Excuse Me For Living

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Israel has all the proof it needs that world opinion will never consider its right to exist important. The Obama White House, and a lot of the US News Media, portray the Hamas-Israel conflict as something like an amateur soccer match, with the uneven score (40-odd Israeli soldiers killed versus 1000-plus Palestinians, mostly civilians) showing that the contest is unfair, that Israel has “gone too far,” that they have entered the same moral zone as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, carrying out a “genocide.”

Of course, this is a real hot war, not a diversity training exercise, or a self-esteem course, or any sort of the kindergarten psychotherapy that has come to form the basis of American thought and policy. And a vicious world opinion uses America’s own moral fecklessness the way Hamas uses women and babies to shield its rocket installations.

Apparently world opinion also doesn’t take seriously Israel’s founding maxim, “never again,” meaning that Israelis will not passively wait for world opinion to save them from an enemy that plainly and clearly seeks to annihilate them, as happened 1933-45. The Hamas organization is explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That is not a rhetorical gimmick; it is its declared unwavering primary goal.

The claim that Israel seeks to annihilate the Palestinians is simply a lie. Israel seeks to stop rocket attacks and tunnel invasions, and as long as Hamas is dedicated to those actions, they can expect a forceful Israeli reaction. The sealed border of Gaza has been part of that reaction, to counteract the traffic in war materials and the ready supply of suicide bombers who, Hamas declares, “love death more than the Israelis love life.”

The Hamas war leaders are killing their own people to score public relations points. The particulars of the Hamas arsenal embedded among the civilian Gaza population are so firmly established that the facts are hardly worth rehearsing. Anyway, the world doesn’t care about those facts. Israel’s will to exist is an annoyance to it.

Of course, Gaza is just one flash point in an Islamic region much more broadly inflamed in conflict between different Islamic brands and their political subsidiaries. The main reason (unacknowledged) is overpopulation of the region due to short-term wealth from oil. With oil production peaking across North Africa and the Middle East, the world can expect at least a generation of violent conflict over the table-scraps of Modernity. Even the Islamic nations with scant oil reserves have been hugely affected by a half-century of this regional oil wealth. The crack-up in the shadow of this brief historical episode has been easy to anticipate. World opinion is not going to stop it.

By the way, where was world opinion a month ago when ISIS was crucifying and beheading its way out of Syria into central Iraq? World opinion took those horrors in stride because that’s exactly the kind of behavior that world opinion now expects from radical Islamic maniacs.

Israel is a sideshow to all that, really, but one that attracts a lot of attention, with the memory of the Nazi “final solution” lingering on in the atrophying moral organs of what has been loosely called “the West,” where the last great world conflagration played out. It is ridiculous, of course, to compare the lot of the Gaza Palestinians to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Jews locked in the Warsaw ghetto were not firing rockets out of it, nor did they ever declare that Germany had no right to exist.

The Palestinians will find justice when they find a leadership that is willing to grant Israel a right to exist and when they stop firing rockets and sending tunnel commandoes into Israel to wreak havoc. If they started with that, they could expect a conversation to begin with Israel over new terms of coexistence. But they have to demonstrate an interest in coexistence. There’s no evidence of that so far. Why this simple equation is not understood by world opinion is an abiding mystery.

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