The Middle East on Fire, Again

On Friday August 1^st, in a full-page ad in the print edition of the Washington Post, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel directed a plea to Hamas, imploring it to reject what he termed the practice of “child sacrifice,” Hamas’s alleged military tactic of using children as human shields in its war against the State of Israel.

With the clarity of a survivor of WWII’s Nazi genocide, Wiesel stated that “what we are suffering through today is not a battle of Jew versus Arab, of Israeli versus Palestinian,” but that “it is a battle between those who celebrate life and those who champion death . . . . a battle of civilization versus barbarism.”

Israel: Here to Stay

Why is it, I often wonder, that the rest of the world seems to get its nose bent out of shape whenever Israel moves to defend itself against unprovoked military or terrorist attacks as they rain down upon its citizenry and its sovereign territory?
 
Some of the answer lies in the fact that most Arab nations of the Middle East have not accepted the presence of Jews in their midst ever since Israel was established in 1948.
 
Yet, the concept of the eventual re-establishment of a nation for Jewish people in the land of their ancestors is not new – the Palestine region was being considered as a homeland for Jewish people at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, long before the establishment of Israeli statehood.  The European Holocaust of World War II only accelerated the process.

Israel, a Beleaguered Nation

Although I had planned to write about another topic in today’s blog, I feel compelled to record a few words about Jews in The Middle East. The hatred focused upon Israel as a nation and upon individual Jews is systemic and viral in that part of the world. Similarly, the reaction of other nations – especially those in the West – when the Jewish nation takes steps to guarantee its survival is troubling.

The Israeli interdiction of a flotilla of six ships bound for Gaza is the latest example of such a knee-jerk, anti-Israel condemnation by the international community.

The purpose of the interdiction and inspection of all shipping bound for Gaza is to assure that nations like Iran which seek the destruction of the Jewish state are not sending war materiel to the Hamas organization which controls Gaza. Once a Gaza-bound vessel is inspected by Israeli forces and found to be without armaments, it is permitted to proceed to its port of destination.

But this last flotilla originating in Turkey may have been designed as an ambush. The first five vessels were detained and inspected without incident. But insurgents on the sixth vessel appear to have planned to engage Israeli servicemen as they rappelled down ropes from a helicopter.

When individual Israeli servicemen were beaten and stabbed as they descended, they requested permission from their commander to fight back with their own weapons and were given the go-ahead and defended themselves, killing attackers in the process.

Israel is surrounded by a ring of hatred that is irrational, which knows no bounds, and which is bent on the destruction of that country. The only thing holding the hatred in check is the seemingly eternal resolve of Jews to survive, backed up by the military preparedness of the Israeli state, and what has been – at least until now – the strong, unequivocal support of the U.S.

Since Israel became a nation in 1948, it has not always instituted the best policies towards its neighbors, and the Palestinian question remains a burning issue that needs to be resolved. But each time that Israel makes a significant concession such as, for example, giving up control of the Gaza Strip, retaliation from within the newly acquired Palestinian territory occurs – this time in the form of rocket attacks upon Israel.

That is why the embargo on shipping into Gaza is in effect, and that is why world leaders need to back off from their one-sided views of The Middle East situation vis-à-vis Israel.