The war of aggression waged by Hamas, against which Israel has commenced a robust response, must not be seen in a vacuum. Hamas is an agent of radical Islam’s revolutionary jihad. Israel, the “little Satan,” is a proxy of Western modernity. The conflict in Gaza is merely the latest round: a continuation of the war which flared up during the summer of 2006 and which rages still in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and other theaters.
So what can the big Satan do to help? Obviously, we are not going to contribute military force. We already subsidize Israel’s defense, and, more importantly, the IDF doesn’t need that kind of aid. What Israel needs is to be allowed to win: to finish the grisly work of “breaking the will of the Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel,” as Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit so aptly put it.
Our best means of bringing about that urgently needed outcome is to nullify the militarily overmatched Palestinians’ primary asset: the skewed state of international politics and international law.
NO STATEHOOD
On the political front, it is high time to acknowledge the failure of the fantasy that the Palestinians are legitimate actors worthy of statehood and its privileges. Contrary to the prevailing elite view, legitimacy is not conferred by such facile exercises as the holding of popular elections — though such exercises are not without consequences, which we will come to momentarily. There are certain minimal requirements for statehood, not least of which is accepting the right of one’s sovereign neighbor to exist.
At present, no representative of the Palestinian people concedes this right to Israel. As its
1988 charter makes plain, Hamas unapologetically seeks Israel’s destruction. This is why Hamas was formed: to eradicate the Jewish state as a preliminary step in the jihadist quest for global hegemony.
That leaves Fatah, the legacy of Yasser Arafat and Hamas’s rival. In their foolish desperation to “solve” the currently unsolvable Israeli/Palestinian dispute, our rose-tinted solons portray Fatah as a “moderate” party which seeks peaceful coexistence with Israel. It’s a dangerous illusion.
Regardless of what Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas may say to Western audiences, his message to the Arab world is that Palestinians should put aside their internal divisions and, as he
put it in 2007, “direct our guns against Israeli occupation.” To anyone outside Brussels or Foggy Bottom, that cannot be a surprise: Fatah, Abbas’s organization, is pledged by its
constitution to the destruction of Israel. (See, e.g., Article 12: Fatah’s first stated “Goal” is the “Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence”; see also, e.g., Article 19: “Armed struggle is a strategy and not a tactic, and the Palestinian Arab People’s armed revolution is a decisive factor in the liberation fight and in uprooting the Zionist existence, and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated.”)
When we appraise hostile countries, it has become
de rigueur in our foreign policy circles to distinguish the “people” (always good) from their nasty governments. So it is with the noble Palestinians. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted in a 2006 interview, for instance, that the “great majority” of them — i.e., upwards of “70 percent” — are “perfectly ready to live side by side with Israel because they just want to live in peace.”
This is preposterous. Palestinians are
weaned on Jew-hatred through schools and media controlled by the competing factions and other jihadists. Their national heroes are those dedicated to killing Jews, most especially the “martyrs” (or shaheed) who self-implode in suicide attacks. It is to be expected, then, that when the public is polled in the actual Palestinian territories, rather than in Condi-world, a very different reality is reflected: About three in four Palestinians
deny Israel’s right to exist, a figure that soars to over nine in ten when only the fighting-age demographic (between 18 and 25) is considered.
It is, moreover, only natural that Palestinians would choose Hamas in a free election, as they did in 2006. Of course, no shortage of delusional gibberish has been spouted about this outcome by democracy devotees — who typically twaddle about elections having consequences right up until the moment when the election happens and they don’t like the consequences. So, to maintain the fiction that we are dealing with decent, peace-loving people, we are urged to blinker the Palestinians’ choice to be led by unabashed mass-murderers. That, we are told, merely indicates a desire for less corruption and better social services — metrics by which Hamas is putatively superior to Fatah. I somehow doubt we’d be so nuanced if a cognate electoral choice were made by our neighbors in Canada or Mexico.
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