That was a question CodeSlinger asked me.
I replied in a comprehensive manner, explaining my reasoning: but thought it worthy of a post of its own. So, here it is:
CodeSlinger,
I really, really don’t know that I would have them do anything other than what they are doing now.
The Israelis are in a very, very difficult position: the UN is stacked with anti-Semites, the Europeans are afraid to upset their anti-Semitic Islamist colonists (and yes – the Muslims who are true immigrants are integrating as best as they can – it is the Islamists who are entering Europe who are colonists, not immigrants who are preventing them), and the US is more anti-Semitic than ever. It seems that Canada is the only major ally of Israel – and we are small potatoes on the world stage.
So, the Israelis are stuck in a highly unenviable situation.
Israeli civilians are bombarded by rockets fired from Hospitals and UN schools within Gaza. It is only because of their investment in bomb shelters that the Israeli casualties are minimal.
But, the Hamas ruled Gazans have taken billions in ‘humanitarian aid’ and instead of bomb shelters and the equivalent to the iron dome, they built underground tunnels into Israel, often undermining kindergartens as particular targets in order to add shock value to their anticipated attack during a Jewish holiday. They have even worked several hundred Gazan children to death in mining these tunnels…
The Israelis MUST do something to primarily stop these tunnels which are extensive and through which Gazans dressed in Israeli military uniforms have snuck into Isrel and murdered people, secondarily to stop the rocket fire because a civilian population cannot indefinitely function under such conditions.
But, if the Israelis do not take extreme care to do what they are doing – dropping leaflets to warn people, phoning them to let them know an attack is coming, sending a harmless, warning shot against a building with enough time for civilians to evacuate before the real missile which will demolish the building is fired, if they did not call off air strikes when children are in the target area….they would be sinking beneath their own level of civilization!!!
After all, some of these Gazans may have voted in Hamas, but others did not and the children, of course, are innocent. Brainwashed – yes, but killing them would be barbaric. Israelis would be abandoning their own civilized state – not in the past, but now.
But if this were not a sufficient reason, if you wanted a purely pragmatic one, I can supply one of those as well.
Israel cannot survive if the whole world – with the exception of Canada and a few other little nations, like the Czech Republic – refuses to trade with them and completely isolates them.
And every dead Palestinian child – whether killed by Israeli weapons or by Palestinian rockets aimed at Israel and accidentally landing in Gaza – is a source of money for Hamas. So, Hamas will make sure that each and every real and imagined dead Palestinian child makes headlines. (And, yes – they have been caught not only passing off scenes from a horror movie as ‘Palestinian children killed by Israel’ – but also passing the photographs of the Isaeli Fogel children(including a suckling infant) who were murdered by a Palestinian terrorists as they slept in their beds, these too are being passed off as ‘Palestinian children killed by the Israelis’!!!
The Israelis – both Jewish and non-Jewish – may have much going for them, but they are a tiny country surrounded by nation states that share an ideological imperative to destroy Israel as a State AND to kill every Jew alive on this tiny little planet. And if the Jews pack up and colonize another planet, the Islamists will follow them to that planet nd try to murder them there.
Because their desire to kill every Jew in general and destroy Israel in particular is dogmatic, rooted both in the Koran and in the Hadith.
Regarding Israel:
The Islamic prophet Muhammad had sheltered with both Jewish and Christian communities while he was, for reasons not known to history, excommunicated from Mecca. Both the Jewish and the Christian communities excommunicated him in their turn, also for reasons unknown. At least, that is what I was taught at Carleton University many decades ago when I took a course on Arab history.
While with the ‘People of the Book’ (Christians and Muslims), he learned a lot of their mythology. In particular, he latched on to the idea that the Jews had been God’s chosen people – which is why all the Old Testament killing and raping and genocide to get the Jews their ‘promised land’ was OK. God was fine with genocide – as long as the genociders were God’s ‘chosen people’. But, according to Muhammad, the Jews got too comfortable and broke their covenant with God (the whole Jesus thing, money-changers in the Temple and all that stuff) – which is why God punished them by kicking them out of the magical promised land, Israel.
Because, if Israel is ‘the promised land’, then only God’s chosen people get to live there – right?
And, the punishment that Muhammed is said for God to have inflicted on the Jews – to prove they were no longer his favourite people – was to deny them a homeland at all. As in – no matter where the Jews would have set up their new nation state, it would have made Muhammed wrong for saying they will never have a homeland as divine punishment. That is, the moment the Jews have a nation state of their own, Muhammed is proven wrong and all of Islam is proven to be a false religion…
But, setting it up in the promised land is an order of magnitude worse, because that is reserved for God’s favourites. And if the Jews get a homeland there, that means that they ARE God’s favourites…which means the Muslims are not, which means that Islam is not 100% correct….which it claims to be, so if one part is falsified, then all of it is….which is why them Jews have got to be kept out of Israel.
As do the Christians and everybody else.
Because if the Muslims are not God’s favourite people, then their whole religion is proven to be false…
So, now that we know why only the Muslims may live in Israel, we get to the secondary reason: all the Jews, including children, must be killed.
Why?
Because the Koran says that only when all the Jews are exterminated will the day of judgment (and paradise on Earth) take place.
So, you see, the Palestinian Islamists have very logical reasons for not wanting peace with Israel:
1) More dead Palestinian babies = more money for Hamas
2) Permitting Jews in ‘the promised land’ would bestow the title of ‘God’s favourite people’ on them and not Muslims, falsifying Islam
3) Killing all the Jews will bring Paradise to Earth and ought to be accelerated
Thus, Israel has no hope of a peace treaty with Hamas.
If Israel acts as any other country would to protect its people, the international community (weighted by Muslim and Islamist-fearing State votes) will destroy it through isolation.
Therefore, doing what they are doing now – pursuing their objectives while taking every possible precaution to save civilian lives is the only reasonable course of action open to the Israelis.
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 