement of that action.
Neither the Israeli state nor the governing Palestinian entities are willing to jeopardize the sponsorship of their respective supporters in the West by taking America or Europe to task for having created the maelstrom of conflict in the Middle East. On the contrary, Israel plays on the guilty conscience of the West to obtain sympathy even for its citizens’ sleeplessness under Hamas’s rocket attacks. And the Gazans appeal subliminally to latent anti-Semitism in the West in highlighting the horror caused by the IDF’s retaliatory bombings.
The asymmetrical conflict between Hamas and Israel pits a densely populated strip of land ruled by a nearly incompetent terrorist organization armed with rudimentary weapons against an argumentative and life-treasuring society with a highly sophisticated military. The two of them are locked into a bubble that the rest of the world would rather see float up and away. In answer to Rabbi Marvin Hier’s OpEd in the January 8, 2009, Wall Street Journal, Israel does indeed not enjoy the same right to self-defense as other countries when it is really defending the freedom of the West to expiate a great fault by displacing the innocent contemporaneous inhabitants of a historic piece of land.
Nor do Hamas or other Palestinian groups have the right to terrorize the Israelis, or anyone else for that matter, in retaliation for losing their territory. They and their sponsors in the Arab world certainly have the economic leverage to attempt to pressure the West to force an accommodation on Israel. The risk of a military confrontation with the West, however, may be more than they are willing to take. So, in the end, an interminable stand-off is the best situation that any state in the region can hope to achieve.
Non-state actors, like Al Qaeda, may have other outcomes in mind. Opposition to their anarchical solution to the Middle East dilemma may ultimately lead to reconciliation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as the two sides realize their common interest in collaborating to establish peace and order.
The irony of the intractable conflict between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs is that both sides rationalize their actions by diverting blame from the real author of their dilemma. It was Western (not Arab) anti-Semitism that drove the Zionists to claim a homeland in their long-abandoned Holy Land. It was the West and the USSR (and not the Zionist movement) who used their power to impose a Jewish state on the beleaguered Palestinian people and to secure U.N. endorsement of that action.
Neither the Israeli state nor the governing Palestinian entities are willing to jeopardize the sponsorship of their respective supporters in the West by taking America or Europe to task for having created the maelstrom of conflict in the Middle East. On the contrary, Israel plays on the guilty conscience of the West to obtain sympathy even for its citizens’ sleeplessness under Hamas’s rocket attacks. And the Gazans appeal subliminally to latent anti-Semitism in the West in highlighting the horror caused by the IDF’s retaliatory bombings.
The asymmetrical conflict between Hamas and Israel pits a densely populated strip of land ruled by a nearly incompetent terrorist organization armed with rudimentary weapons against an argumentative and life-treasuring society with a highly sophisticated military. The two of them are locked into a bubble that the rest of the world would rather see float up and away. In answer to Rabbi Marvin Hier’s OpEd in the January 8, 2009, Wall Street Journal, Israel does indeed not enjoy the same right to self-defense as other countries when it is really defending the freedom of the West to expiate a great fault by displacing the innocent contemporaneous inhabitants of a historic piece of land.
Nor do Hamas or other Palestinian groups have the right to terrorize the Israelis, or anyone else for that matter, in retaliation for losing their territory. They and their sponsors in the Arab world certainly have the economic leverage to attempt to pressure the West to force an accommodation on Israel. The risk of a military confrontation with the West, however, may be more than they are willing to take. So, in the end, an interminable stand-off is the best situation that any state in the region can hope to achieve.
Non-state actors, like Al Qaeda, may have other outcomes in mind. Opposition to their anarchical solution to the Middle East dilemma may ultimately lead to reconciliation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as the two sides realize their common interest in collaborating to establish peace and order.
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