The Final Reckoning On November 25th, TIME magazine reported that the Bush administration was in the process of establishing relations with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and has warned Israeli Prime Minister Olmert against resorting to any military action against it or Iran before he leaves office. If true, the US and Israel are on a collision course. Nations not only have the right, but the obligation to defend their citizenry and territory from attack. As such, it is only a matter of time before Hamas and its Palestinian sympathizers are called to account for the death and destruction wrought by thousands of missiles they have fired into Israeli cities, towns and kibbutzim over the past three years. Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar noted recently: "We do not recognize the State of Israel or its right to control any of the land of Palestine. Palestine is holy Islamic land. Our national problem is not related only to the West Bank, Gaza, and al-Quds (Jerusalem)...but to Palestine, all [the territory of] Palestine." By that he meant Israel proper or what he terms "the Zionist entity." Unfortunately, Zahar is not alone in this thinking. A recent poll of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza asked: "Do you support or oppose suicide bombings against Israeli civilians?" Fifty-six percent (56%) said they support it. This parallels the results of an earlier survey conducted jointly by Public Opinion Research of Israel and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion. That survey found that only 13% of Palestinians agreed with the statement that "Hamas was a terrorist group"; 82% agreed that Hamas was a "freedom-fighting organization"; and a mere 10% believed that bombings targeting Israeli civilians in buses and restaurants could be classified as "acts of terrorism."
These attitudes suggest an enormous ethical and moral divide between Palestinian and Israeli cultures. What the Bush administration fails to understand is that Hamas didn't get elected by accident. It got elected because its very rationale for existence reflects the prevailing attitude within mainstream Palestinian society. For the Palestinians, terrorism is not a weapon borne of desperation but a strategic choice. If Hamas and its Palestinian supporters seek the annihilation of Israel, they had best understand the ultimate consequences.
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute writes: "Real peace and successful reconstruction are in direct proportion to the degree to which an enemy has been vanquished - the aim being that an enemy will come to understand that it cannot go on being what it has been." In effect, only after eradicating the reasons for which wars are fought - slavery, fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism - can real peace and re-construction follow. According to Hanson, an enemy is vanquished when it is rendered incapable and unwilling to continue the conflict. Only then can its terror apparatus be dismantled; its leadership replaced, its capacity to wage further war be eliminated; its weapons seized; its militias hunted down; its propaganda machine terminated; its educational system reformed; its human and financial resources channeled back into massive social and economic reconstruction, and its population prepared for a new and better future. If his historical analyses of war, victory and defeat are correct, neither Israel nor the US will be able to accommodate or moderate an enemy whose entire rationale for existence is its divinely-inspired mission to conquer Israel and compel its citizens to submit to Islam.
Faced with a choice between annihilation and survival, Israel will choose survival. War is neither pleasant nor desirable, but in an environment where Palestinian suicide bombers are trained from infancy to hate Jews and are revered as "martyrs," where Palestinian children play soccer with the decapitated head of a fallen Israeli soldier and have an orgy in the blood of their Israeli victims, where Palestinian mothers celebrate the "martyrdom" of their children, and where Palestinians are taught a culture of death in their textbooks, schools and summer camps, in their mosques and marketplaces, in their radio and television programs, in their video games and on the Internet, total war becomes necessary to eradicate the culture that breeds such pathologies. Churchill, Eisenhower and Patton understood this. They understood that it would have been impossible to dismantle the Hitler Youth, the Nazi SS, the death camps and the cult of Aryan supremacy without the complete and total destruction of the Third Reich. Only such destruction permitted the re-birth of a new Germany from the ashes of World War II. The idea that a genocidal, messianic regime like Hamas can be bribed or cajoled into denying its rationale for existence is the height of folly and flies in the face of history.
Eventually, a point
will be reached when Israel will be forced to act with or without
America’s blessing. Just as the creation of free and democratic
societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a
comprehensive purge of their pre-war political, economic, military,
social and cultural infrastructures, including the re-education of their
entire populations and the rebuilding of their societies over many
years, so Palestinian society must undergo a profound upheaval followed
by an equally profound metamorphosis that will sweep away the concept of
"martyrdom" and religiously-inspired genocide and sow the seeds for a
new tomorrow. Like it or not, the "death cult" must be extirpated from
the Palestinian psyche. That will not be achieved by forcing the
Israelis to concede Palestinian statehood to terrorists, relinquishing
the Golan Heights to Syria, returning the Sheba ‘a Farms area to
Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, dividing Jerusalem, rectifying Israel’s
borders, or settling on a refugee compensation formula – at least, not
in the first instance. Real peace will be achieved only after the
Palestinians have been brought to the realization that their dream of
conquering Israel is futile, and that whatever the future holds for
them, it will be far better than the hell of war they have brought upon
themselves. In the end, the Palestinians will eventually learn to reject violence not because it is politically ineffective, but because it is morally wrong. To achieve that level of understanding may take decades, but one thing is certain - only a society freed from the demons of its past can succeed. The scourge of "martyrdom" and the jihadist rationale that epitomizes Hamas must be eradicated from Palestinian society. Anything short of this merely prolongs Palestinian agony, delays Palestinian reconciliation and re-construction, sows the seeds for continuing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and renders a new Palestinian rebirth impossible. |
