Israel, We Hate You Even More
Something critics of Israel have never fully explained: you have an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank, you have a political party that still remains aggressive about Israel and encourages the shooting of missiles into "enemy" territory. What is the "proportionate" response to these actions?
This is the scenario that Israelis have to confront regarding Gaza. I've not heard of one leftist who declares Israel to be morally bankrupt and Nazi-like ever explain on what basis does Hamas have to continue shooting rockets into Israel from Gaza? Israel's "evil" control over the Strip is used as an excuse because leftists love to cling to the notion that violence is the exclusive result of deprivation. So Israel may have left the Gaza Strip, but it maintains tight control and an "illegal" blockade, therefore, nothing has really changed and the missiles deserve to be fired.
Never does a leftist challenge Hamas as to why their focus is not on state building and even rebuilding damaged infrastructure, but on more attacks and arms smuggling. How are you supposed to deal with an adversary that insists on clinging to violent confrontation as a sacred right and won't budge past that? Based on this experience alone, why in hell would anyone think an independent Palestinian state with borders even remotely close to the 1967 Green Line (not an international boundary) would never be cause for concern? Put another way, if grief and destruction is the result of Israel's withdrawal from occupied territory in Gaza, what incentive do they have to happily let the Palestinians control the West Bank with an organization like Hamas at the helm?
In 2005, the country withdrew unilaterally from its 20-year occupation of southern Lebanon. Even after all that action, and verification of the withdrawal by those stalwarts at the United Nations, Hizbullah insists the resistance will continue, and the focal point of this is the Shabaa Farms, a postage-size swath of land that Israel and the international body says is part of Syria. For this alone (ahem), Hizbullah is armed to the teeth, deadlier now than it was in 2006, and insisting its right to confront the "Zionist aggressor." Again, where is the leftist explanation for this? What's the excuse for this? The world demands that Israel cede everything and gain nothing, because whatever happens is Israel's fault. When the so-called "Party of God" decides to pull the trigger (and it will) and send deadlier missiles into Israel and the Jewish state responds, who do you think will get tagged with the "disproportionate force" moniker? Sure, there may be some huffing and puffing about Hizbullah, but the world fears them and their radical agenda, not the Israelis.
None of this is to suggest that Israel is blameless. Its handling of the raid on the "Freedom for Gaza" flotilla was so botched, it's almost impossible to calculate the damage to Israel's reputation. For leftists, it's further proof of the demoralized nature of the Jewish state; for Hamas, it's a propaganda coup the likes of which haven't been seen recently. The pressure will be on Israel to end its blockade and take everybody right to the ante status quo: the threat of arms reaching Hamas who will use it against Israel.
Guess what? They're already doing that now. And there's no way to stop them from doing it in the future. Leftist haters of Israel can't answer beyond the point of ending the blockade. And they probably don't want to, because whatever happens, the Jews deserve it.