Frank's Musings

Right-wing Jews in Israel have been provocatively settling on land in reservations to which desperate Palestinian families have been confined under rules invented with international consent to separate equally emotional claimants to the same disputed Middle Eastern lands.  As in Afghanistan, wealthy nations in the West are being tempted to throw up their hands and abandon the antagonists to resolve their dispute alone, except for the political strength of sympathizers with Israel’s existence and the economic leverage that has been attributed to the Palestinians because of their assumed solidarity with oil-rich fellow Arab states.

However, the political balance has begun to change. Climate change has suddenly become a more urgent concern because of the excessive global temperature increase in 2023. There have been some encouraging advances in the expanded use of non-CO2-producing sources of energy, like solar, wind, geothermal, thermonuclear, hydroelectric, and other technologies. This development has, for example, seemed to impress on major oil and gas producers, including both exporting nations and commercial companies, that their future wealth depends on devoting their stores of capital to alternate enterprises, as well as to shifting their energy-producing activities to carbon-neutral, if not absorptive, methods.  The technological and entrepreneurial prominence of Israel has led oil-rich Arab countries to give serious consideration to promoting the commercial alliance of their sovereign wealth with the innovative power of Israel by perforating political barriers to collaboration between citizens and institutions from the two sides.

An important consequence of these trends is the weakening of the perceived international political power of the Palestinians to influence the outcome of their dispute with the Jewish state over the disposition of the Holy Land. Moreover, a terrorist organization like Hamas is losing a major component of its strength, i.e., its image as the underdog fighting oppression by Israel.  It is not only losing its appearance of victimhood in Western eyes, but also its brotherly appeal to other Arab states. Commercial priorities are shoving sympathy and ethnic solidarity aside.

This recasts Israel’s military campaign against Hamas as a police action rather than a war.  Hezbollah’s choice not to join Hamas’s attack on Jewish residents of Israel is not so much a smart move as a display of their greater discipline. The Palestinians in Gaza, and throughout their incipient state, should collaborate with Israel to rid their lands of the scourge of Hamas terrorism. The only point of Hamas’s savage 10/7 attack was to prevent a reasonable resolution of the dilemma of competing claims on the Holy Land. Continued Hamas activity will only endanger the peaceful lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike.