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I suppose, in a way, you really have to hand it to them.
The Israelis, I mean.
When it comes to all things military, there is no nation on the face of the planet as astute, as innovative, as determined, and as ruthless as Israel. I guess living in a dangerous neighbourhood surrounded by enemies will do that to you.
For the record, I’m not here to be an Israeli apologist. I believe Israel has a right to exist, and even better, exist in peace, but that’s something that seems unattainable given the perpetual disfunction and political violence that’s common place in the Middle East.
But I’m going to add to that by saying the following:
Also for the record, I’m not here to be a Palestinian apologist either. I believe Palestine has a right to exist, and even better, to exist in peace, just like Israel. The sad and unfortunate aspect of this whole thing is the commonly-held, although misguided notion that an Israeli state and a Palestinian state cannot co-exist, since both entities claim essentially the same lands and both entities have “leadership” more than willing to spill blood to advance their political claims. I will say, though, that Hamas, the ruling entity of Palestinian Gaza, is the kind of leadership that’s willing to arbitrarily spill the blood of the very citizens they claim to represent and protect. Hamas, an Iranian-backed proxy, is more than willing to sacrifice the lives of its own citizens to make what they feel is a legitimate political point. This, all by itself, differentiates them from the Israelis, who have demonstrated an eager willingness to kill their enemies in the thousands, yet at the same time will move heaven and earth to save the life of a single Israeli.
When it comes to war, nobody can really touch Israel in terms of training, weaponry, national resolve, and the prosecution and execution of war, whether that be tactically, strategically, in intelligence gathering, and the use of outright dirty tricks.
This is the nation that came up with the Iron Dome missile defence system. They took the American F-35 and converted it into something that meets their own needs, possibly taking the most elite warplane available right now — not counting the F-22 Raptor — and turning it into the most elite warplane available right now.
They are a nation that won decisive victories in wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, all of them conflicts with multiple nations simultaneously. In the past six months, Israel has absolutely hobbled Iran by destroying their proxies in Hamas and Hezbollah, trading missiles and bombs with another Iranian proxy — the Houthis — and attacking and eviscerating Iran itself, humiliating that nation with the ease in which they dismantled the Iranian air defence system then followed that up by bombing the place with impunity while the Iranians could really do nothing more than watch. Israel has turned Lebanon into an empty sock, while in Syria, a long-time enemy has been chased away leaving a toothless threat from that quarter.
How about the exploding pagers and cell phones that wiped out the leadership of Hezbollah? And that Ai-assisted remote-control heavy machine gun they used to kill a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist, the latest of those types to be either shot, poisoned, blown-up, or shot to pieces as they drive home for dinner. Did you catch how they assassinated the leader of Hamas at the funeral of an Iranian general they killed in an airstrike in Lebanon?
As I gush over Israeli capabilities and their resolve to use those capabilities, I have to really double-down with praise for their development of a new weapon, the latest to come out of Israeli military research and development. It’s really a kind of old-new weapon, old in that it’s actually been around since forever, yet new in that it’s the Israelis who are employing it.
That weapon is starvation.
It’s bad enough that Israel has killed upwards of 40,000 people in the Gaza conflict, a conflict that had legitimacy as a response to the Hamas attack on Israel a couple of Octobers ago, but a conflict that lost that legitimacy when Israel continued to take Palestinian lives, the vast, vast majority of those lives belonging to non-combatants, another name for innocents, yet another name for women, children, the aged and the frail. These are the people Hamas sacrificed to initiate their plan, a plan that horribly failed and bounced back on them ten-fold.
When you’re attacking Israel, you should be more than cognizant of the hard fact that Israel is completely Old Testament in its approach to self-defence and national survival. It’s not an eye for an eye, or a tooth for a tooth. If you pluck out an Israeli eye, they’ll pluck out twenty of yours, probably chopping off your arms and legs for additional emphasis.
Their philosophy is one of “if you hit us” then “we’ll hit you back even harder.” And you have to give them some grudging credit on this score, because that Old Testament deterrent has been keeping hostile Arab nations at bay for decades. That and the certain knowledge that Israel possesses nuclear weapons.
Back in the day, a bomb would go off on a bus in Tel Aviv, killing a couple of Israeli citizens. Within 24 hours, two Israeli F-16s would appear in the sky over Beirut, Lebanon. Those two fighter jets would loose their ordnance at a target, likely levelling a multi-storey apartment building, likely killing dozens, more than likely many dozens. And why? Because some Hezbollah leader, or Iranian leader was using this apartment building as cover for their headquarters, hiding behind innocent civilians, and daring the Israelis to strike, which the Israelis almost always did.
It’s about proportion. Or rather, it’s about the lack of proportion.
Kill one of mine and I’ll kill 100 of yours. Blow up a bus and we’ll blow up your capital city. It’s a mathematical calculus that results in one dead Israeli equalling 100 dead Lebanese, or put another way, 1=100. In the world of math, that’s a counter-intuitive equation, because it’s not an equation, since both sides don’t balance out with the same value on each side. But this is Israeli War Math, a math that has its own deadly rules.
For months, the Israelis pounded the Palestinian enclave of Gaza relentlessly and mercilessly, just like they do with every conflict they’re in. They flattened the place, along with schools, hospitals, clinics, food sources, water sources, and just about any other thing that dared raise its head. The rationale is always the same, that those no-good Hamas bastards were hiding in caves built beneath these schools and hospitals, daring the Israelis to kill innocent civilians to get at them. Boy, did Hamas ever not do its homework.
So now, these many months later, Gaza is a pock-marked slice of flattened earth and rubble, leaving the surviving inhabitants in a state of critical danger, as essentials like food and water are scarce, and nowhere near sufficient for the population.
So here’s the thing.
International aid groups have been rallying to come to the aid of the innocent civilians, the innocent victims, still living in Gaza. By still living I mean two things really. One is that they’re still alive after the relentless and vicious Israeli assault on their homes. And second, it’s not as if they had a choice, since there’s nowhere else for them to go. The Israelis have them all bottled up and won’t allow then to leave. So victims they remain.
Those international aid groups intent on delivering food, water, and other essentials of life? They’ve been routinely blocked, stopped, harassed, and fired upon by the Israelis, in some cases resulting in the deaths of aid workers, including Canadians. And then, in the most egregious, yet almost predictable circumstance, Israeli troops opened up on hundreds of desperate and starving Palestinian citizens who were making a last-ditch attempt to reach the aid workers and the food and water they had in their possession. They were cut to pieces.
This is a war crime.
I will stand by that assertion for as long as I can stand, and would have the same opinion if it were anyone else doing it, whether they be British, American, French, or even Canadian troops, using lethal force against starving non-combatants and innocents. Meeting empty stomachs with a hail of gunfire is a crime of both proportion and ethical morality.
Israel is not Soviet Russia. It’s not North Korea, or even Iran. Israel is none of these places. It’s a democracy. And yes, it’s a democracy in a tough, dangerous neighbourhood, but there is no circumstance in my world where women and children get gunned down for the crime of wanting to be fed. Those aren’t the actions of a liberal democracy, they’re the actions of despotic, ruthless, and murderous dictators.
The killer irony in all of this is the fact that modern Israel got its start in the face of the Holocaust, where over 6 million Jews met their demise at the hands of ruthless, murderous European dictators. The upshot of all that was the State of Israel, plunked down smack-dab in the middle of what was then Palestine. And now we have the Israelis, the generational descendants of Holocaust survivors, perpetrating the very same crimes that were once committed upon them, and their very own people.
I don’t have a ready solution for any of this. The land where Israel sits today was the land of Ancient Israel, biblical Israel, a homeland of the Jewish people for as long as anyone can remember, that is before the Romans sent them scattering over two thousand years ago. That same land, in more modern times, was occupied relatively peacefully by the Palestinians, who in their turn were the ones to be dispersed to make way for the new Israeli state at the conclusion of World War 2.
So who has the greater claim? The Israelis, because of ancient title claims? The Palestinians, because of the more modern territorial claims? Or the Israelis again, because they’ve got more and better guns, and more and stronger allies?
This is among the world’s greatest tragedies, if it’s not already the greatest.
I really don’t care what your predicament may be, the wilful and deliberate starving of innocent human beings of any age or gender is not just a crime, it’s a really big crime, perhaps the worst ever.
And so long as Israel continues to employ such medieval tactics, it will continue to watch its international support erode.
Today, French President Emmanuel Macron stated that Palestine should be its own state, consistent with the so-called Two-State Solution. That’s a courageous move by the leader of a strong military/economic/democratic power. I don’t know what a Two-State Solution looks like on a map, but it’s moves like Macron’s that will get other significant nations to reassess their own positions, so I’m going to give Macron his deserved props.
Our own prime minister, Mark Carney, said today that what Israel is dong in Gaza right now, the lethal interference with food aid, is wrong.
He’s right.
But it’s not enough to just say it, you have to be prepared to do something about it. Perhaps the statements from the leaders of France and Canada might be what it takes to get Britain and Germany on board as well.
Forget the Americans. They’ve lost any moral relevancy they might have felt they once had. They’re the only nation that has any influence over the Israelis, what with the billions of dollars in aid and weapons the Americans provide to Israel, and have for years.
As enablers, what’s happening in Gaza right now is a stain on America itself, another in a long list of self-inflicted stains that nation has perpetrated upon itself.
The driver of the get-away car is equally culpable in any crime involving violence.
This, sadly, is part of the America we see today.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 