Darby’s reflections

The outcome in the Mideast, says Rick Darby at Reflecting Light, Israeli, raeli, bad. He goes on from that all-too-true pun to an eloquent summing up of the disaster. Two highlights:

On a political level, Israel’s stop-and-go, go-and-stop campaign was senseless and self-defeating. This is not your father’s Israel; the spirit that saved the little country from near-extinction against Arab invasions in ‘67 and ‘73 is no more than a historical memory. Today’s Israelis are a different breed, not much different, it would appear, from many Europeans and some Americans: indecisive, given to wishful thinking about the Muslim world, in denial about the threat. If they do go to war, they believe they can achieve a clean, almost casualty-free “mission accomplished” using air power and high-tech weapons. Well, they have just learned how wrong that belief turned out to be.

And this:

The possibility that it won’t survive as a nation, and that there will be yet another worldwide Jewish diaspora, can’t be written off as paranoia or doomsaying.

Music to Buchanan’s and McConnell’s ears, except for the diaspora part. But it’s important to say this so bluntly because this IS the issue. National survival. It is absolutely amazing and a lesson for all time that not only America and Europe with all their wealth and size have ignored dangers, which is relatively understandable, but tiny, vulnerable, New Jersey-sized Israel ignored infinitely worse and more immediate dangers. Never has the ruinous power of liberalism been shown so spectacularly.

The saying may be overdone that the Jews are the canary in the coal mine, but a cliché has rarely been so true.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 17, 2006 11:25 PM | Send