A fresh perspective on Israel from Alan Caruba

Alan Caruba sent me this from his base in the US.

It's Always Israel's Fault
by Alan Caruba

We live in a world where hijackers, primarily from Saudi Arabia, can commandeer two airline jets to destroy the World Trade Center and, within hours, the word is spread that this heinous act was really the work of the Israeli Mossad and Jewish terrorists.

We live in a world where, despite ceding Gaza to the Palestinians, a tunnel is built by Hamas to facilitate the killing of two Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of a third, while rockets rain down daily, and yet Israel is ultimately blamed because it is the “occupier” and holds Palestinian terrorists in its jails.

We live in a world where Hezbollah can take two Israeli soldiers hostage a few days later and flee back across the border into Lebanon. Apparently, Israel’s military withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 was insufficient reason to cease such outrages.

This brings us to the UN’s Division for Palestinian Rights, a branch of its Department of Political Affairs. Every year since 1977, it has organized a meeting in New York on November 29 to deplore the General Assembly’s 1947 Partition Plan that was accepted by the Israelis and unanimously rejected by Arab states. The meeting is a platform for speeches denouncing the existence of Israel, all paid for by the UN.

When the body of the former UN Human Rights Commission stank so rankly of its own putrescence, it was rhetorically replaced with a Human Rights Council and on July 6, 2006 the Council ended its first-ever “special session” with a resolution condemning Israel for the latest problems in Gaza.

Briefly, Gaza is a sliver of land adjacent to the Egyptian border from which Israel withdrew, forcing its own citizens who lived there to abandon their homes and communities. The hope was that by ceding Gaza to the Palestinians, it would lead to peace. It led to the election of Hamas, a terrorist organization solely dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

When Israel retaliated against the latest provocation, demanding the return of the young soldier, it was the considered opinion of the UN Human Rights Council that Israel was guilty of causing a humanitarian problem. The vote was 29-11 with five abstentions.

The Council’s resolution included a call “to dispatch an urgent fact-finding mission headed by the Special Rapporteur” et cetera, et cetera. The man selected for this mission is John Dugard and, as UN Watch, an independent non-governmental organization noted, he has held this position since 2001 and has the dubious record of never finding a single Palestinian guilty of anything. After a pro forma expression of sympathy for Corporal Gilad Shalit, the Hamas hostage, he added that he felt the same “for all Israel’s young soldiers compelled to serve in the army of an occupying power.”

According to UN Watch, this same “occupying power” has, over the past four years, been subject to more than 140 separate suicide attacks and 13,730 shooting attacks. Dugard failed to mention them.

The United States has been oddly quiet of late regarding events in Gaza, noting only that the kidnapping was a terrorist act. Perhaps the State Department has concluded there is nothing that can be done to persuade the Palestinians to act in a sane fashion.

The Israelis have tried every thing they could to mollify the Palestinians and the neighboring Arab states. They have done this despite having fought several wars that gained it the territories the Arabs want returned, along with all of the rest of Israel.

There is a lesson here somewhere for the Israelis and for the rest of the world. It has something to do with punishing one’s enemies until they give up. It has something to do with the lesson the Holocaust should have taught them. You cannot negotiate with people who want to kill you.

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