GRUESOME IN GAZA by Robert J. Lewis@Arts & Opinion

For a long time there was a time when I was sympathetic to the idea of a Palestinian homeland as part of a two-state solution. But in light of what can only be described as sustained, intransigent and transparent Palestinian folly, I have decided that thoughtless and reckless comportment should not be rewarded. As I write this, the Palestinians are getting hammered hard as a consequence of a series of decisions that reason and intelligence cannot account for.

Let us hypothesize a small man, weighing 150 pounds, who is unarmed. Facing him is an Arnold Schwarzenegger type, 250 pounds of sinew and muscle, who also has a machine gun slung over his broad shoulders. Since the two don’t like each other, you would expect the smaller man, as an act of self-preservation, to act in such a way so as not to rile the bigger man. But instead, throwing caution and IQ to the wind, the little man begins throwing rocks -- some of which are sharp enough to lacerate -- at the bigger man. He repeats the rock throwing the next day and then the next, seemingly intent on making a rite of a wrong. A neutral observer would conclude that only someone intellectually deficient would expect his bigger and more heavily armed adversary, now bleeding, to do nothing indefinitely, that at some point the big man is going to say enough is enough and pick up the little guy and hurt him bad, which is what he is doing now, in Gaza – without apology.

This bizarre contest of mindsets in the valley of Elah begs the question, what prompted the little man to act so irrationally? What does he hope to gain by irritating to the point of violence the self-evidently more capable and stronger man? Based on the thus far unequivocal results of the encounter, one must conclude that the little guy was not in his right mind and/or someone else had already got hold of his mind, like Iran et al, and bade him do his dirty work.

There is no secret to the greater anti-Israel Arab agenda. Short of calling for the destruction of Israel, Iran and company want the political entity of Israel out of sight and mind. To that end, they are naturally attracted to the idea of achieving that outcome without having to bloody their hands. So they decide to enlist the very gullible -- by virtue of being homelandless -- and demonstratively short-sighted Palestinians to do their bidding. They decide on a two-pronged approach: funnel the Palestinians (1) propaganda that will cajole them into believing they don’t want peace and prosperity, and (2) weapons, the small arms equivalent of sling shots, that will convince the ‘occupiers’ to lay down their superior weaponry and, en masse, leave that part of the world forever.

Iran and its friends must be laughing all the way to the Mosque – and why not? They get to fight their sworn enemy without consequences. Which makes the Palestinians the world’s easiest dupes ad extremis since they alone are paying the ultimate price for taking up a position that prior to the election of Hamas they didn’t support. In opinion polls taken over a period of many years before the election of Hamas, the majority of Palestinians consistently favoured peaceful coexistence with Israel in the context of a two-state solution.

Few would disagree that Israel and Palestinians are, to all intents and purposes, engaged in low grade war that is likely to continue into the indefinite future, especially if the latter continues to allow their best interests to be hi-jacked by the self-serving interests of the anti-Israel Arab league, whose sole raison d’être is to rewrite the map of the Middle East, and who, despite grandiloquent declarations to the contrary, don’t give a micro-damn^[1] about their impoverished Palestinian pawns. Which predicts that the hammering the Palestinians are sustaining today will be repeated tomorrow, and the living hell the Arabs have made of Gaza is only going to get worse.

[1 ] from frontpage.com by David Solway
But the argument for Palestine, despite its earnest and sympathetic prosecution, is vitiated by a profound irony that nobody wants to acknowledge. There is a strong element of fraud in the ubiquitous preoccupation with the Palestinian cause. Despite the overwrought rhetoric, the Arabs (and their Western backers) really do not care about Palestine and never did. Their real goal is the extirpation of Israel. This should be glaringly obvious when we consider both the Arab and Western response—a better formulation might be lack of response—to the Iranian menace to visit nuclear annhilation upon Israel. For if Israel should be destroyed in a nuclear attack, Gaza, the West Bank and over one million Israeli-Arabs would also be annihilated. Physical destruction, radiation poisoning and total economic collapse would expunge Palestinian Arabs as effectively as it would Israeli Jews.

Even the Palestinians themselves do not seem to have caught on, either because what we are dealing with is a veritable suicide culture that can tolerate its own extinction or, to put it bluntly, with a people too stupified by hatred and fanaticism to realize that, under these circumstances, their very existence is no less at risk than Israel’s. The fact remains that they have been sold out by their Arab brothers and Western enablers who are perfectly indifferent to the devastation Palestinians would suffer should Iran follow through on its threat to unleash nuclear havoc on Israel.

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