The war against Israel continues

According to John Mearsheimer writing in The Palestinian Conservative, a magazine edited by Scott (“Mary was a poor Palestinian woman”) McConnell,* Hamas is sincere, adheres to its promises, and is trustworthy. Israel has bad motives and is dishonest. It is a cruel bully crushing Palestinians for the fun of it. Thus, according to Mearsheimer, when Israel, to the anguish of many of its citizens, withdrew from Gaza in September 2005, forcing all the Israeli residents out and dismantling towns and leaving a thriving greenhouse industry to be destroyed by the Arabs, Israel was actually pursuing its “real” goal of “building a Greater Israel.” Let’s repeat that. By giving up all control over Gaza and letting the organization sworn to its destruction to take it over, Israel was actually pursuing an imperial policy of expanding its power. Further, its method of doing this was “to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people,” to “create an open-air prison for the Palestinians in Gaza and inflict great pain on them until they complied with Israel’s wishes.” Mearsheimer doesn’t stop there. He says that by retreating from Gaza, and planning to retreat from the West Bank, Israel was actually following the policy of Zev Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist!

Similarly, says Mearsheimer, the recent Gaza war was entirely Israel’s fault. The cease-fire that went from June 2008 to November 2008 was being obeyed by Hamas. It was Israel that violated the cease-fire and brought on the Gaza war.

The official Israeli position blames Hamas for undermining the cease-fire. This view is widely accepted in the United States, but it is not true. Israeli leaders disliked the cease-fire from the start, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the IDF to begin preparing for the present war while the cease-fire was being negotiated in June 2008. Furthermore, Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, reports that Jerusalem began to prepare the propaganda campaign to sell the present war months before the conflict began. For its part, Hamas drastically reduced the number of missile attacks during the first five months of the cease-fire. A total of two rockets were fired into Israel during September and October, none by Hamas.

How did Israel behave during this same period? It continued arresting and assassinating Palestinians on the West Bank, and it continued the deadly blockade that was slowly strangling Gaza. Then on Nov. 4, as Americans voted for a new president, Israel attacked a tunnel inside Gaza and killed six Palestinians. It was the first major violation of the cease-fire, and the Palestinians—who had been “careful to maintain the cease-fire,” according to Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center—responded by resuming rocket attacks. The calm that had prevailed since June vanished as Israel ratcheted up the blockade and its attacks into Gaza and the Palestinians hurled more rockets at Israel. It is worth noting that not a single Israeli was killed by Palestinian missiles between Nov. 4 and the launching of the war on Dec. 27.

Jimmy Carter made similar claims on January 26 on the Today program, saying that all Israel’s fault because the Israelis “did attack Gaza again on November 4th.”

Powerline straightened out the record:

For those who don’t recall that “attack,” these are the facts, as we related here:

The IDF sent special forces 200 yards across the border to destroy a tunnel that had been built to facilitate the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. Intelligence indicated that such a kidnapping was imminent:

The IDF accused Hamas of jeopardizing the truce by digging the tunnel and plotting to abduct more Israeli soldiers in the immediate future.

“The tunnel we uncovered was ready for imminent use, forcing us to act immediately,” the military source said. “We did not know where the other end of the tunnel surfaced. In light of the intelligence we received about its immediate use, plans for special forces to enter Gaza this evening after sundown were approved,” he added.

Hamas gunmen opened fire on IDF forces and Hamas fired 45 rockets into Israel the same night.

I can’t speculate on his motives, but Carter’s animus against Israel and his weirdly positive attitude toward America’s terrorist enemies make him a force for evil, not for good, in the Middle East.

Note

From Scott McConnell’ 2003 article on how he became a champion of the Palestinians:

Sometime in 1995, I began attending services for the first time since prep school, showing up sporadically at a mainline Presbyterian church in Manhattan. No big epiphanies to relate, and unlike George W. Bush I cannot claim Christ as my favorite philosopher. But something rubs off from the Christian liturgy—its all-embracing quality, its summons to universal brotherhood—that makes “racial passions” of any sort seem a bit shameful. That’s my experience anyway, but I suspect it is why the country’s hard-core racialists are so vehemently anti-Christian.

From church may have come the spark of another realization: that the Palestinians, many of whom are Christian, are people deserving of dignity and rights. In one of the first Christmas services I attended, the minister alluded to Jesus’ mother Mary as “a poor Palestinian woman.” For a new congregant who had spent the previous decade in circles where the word “Palestinian” was rarely uttered without a sneer implying a congenital predilection for murder and mayhem, the phrase about Mary rattled around the mind for a while.

The meaning and effect of McConnell’s statement was discussed here.

Three years later, in an entry entitled, “If Mary went to Bethlehem today,” reader Tom S. offered this summary of McConnell’s and the paleo right’s stance toward Israel:

I never cease to be amazed at the extent to which the paleo right has internalized the radical Arab view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even anti-Israel organizations such as the BBC, and anti-Israeli pundits such as Robert Fisk, usually at least go through the motions of blaming both sides, before they start criticizing Israel. But for paleos such as McConnell, Buchanan, and Sobran, there is not even a pretense of such even-handedness—the whole problem is Israel and Israeli policy. Even hard-headed realpolitik is denied as being a possible Israeli motivation; to those like McConnell, Israel is simply being mean and cruel, for no reason at all. Cut out the references to Allah, and most paleo pronouncements on the Middle East could have come straight from a Hamas press release. McConnell, it seems, even has trouble admitting that his (and our) Savior was a Jew! Criticizing Israel is one thing, but this verges on the pathological.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 07, 2009 11:18 AM | Send