Frank's Musings

Israel is faced with the need to eradicate Hamas, not only as the government of Gaza, but as an organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction.  The Palestinian people and world Jewry both have a justifiable claim on the territory occupied by the state of Israel—it is the homeland of the Arabs that have lived there since before the creation of Islam, and it is the traditional and internationally recognized seat of the Jewish state, which the Jewish people have sought to reclaim in order to separate themselves from discrimination in virtually every other country ever since the destruction of the Temple of David in Jerusalem.

The compromise reached by the world community in 1948 recognizing the formation of Israel under exclusive Jewish religious rule, of course, created a genuine dilemma.  Both Israelis and Arab Palestinians found themselves with irreconcilable justifications for statehood.  The de facto sovereign power over the entire region, referred to as Israel and the West Bank, of course, is in actual control.  The claim of the Palestinian Arabs is only pusillanimously supported by some in the United Nations, including Russia, and only in words by the Arab League.   These competing claims on the land occupied by the Israeli state, therefore, have engendered resort to terrorist tactics by non-state organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and others.  It has also incentivized Israel to use indiscriminate (and some say inhumane) military means of restitution for violent attacks on its citizens.

The inevitable outcome of the current balance of power in the conflict will be the tamping down of organized violent attacks on Israeli individuals together with the forceful imposition of a non-violent status of coexistence of Jews and Islamic Arabs in this region, regardless of the political (and financial) strength of Israel’s sympathizers.  As Barack Obama recently stated, “We are all complicit” in the creation of the irresolvable conflict between the Jews and the Muslim Arabs in the region.  With no institutional process for deflating violent conflict, Western countries and the United Nations have no choice but to abandon their commitment to self-determination and force the occupants of the Israeli/Palestinian region peacefully to divvy up the territory between the two sides, and to offer compensatory funds to equalize the expenses of displaced Jewish as well as Arab Palestinian residents.