Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Israelis represent order, civilization

The North American media and many private individuals harbour the notion that some sort of moral equivalence obtains between the Israeli and Palestinian sides in the struggle for control of the Holy Land, or worse, that the Palestinian cause is morally superior. Hogwash!

The Israelis represent the side of civilization, order and the rule of law; the Palestinians terrorism, mayhem and warlordism.

Civilized people do not borderline institutionalize strapping high explosive nail bombs to persons and having them suicidally detonate in crowds of children. That is mad dog criminal insanity. Civilized people do not deliberately shoot babies out of their mother's arms.

I'm not suggesting that the Israelis' record is lily-white, or that the Palestinian people may not have some legitimate grievances, but deliberately murdering civilians blows their credibility as far as I'm concerned.

Since 1948, the Palestinian Arabs have been a militarily conquered people, but they have been treated much more fairly than Jewish minorities in any Islamic theocracy you can name.

Arab citizens of Israel can vote in real democratic elections (which are also exceedingly thin on the ground in Islamic states), and to stand for election themselves and sit in the Knesset if elected. They can work and prosper economically within the Israeli economy. They can practise their religion without interference. If they are unhappy with these conditions, they are also free to emigrate.

The argument is often heard in the West that all the Palestinians want is a self-governing homeland with secure borders. The Israeli government has accommodated these aspirations to a degree that would be unheard of in response to similar demands from Jewish minorities in any Islamic country.

However, even if Palestinians were granted full political autonomy and military control of the West Bank and Gaza, anyone who believes they would be satisfied with that and stand down their terrorist campaign against the Israeli "occupation" of greater Palestine, is dreaming in technicolour.

The stated objective of the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas, is to build an Islamic republic in all of Palestine, including what is now Israel. The other major Palestinian terrorist organization, Hizballah, which has nine seats in the Lebanese parliament, has called for a pan-Islamic jihad against Israel and the West.

The Palestinians are demanding right of return to not just Gaza and the West Bank, but to Israel proper, with a restoration of property annexed in the 1948 war. That is never going to happen.

Here is a reality check. Israel is in Palestine to stay. They have the whip hand militarily, and will continue to with support from the U.S. If there was ever an indicator that Israel was in danger of losing control of the situation, America would be obliged, thanks to American Jewish and pro-Israeli evangelical Christian political pressure to step in with whatever degree of military force necessary to guarantee Israel's security.

This makes Israel the overdog in the eyes of some underdog-loving Westerners, many of whom are also addled by the liberal humanist notion that there is no objective right or wrong - just a constellation of equally valid and legitimate points of view.

Few Western news stories about the most recent round of hostilities in Israel fail to note that a substantially greater number of Palestinians than Israelis have been killed, the unqualified implication being that Israel is somehow the aggressor. Again, hogwash.

Israeli military policy is that soldiers are not to use live ammunition against rioters not armed with guns unless their lives are in direct danger, and even in that case their orders are to aim at the assailants' legs.

If you chuck rocks at passing cars, buses, police and soldiers, you can reasonably expect retaliation. If you countenance and encourage suicidal mass murder with human bombs, you can reasonably expect retaliation.

The Israelis did not initiate this latest round of violence, but they have the military superiority to address it, and trained soldiers with helicopters, rockets and automatic infantry weapons are more than a match for rocks and Molotov cocktails.

If there is a workable proposal for "compromise" in Palestine, I have yet to hear it. The nature of this conflict is that one side or the other must prevail. I'm rooting for the side of civilization, democracy and the rule of law.

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