The War in Gaza

The war for Gaza is not going well for Hamas. It is not going well for Hamas supporters, who constitute most of the inhabitants of Gaza. And it is not going well for the Biden administration, which wants it to be over-- the better to shore up its electoral chances in Michigan.

While speaking out of both sides of its mouth, the Biden foreign team has sent crack journalist and useful idiot Tommy Friedman on a round the world trip to assess the level of support for Israel.

Now, Tommy informs us, on the basis of the people who are happy to use him as a tool, that Israel is failing because it is losing acceptance.

One imagines that this means that people around the world no longer think that Israelis are nice people. 

Once upon a time European Jews sought to be accepted by their non-Jewish and largely pagan neighbors. They did not imagine that their neighbors would try to exterminate them, and, by the by, their culture. 

How did that one work out, Tommy? 

In truth, people in the Middle East and Asia respect Israel for what it has accomplished. Many Muslims in the region are deeply resentful of the fact that the Jews built a prosperous modern society in a land where people had previously limited themselves to growing dates and figs. 

Other Muslim nations, through the Abraham Accords, have embraced a concept that I have often promoted. Namely, that Israel is the solution, not the problem to the region’s need to modernize. 

Israel is a military power. Its reputation took a serious hit on October 7, but clearly the massacre happened because the Israelis let their guard down. 

Militarily, Hamas is largely outgunned. Thus, it resorts to terror, to a more primitive form of warfare, one that relies on propaganda, on sapping the morale of its enemy. And thus, Hamas must be eliminated. This is not the same as to say that Hamas must be accepted. Friedman does not say it overtly, but how else, by the terms of his argument, can Israel feel accepted without accepting Hamas. 

It is certainly not for Jews to accommodate the madness that defines the Palestinian minds. It is for Jews to show, beyond any real doubt, who is the stronger and more efficient.

People respect success. They do not respect mealy-mouthed craven pandering, even when it appears in the pages of the New York Time. Right, Tommy?

Being a tool of the Biden administration, Tommy continues to float the Biden solution to the conflict, which involves two states living in harmony.

Of course, this prospect has been floated for decades now. The Palestinians do not want it. They want all of Israel, and they want it to be called greater Palestine. Similarly the Israelis no longer trust the Palestinians to be neighborly.

They already tried it and got seriously burned.

The current conflagration involves the clash of civilizations, the clash between modern Western civilization, the kind that America’s culture warriors associate, obscenely, with white skin, and the more primitive civilizations associated with Islam.

During the past millennium Islamic culture fell behind that of the West, as Bernard Lewis outlined in his book, What Went Wrong?

Now, if Israel were to follow Tommy’s approach, it would effectively be surrendering to Hamas. Many countries in the region and even outside the region are rooting for Israel privately while expressing public chagrin over the destruction that the IDF has produced in Gaza.

One needs to understand that Tommy’s numbers about civilian casualties come from Hamas. Precisely why he would accept them unthinkingly is beyond me. 

As you might have guessed, without reading his mental drool, Tommy blames it all on the Israeli prime minister. He barely pays lip service to the horrors Hamas visited on Israel, but he thinks that the fault lies with Benjamin Netanyahu:

That many civilian deaths in a relatively short war would be problematic in any context. But when so many civilians die in a retaliatory invasion that was launched by an Israeli government without any political horizon for the morning after — and then, when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, finally offers a morning-after plan that essentially says to the world that Israel now intends to occupy both the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely — it is no surprise that Israel’s friends will edge away and the Biden team will start to look hapless.

We will not list the civilian casualties from other wars, thoroughly ignored by Tommy Clueless. One can list Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo and Dresden-- for starters. And, isn’t there something profoundly stupid about trotting out the concept of the morning after pill, even suggesting that no army can attack a neighbor without a plan for what comes after?

Dare we mention the nations that have been founded by colonial powers, and that have built Western countries on land that had been inhabited by indigenous peoples. Consider the cases of New Zealand, Australia and, of course, Andalusia. And let’s not forget that Indian tribes owned much of what we now call America. Does Tommy want us to end the “occupation.”

By the logic of anti-colonialism, we ought to give America back to the indigenous peoples. Didn’t Susan Sontag famously denounce America in precisely the terms that the radical left is using today to discredit Israel:

America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

She said it some fifty years ago, but it could have been said yesterday. 

Tommy agrees. He bought the notion of occupation, of colonialization, which translates the notion that Israel is illegitimate. As it happens, given the track record of Palestinian governance, no Israeli prime minister could possibly accept returning Gaza to the Palestinians.

The people of Gaza have simply forfeited, for now, the right to govern themselves. The right to self-governance might be God-given, but that does not mean that we need to respect everyone’s right to self-governance. You can exercise a right and you can forfeit the right.

Tommy has this to say:

But now we have a toxic combination of thousands of civilian casualties and a Netanyahu peace plan that promises only endless occupation, no matter if the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank transforms itself into a legitimate, effective, broad-based governing body that can take control of both the West Bank and Gaza and be a partner one day for peace.

So the whole Israel-Gaza operation is starting to look to more and more people like a human meat grinder whose only goal is to reduce the population so that Israel can control it more easily.

Waiting for the Palestinian Authority to transform itself into a functioning governing body is like waiting for Godot. And we know how that turned out.

To imagine that Israel is looking for control is vapid, even for Tommy. Israel is showing the world that it will not allow its enemies to attack it with impunity. Israel is increasing the price of further attacks. Since the rulers of Gaza have shown themselves incapable of doing anything for their people beyond building terror tunnels and rockets, they have left the Israeli government no other sane choice.

One suspects that the vast majority of Israelis agree. One understands that Tommy, for all his caterwauling about the poor Palestinian people-- who made their bed, now they will lie in it-- never shows any real appreciation for the trauma that Israel suffered. 

In the end Tommy blames the Jews. He blames it all on the Israeli prime minister, accusing him of failing to embrace the two state non-solution.

Tommy mentions in passing that Israel is being outmaneuvered by Iran, yet the truth of the matter is that the weak and feckless Biden administration is being played for a fool by the ayatollahs. Doesn’t Tommy know who is funding Hamas and who is funding Iran?

The situation on the ground is simple. Given the serial failures of the Biden administration in the Middle East, Israel has no other options.

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