The Gaza Blitz
Posted on December 30th, 2008
by Patrick J. Buchanan |
|
Unwilling to control its fighters, who fired scores of missiles into Israel at the end of their six-month ceasefire, Hamas gave Israel the provocation it needed to deliver a savage blow to the Palestinian enclave in Gaza.
Saturday was the bloodiest day in the history of the Palestinian people since being driven from their homes in the War of 1948. One thousand were killed or wounded, as the Israeli Air Force conducted over a hundred strikes — on graduation ceremonies for Hamas fighters, police stations and storage sites for rockets.
About Israel’s right and duty to defend its border towns, there is no dispute. When Hamas permits Gaza to be used as a launch pad for rockets, it must expect retaliation. Nor can Hamas claim some right to dictate the limits of that retaliation.
Yet the wisdom of so savage a retribution for rockets that killed not one Israeli is open to question. And crass Israeli politics seems to be behind this premeditated and planned blitz.
With Likud’s hawkish “Bibi” Netanyahu ahead in the polls for the Feb. 10 election, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Labor’s candidate, had to show that he, too, could be ruthless with Hamas.
Kadima Party candidate and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has an even greater need than the highly decorated Barak to show toughness. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, departing in scandal, wants to exit in a blaze of glory, to blot out the memory of a botched war against Hezbollah that he launched in the summer of 2006.
However, while Israel’s politicians all seem to have a stake in these devastating strikes, Israel herself will pay the price.
Given the casualty toll, over 300 dead and 1,300 wounded as of this writing, Hamas will have to exact its pound of flesh. The Hamas wing that seeks renewed war with Israel will now shout into silence the wing working with Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak on a new ceasefire.
The moderate Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas, who has been talking to Israel, testifying to her good faith, has been made to appear the puppet and fool. A new intifada spreading to the West Bank, with suicide attacks inside Israel, is now possible.
Moderate Arabs, who have recognized Israel or backed peace, will now be seen by the Arab street as appeasers impotent to stop the public suffering of the Palestinian people.
As for President Bush’s hopes of midwifing a peace that would create a Palestinian state, they are as dead as the Annapolis process he set in train. In advancing peace in the Middle East, Bush’s eight-year record is now a near-absolute failure.
For four years, Bush refused to talk to Yasir Arafat, though Bill Clinton had negotiated with him, as had four Israeli prime ministers, two of who shared a Nobel Prize with Arafat. In his second term, Bush, after insisting Hamas be included in free elections in Palestine, refused to recognize Hamas when it won those elections.
Arafat was a terrorist and Hamas is a terrorist organization, declared Bush, and we don’t negotiate with terrorists. Yet, Bush de-listed Libya as a state sponsor of terror and sent Condi Rice to chat up Col. Gadhafi, though Gadhafi still has on his hands the blood of scores of American school kids from the Lockerbie massacre of 1989 that Libya and Gadhafi engineered
For eight years, like the “dummy” in a hand of bridge, Bush has sat mute as his Israeli partner, Sharon or Olmert, played America’s cards as well as their own. The Bush response to Saturday’s carnage, as anticipated, was to blame Hamas for causing it and urge Israelis to be careful about civilian casualties as they go about their reprisals.
Whatever Israel decides, we support. For eight years that has been the most reliable guide to U.S. Middle East policy.
And Barack Obama? Forty-eight hours after the Israeli blitz began, he and his national security team remain silent.
Hopefully, Obama will bring with him a new Mideast policy, one made in the U.S.A., for the U.S.A. Hopefully, just as Israel has its private links to Syria through Turkey, to Hamas through Egypt and to Hezbollah, Obama will establish independent U.S. channels to all three, and adopt a separate U.S. policy toward all three, as Israel does.
While the United States must support Israel’s right to defend her towns and to strike bases from which Israelis are being attacked, Obama should denounce the collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, by Israel’s cutting off their electricity in the dead of winter and denying them the food and medicine many need to survive.
For us to remain silent in the face of this comports neither with our interests or our values. Israel’s policy of withholding from the weak and innocent of Gaza, women and children, the necessities of life, to punish the guilty who rule at the point of a gun, is a policy that Obama should declare the United States will no longer support with tax dollars.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Filed under: Foreign policy, World
Both sides are wrong in the dispute between Israel and Gaza and it is immoral to side with either one over the other. The only truly moral action is to assist in trying to end the dispute. We shall see whether the new American Administration takes sides. If it does so, the dispute will continue and be made far worse than it already is, causing yet another Middle Eastern conflict, spreading to involvement in a war with Iran and further causing damage to the global economy.
Let me turn this around for a second. Say you were the PM of Israel. You have an entity adjoining you that is committed to your destruction. ( and if anybody doubts that I’d invite them to read the Hamas charter, particularly article 7 ) That is allied with Iran. That periodically bombards southern Israel. Ok, what do you do. I REPEAT, WHAT DO YOU DO. I’m interested in the responses.
I know that it is easy for Pat. Lives in northern Virginia. And found other places to be during his time for military service. But I’d invite him to move to southern Israel for a few weeks and get shelled. See how he likes it. And what he would ask his government to do in that event.
A boat load of lunatics tried to sail a private yacht into Gaza under the pretense of delivering medical supplies. They were turned back by the Israeli Navy. The boats collided during the encounter. However, the damage was light. Unfortunately, head Moonbat, former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, did not fall overboard during the encounter.
Far-Left Hamas Supporters Coming to Gaza by Sea
by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz
(IsraelNN.com) Free Gaza, a far-left organization offering support to the jihadist Hamas government in the Palestinian Authority, sent a ship on Monday to defy the Israeli sea blockade on Gaza. Despite the major IDF military operation underway, sixteen Free Gaza activists, including a former member of the US Congress, are on their way to the region.
The ship, a yacht, left from Cyprus this evening carrying Free Gaza supporters from Britain, Australia, Ireland, Cyprus and Tunisia, as well as former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Free Gaza spokesmen told the press before they set off that their ship is carrying three and a half tons of medical supplies, including antibiotics. The yacht is the sixth of its kind sent to Gaza by the organization in four months.
A Cypriot doctor on board the ship said that they are sending a message to PA residents that “they are not alone.” McKinney said that she intends to call on American President-elect Barack Obama to condemn Israel’s Operation “Cast Lead” against the jihadist regime in Gaza. Link here. The Intellectual Redneck
The Israelis knew the boat was coming.
The Israelis knew who was on the boat.
The Israelis had indicated they would allow the boat to reach Gaza.
The Israelis knew where the boat was going.
The boat was inspected before it left Cyprus by Cypriot authorities so the Israelis knew what was on the boat.
The boat was rammed in International waters by an unlit Israeli war boat.
If asked, the boat would have stopped and allowed Israeli inspection.
The boat never at any point entered Israeli waters nor had any intention to.
Do I have anything wrong here?
I wish the entire Middle East would just entirely self-destruct. Quickly, before our leaders decide we have to go “help.”
“But I’d invite him to move to southern Israel for a few weeks and get shelled. See how he likes it. And what he would ask his government to do in that event.”
Did you even read the article? There’s no doubt that Israel has the right to defend itself.
I’d like to think I’d start by asking my government to stop blocking food and medicine shipments to the region. I’d like to think my country wouldn’t treat the country next door like a concentration camp.
We’re Americans. We should be leading the world by teaching other governments how to rule by apathy. Give them all food, television and warm comfy houses. Hey, it worked here.
Bill Pearlman writes, “But I’d invite (Buchanan) to move to southern Israel for a few weeks and get shelled. See how he likes it. And what he would ask his government to do in that event.”
Glenn Greenwald writes, “Can’t the exact same mentality be deployed to justify everything Hamas has done and is doing, to wit: ‘if a foreign power were brutally occupying my country for four decades — or blockading my country and denying my children medical needs and nutrition and the ability even to exit — I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing’? But the last thing that our political class ever extends is reciprocal, two-sided analysis to this dispute.”
Minor problem with that analysis. The Rafah crossing is in Egyptian hands. And the missiles started from day one. The Palestinian people voted in a party that advocates the destruction of Israel. There is no ambiguity there. You can’t do that, launch thousands of missile attacks. And then cry when the other side hits back. It doesn’t wash.
“Minor problem with that analysis. The Rafah crossing is in Egyptian hands.”
And the State of Israel holds no sway over that situation at all? How about the time it told Egypt it planned to “’solve the problem” when the Palestinians blew a whole in the wall and rushed in to buy life-sustaining goods?
“And the missiles started from day one. The Palestinian people voted in a party that advocates the destruction of Israel.”
Yes, Israel has an enemy to the West and in other parts of the Islamic world. As Michael Scheuer put it, “Let me say that I harbor no resentment over the actions of Israel’s leaders. For more than 60 years, they have knowingly made their country a pariah in the Arab and Islamic worlds, just as the Palestinians have made themselves pariahs in much of the West. This is, of course, the right of both parties, but neither seems to want to face the consequences of their decisions.”
What did the Zionists expect, a welcome mat?
The article states that Mr. Obama and his team did not offer comment and seems to be critical of Mr. Obama’s silence. I would reply that there is one and only one President of the United States and only the President can speak for the American people. Mr. Obama must remain silent on specific issues because to have two people speaking on behalf of the United States weakens US foreign policy and strength.
The shelling of civilian areas by Hamas and other groups is wrong, and should be condemned, as Mr. PJB has done here. But the collective punishment of an entire population is also wrong and should also be condemned.
What Israel and its supporters fail to realize is that two wrongs do not make a right. The Israelis - during the latest ceasefire - were refusing to allow medical and food aid into Gaza. When you do that to a people already living in sub-saharan conditions, is that not an act of war? Maybe, maybe not. For sure it is a war crime (collective punishment) under the Fourth Geneva Conventions.
Israel - as history has shown - is a flagrant violator of humanitarian and international law. In fact, they’ve even committed war crimes against US military (USS LIberty). So, this is nothing new. It’s that America, via Israel’s lobby, is now aiding and abetting these war crimes to the point it has endangered the national security of this nation and the citizens therein..
Pat Buchanan is a disgusting creature who recieved the poison of Jew hatred from his mothers milk. His father was an America-firster and Nazi sympathizer. Buchanan’s long list of Jew hatred goes back decades, from defending SS concentration camp guards to attributing anything bad that happens to… you guessed it… Jews. he is a sick man who needs help.
Why Joe, such harsh words for Mr. PJB. It’s just so out of character for an Israel-defender (nice blog) to say such things when they cannot handle the truth.
By the way, what’s wrong with being an America-firster if in fact one is an American? Are we supposed to be Canada-firsters? Or how about Britain-firsters? Help me out here, Joe.