Letters to the Editor
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Rethinking?
Rethinking history or rewriting history? Won't change the fact that these arab countries sought to destroy israel from day one of it's reclamation. Long live Israel.
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Actually what Gandhi said
Was pretty much along the lines of mainstream sidewalk Marxist leftist asshole thought, to wit: All Jews should have committed mass collective suicide during the Holocaust as an act of protest against the Holocaust. Thanks but I think I'll take my moral direction from someone else all the same. Or if you prefer, YOU first.
The fact is, it's not that Israel wins or loses which irritates the left so much. It's that Israel refuses to willingly commit suicide and thereby relieve the left of guilt over its desire to see a new Holocaust, that makes them so mad.
I wonder though, since it appears that ZA owns the word 'apartheid' forever and ever and has become the unique arbiter of that definition, how the sidewalk Marxist left would have felt if the blacks in ZA had done the same (which by the way is where Gandhi cut his philosophical teeth on the matter). I wonder if they would prefer that anyone anywhere commit collective suicide a-la Jim Jones as an act of 'protest'? Well I can see at a least where their love of suicide bombings comes from.
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A casus belli as far as international law was concerned, too
The blockade of the Strait of Tiran was an act of war, according to international law, not 'just as far as Israel was concerned'.
(See http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Blockade)
If Egypt was so weak in relation to Israel, then it shouldn't have blockaded the Strait and provoked a war.
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Required Reading
http://www.meforum.org/article/1696
Excerpts:
Chechen nationalists and their foreign supporters pursued the same strategy in their war against Russia. Their willingness to suffer immense casualties—or, at least to permit the civilian population to suffer—may not have won an independent state, but they have both denied the Russian military the victory which Moscow sought and eroded international unwillingness to offer them concession in response to violence.[11] In July and August 2006, Hezbollah survived a withering Israeli air bombardment to claim victory amidst the rubble.[12] Careful planning and battlefield preparation coupled with a willingness to sacrifice Lebanese infrastructure paid off for the Iranian-trained group.[13] Had Serb officials shown the same morbid stamina in Kosovo, they might still control that territory. The question boils down to a battle between coercion and resilience. While the Serbs and many industrialized societies are unwilling to suffer unlimited civilian casualties, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah assign no such value to civilians in their areas of operation or control.
International legal constraints adopted by Western governments shift the balance in favor of resilience and so empower liberation movements, guerilla groups, and terrorists. Many African and Middle Eastern states augment their power relative to Western countries simply by eschewing legal responsibilities. The trend among European Union officials, U.S. military lawyers, and non-governmental organizations to apply maximal Geneva Convention protections universally, regardless of enemy combatant adherence to the accords, furthers this trend. If adversaries have no incentive to abide by international law, knowing that they are afforded universal protection regardless, then there is no consequence to utilizing terror or endangering the civilian population.
Terrorism: Democracy's Achilles' Heel
Terrorism becomes a tactic of choice when its potential to achieve political aims outweighs the costs of its use. Misapplication of international law among Western societies encourages terrorism by decreasing its cost while increasing its effectiveness. On April 15, 2002, for example, six European Union countries endorsed a United Nations Human Rights Commission resolution that endorsed the use of violence as a means to achieve Palestinian statehood.[14] The result, in practice, created a precedent in which terrorists could argue that international humanitarian law justified their embrace of suicide bombing.
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The Peoples' Republic of China continues to embrace surprise as mechanism to sidestep comparative weakness on other fronts. Michael Pillsbury, a former Pentagon official and expert on Chinese military doctrine, noted that Beijing's strategic thinkers consider the Israeli destruction of the Egyptian air force in the opening hours of the 1967 Six-Day War to be a model of inferior forces triumphing over the superior because of surprise. The Chinese navy, likewise, sees submarine warfare as a means to enable its inferior forces to, by stealth, triumph over the superior.[58]
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Diplomacy is important, but the rush to abandon pre-emption in favor of multilateral affirmation can be irresponsible. If citizens elect political leadership transparently and democratically, then it is the responsibility of that government to guarantee their security, not multilateral organizations whose officials are not directly accountable to any citizenry. The 1981 Israeli air strike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor illustrates this issue. The United Nation Security Council "strongly" condemned Israel's actions[71] and, yet, hindsight shows that the Israeli leadership made the correct decision. International organizations often discuss problems, but they seldom solve them. There is often an inverse relationship between the size of any coalition or multilateral organization, and its effectiveness.
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This is why we can't have nice things...
Of Israel's many problems, one of them is on display here in these pages. Anyone who questions the motivations or actions of the government of Israel (or even, as in Tolan's case, merely suggests that one could question), is immediately assailed with charges or insinuations of being an anti-Semite or self-hating Jew.
But the fact is that Israel is a real state existing in the real world. Real states behave cynically and ruthlessly, frequently with callous disregard for the rights of those who stand in the way of policy.
This is the way that real states act. And to suggest that the Israeli government has always stood above such nastiness, always conducting itself with unimpeachable ethics and nobility, should be clearly ridiculous.
But no. To suggest that the Israeli government has not always been above such nastiness opens up a critic to the charges of being an anti-Semite or self-hating Jew. It's for this same reason (among others) that we see so many policy-makers and candidates for office falling over each other to show the world how pro-Israel they are.
This climate of fearful, obsequious pandering results in a situation that is detrimental not only to the Palestinians and Israel's neighbors, but also to Israel itself.
Israel cannot survive as a spoiled, adolescent nation. Just as small, vulnerable children can't be sheltered by their parents for the rest of their lives, small vulnerable states need to be allowed to grow up, learn from their mistakes, take a drubbing every now and then, and figure out how to make their way in the world.
Call me a self-hating Jew if you like. But remember that patriotism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel-- and Jewish scoundrels are not exempt.