Circle Jerk In the Middle East

One of the most striking things about the Middle East is how little things really change. Read a book or an article written years ago and except for the names of the players, the game remains the same. And looking at today's news, we can get a good idea of the reason why.

Today was a particularly florid day of Israel bashing in the press and elsewhere. There were a number of examples in the dinosaur media, with the flagship effort being anti-Semite and hired Saudi shill Jimmy Carter's appearance in the Washington Post. It was such a self serving, bigoted helping of outright horse manure that it would be beneath me to dignify it by deconstructing it , although Jules Crittenden and Don Surber do a decent job of rebutting this senile bigot if you're interested.

Meanwhile, the Nation's resident buffoon David Corn makes the case that anyone who finds a tad of Jew hatred in the Israel bashing coming from the Left is 'playing the anti-Semitism card.' And Time Magazine's Tim McGirk, supposedly a serious reporter pens a feature three pager asking 'Can Israel survive Its Assault on Gaza?'

In the UN, the Arab bloc and the Europeans are working around the clock to save Hamas, and al-Guardian is writing about the Obama administration wanting to negotiate directly with Hamas once he's in.

What's happening of course is the Middle East version of the film 'Groundhog Day' where the same events keep repeating themselves over and over.

Israel is provoked beyond measure and defends herself, and then is hit with 'outrage' by the so-called international community who were nowhere to be found when the Arabs were launching aggression against the Jews. And just at the point of a decisive victory, Israel is forced to accept a ceasefire to preserve the status quo and spare the Arab aggressors 'humiliation.'

This happened in the 1948 war when Israel was forced to accept a ceasefire in place, in 1956 when Israel was forced to withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for security guarantees that were never kept, in the Six Day War, in the Yom Kippur War when Arik Sharon was prevented from destroying the Egyptian Third Army and eliminating any military threat from Egypt for the foreseeable future, in Lebanon when the IDF could have eliminated Arafat and Fatah for all time, and in the Hezbollah war when Israel finally committed her full ground troops at the end of the war, had crossed the Litani and had Hezbollah in an iron ring in South Lebanon when they were pressured to withdraw leaving Hezbollah in place to rearm and fight another day. And the pressure appears to be ramping up for the same kind of open ended non-solution to Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza.

Actually McGirk's piece, rife with misinformation and faulty reasoning as it is* makes my point in a left handed way the author didn't intend. The longer this process keeps being repeated,the farther away peace will be.

What really brings peace is not sparing the aggressor 'humiliation'. That only leads them to believe that victory is just another throw of the dice away, and gives rise to revanchist fantasies.

What brings peace is defeat and the realization that further hostilities are useless and too costly to pursue..particularly when the side that gets defeated is the one that initiated the war in the first place and the entire ideology that sparked the war is discredited and humiliated. Both the United States and Israel have experienced the historical truth of this directly and would do well to remember it.

The Germans and the Japanese experienced total and catastrophic defeat in WWII,and because of that the fascist ideology that drove them into aggressive war was totally abandoned. The results speak for themselves.

Egypt and Jordan only ended hostilities with Israel after a series of defeats that destroyed the ideology of Pan-Arabism, showed them that Israel was there to stay and that the dream of pushing the Jews into the sea was a hopeless fantasy.

The Jordanians and Egyptians had and have no great love for the Jews. They made peace because they saw no sense in continuing. They made peace because they were broke and desperately needed US aid, because in Egypt's case,they had a real leader in Anwar Sadat capable of seeing this and because the Egyptians realized that Israel has the capability to blow the Aswan Dam and put most of the inhabited part of Egypt under 15 feet of water in the event war breaks out again.

In Jordan's case, the Hashemite monarchy is a Bedouin aristocracy ruling over what was originally created by the British to be the Arab state in Palestine, with a population that is over 80% non-Bedouin Palestinian Arab. Another lost war would undoubtedly lead to the end of Hashemite monarchy.

Both Egypt and Jordan thus understand the consequences of another war....and the benefits of peace, even with a nation they largely despise.

If the international community actually cared about peace in the Middle East, they would applaud the idea of Hamas and its genocidal creed suffering a total defeat. It would provide the Palestinians with their first real concrete consequences of aggressive war, destroy and discredit a poisonous group of Islamic fascists and provide an incentive for the Palestinians to realize that Israel is not going anywhere and that it is time make the compromises necessary for peace.

Instead,by taking Hamas' side,they are choosing to prolong the conflict...thus causing more death and destruction for the people they claim to want to 'help.'

Apparently deligitimizing Israel is more important to them. I can only speculate as to why.


*(As only one example, McGirk cites the ridiculous 'demographic' argument as an imperative for the Israelis to give the Arabs whatever they want in hopes of being left in peace, failing to realize that the Jewish birthrate in Judea and Samaria has been more than keeping pace with the Arabs, or that according to impartial census,the Palestinian population is much lower than claimed. The Palestinians have been vastly inflating their numbers for years, both to convince gullible Israelis to swallow the same demographics argument and because the Palestinian's aid is figured on a per capita basis.

McGirk also assumes that any final settlement that involves swapping populations will of course only involve Jews being removed from their homes, while both Arab 'refugees' enjoying the so-called right of return and the present Arab population will continue to live in what's left of Israel without any changes. There are a number of indicaters that point to a very different outcome.

For the record, McGirk is the 'journalist' who broke the story of the Haditha 'massacre.' Now that they been acquitted,there are seven marines who might consider suing Time for libel.)