Critics have never cared about rocket attacks,
terrorism or even about the Palestinians. The argument remains about whether
one Jewish state on the planet is one too many.
If a ceasefire holds, the latest fighting between
Israel and Palestinian terrorists in Gaza won’t have changed much in a conflict
that’s already lasted a century. That’s something that should both discourage
friends of Israel and hopefully focus them on the only issue that really
matters when it comes to the ongoing debate about the struggle with the
Palestinians. That would be Israel’s right to exist, rather than on futile
arguments about security or the best way to achieve peace with people who don’t
want to make peace.
The Israel Defense Forces may have achieved its
stated objectives in “Operation Breaking Dawn.” Palestinian Islamic Jihad
(PIJ), the Iranian-backed terror group, has suffered losses, including the
foiling of what was described as a planned major cross-border terror plot, as
well as some of its personnel and infrastructure in Gaza. This was accomplished
without causing mass civilian casualties—the worst such instance is almost certainly the result of a rocket aimed at Israel that fell short and hit their own
people while the far stronger
forces of its Hamas rivals, who rule Gaza, stayed out of it.
Still, more than 1,100 rockets and other projectiles
were fired indiscriminately into Israel from Gaza by PIJ in the past few days.
An even higher percentage of them were shot down by the Iron Dome missile-defense
system than in past exchanges with Gaza.
As with several other such bouts of fighting in and
around Gaza over the last 14 years, it has ended with Israel offering the
Palestinian terror groups “quiet for quiet.” It is, as almost all Israelis
know, a problem without a solution.
When former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
withdrew every soldier, settler and settlement from Gaza in 2005, the stated
assumption was that it was giving Palestinians a chance to create a laboratory
for coexistence and that the experiment could be easily reversed if things went
wrong. When Hamas seized control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a
bloody 2007 coup, that assumption was shown to be a colossal blunder.
Every Israeli attempt to silence rocket fire from the
coastal enclave or to halt cross-border terrorism—no matter how careful to
avoid civilian casualties or how justified it might be—is treated as a war
crime by the international “human-rights” community.
The Gaza withdrawal stands as a warning to the
Israeli public of the folly of the “land for peace” formula. Except for a dramatic
change in the political culture of the Palestinians, which still binds their
leaders to an intransigent refusal to make peace or recognize the legitimacy of
a Jewish state no matter where its borders might be drawn, that won’t change.
Repeating Sharon’s Gaza experiment in the far more strategic regions of Judea
and Samaria (aka the “West Bank”) or Jerusalem is viewed by the overwhelming
majority of Israelis as insane.
None of this matters to those who bash Israel. The do
gooders insist that it should still “take risks” for peace or keep trying to
achieve a two-state solution that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected.
The U.N. Humans Rights Council will continue its
kangaroo court investigation of the last conflict with Gaza that took place
last May, and since it is an open-ended project, it will likely declare Israeli
actions recently undertaken to top PIJ terrorism to be equally criminal.
Arguments about the anti-Semitic BDS movement,
efforts to restrict U.S. military aid to Israel, or the unreasonable and
criminal behavior of Hamas, PIJ or their “moderate” Fatah rivals running the
West Bank who reward terrorists and their families with pensions aren’t
affected by the facts about the conflict.
If you accept the false Palestinian narrative about
Israel being born in sin as an expression of Western imperialism and
colonialism, as those who buy into intersectionality and critical race theory
do, then it doesn’t matter what the Israelis or their terrorist opponents
actually do.
Talking about the need to ensure Israeli security or
the tremendous care that the IDF takes to avoid civilian casualties, which is
almost certainly unmatched by any army in the world, seem like important
debating points in the discussion about the conflict. The same is true when you
remind people about the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. But none of that matters
to those who think ill of the Jewish state.
All of this means that while defenders of Israel
should always debunk the lies of their opponents, they must also understand
that their purpose should be to remind people that Israel has a right to exist
and that the goal of its enemies is to deny that right.
So, rather than being bogged down in security
arguments or bragging about the sacrifices Israel has made for peace, which
only convince its critics that it is a thief returning stolen property rather
than a country whose cause is just, friends of the Jewish state must speak
primarily of Jewish rights and about how anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Everything else is generally a waste of time and effort.
