This tragic charade continues because Hamas wants it to continue. Its purpose is to make life so unsure and frightening for nearby affluent Israelis that they will grant continual concessions, hopefully leading to such wide-scale demoralization that the Jewish state itself will collapse and disappear. In that regard, the last thing Hamas wants is calm and prosperity in Gaza, which would turn the population’s attention toward living rather than killing and dying.
Hamas in Gaza also feels that the war is not static — and that it is already winning on all fronts. As Europeans, Middle Easterners, and the United Nations lecture Israel about “inordinate” or “disproportionate” responses, the terrorists’ smuggled missiles increase in range, payload and frequency of attack.
Hamas has gained powerful patrons in Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah. Both provide terrorist training and weapons as long as Gaza serves as a useful proxy in their own existential struggles against Israel.
On the world front, we’ve reached a new threshold in which evoking the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews has become commonplace and almost acceptable. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly brags about hoarding the body parts of captured Israelis. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad openly talks of Israelis in Hitlerian terms as “filthy bacteria” that should be wiped off the map.
Palestinians in Gaza can enshrine mass murderers and praise terrorist killers without much worry that the world will be appalled at their grotesque spectacles — much less cease its sympathy and subsidies.
And what a world it is that enables Gaza! The Russians have fought a dirty war against Muslim separatists in Chechnya. The Chinese have been hunting down Muslim separatist Uighurs who claim Xinjiang Province as their own. India wages bloody periodic wars against Muslim terrorists who claim Kashmir.
Imagine tomorrow that all of the above nations told the Gazans that their dispute is no more or less important to the world than similar land quarrels in Cyprus or Azerbaijan; that they are no more or less deserving of international money and sympathy than are the Chechnyans or Uighurs or the Muslims of Kashmir; or that the Israelis have as much right as the Chinese, Indians or Russians to retaliate and put down neighboring Islamist attacks. Then the crisis would shortly recede from the world’s attention.And Hamas in Gaza would either begin negotiating and building Palestinians’ own civil society — or face the sort of typical Chinese, Russian, or Indian retaliation that Israel is quite able to unleash.© 2008 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
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