Not a lot to say
We haven’t said much about Gaza because there’s really not much to say. It’s Groundhog Day again. Charles Krauthammer summarizes the situation:
Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis — 6,464 launched from Gaza in the past three years — deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people…Israel has but a single objective in Gaza — peace: the calm, open, normal relations it offered Gaza when it withdrew in 2005. Doing something never done by the Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers of Palestine, the Israelis gave the Palestinians their first sovereign territory ever in Gaza….
There’s only one grievance and Hamas is open about it. Israel’s very existence. Nor does Hamas conceal its strategy. Provoke conflict. Wait for the inevitable civilian casualties. Bring down the world’s opprobrium on Israel. Force it into an untenable cease-fire — exactly as happened in Lebanon. Then, as in Lebanon, rearm, rebuild and mobilize for the next round. Perpetual war. Since its raison d’etre is the eradication of Israel, there are only two possible outcomes: the defeat of Hamas or the extinction of Israel.
It is hard to envision any happy ending to the war of which these are only the latest skirmishes. It is, on the other hand, relatively easy to imagine cataclysms not too far in the future. This clever example of religious apologetics by Tariq Ramadan, with its implication (at least to us) that Israel should ultimately cease to exist, shows the depth and intractability of the problem. (BTW, the “proportionality” issue is so tiresome and intellectually barren that it is a wonder it still lives.)
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:58 pm
What is proportionality toward someone who means your extermination? Israel, to its credit and peril, is not proportional in its response.