Israel's Decline

The Holy Land is another topic that I have let slide over the past few months. Here's a catch-up laundry list on what I've neglected.

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When last we visited Armageddon's cockpit, the Islamist terrorist gang Hamas had just been elected to control of the "Palestinian Authority" in a landslide over the corrupt secular terrorist gang Fatah. This was generally seen by everybody outside Western diplomatic corps, the UN, and the Extreme Media as an endorsement by the "Palestinian" people of all-out war with Israel.

Sho' nuff, Hamas leaders didn't waste any time making a public display of their true allegiances:

Hamas leader Khalid Meshal met in Tehran with officials of Iran's mad mullahcracy this past Tuesday. "With respect to the challenges that we have ahead of us, Iran's role in the future of Palestine should continue and increase," Meshal said in a joint press conference in Tehran with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.

Can't call that dishonest, since both share the cherished objective of finishing the job Adolph Hitler started. A fact that seemed lost on no less a critical leader than President Bush, whose faith in democracy may be a little too blind:

[A]s democracy takes root, the responsibilities of governing will have a moderating influence on those who assume power in free elections. It's easier to be a martyr than a mayor, or a cabinet minister. When you're responsible for building roads and bridges and power stations and educating people and providing help, you're less likely to blow up health clinics and schools and bridges.

In democracies, elected leaders must deliver real change in people's lives, or the voters will boot them out at the next election time. This is a lesson that the leaders of Hamas will now have to learn, as they take power after their election victory in the Palestinian Territories. Hamas campaigned on a platform of fighting corruption and improving social services, and that is how a Hamas government will be judged by the Palestinian people.

No, Hamas campaigned on a platform of wiping out Israel. Making the trains run on time is beside the point, and is considered the Jews' job until Hamas finally drives them into the Med. This is the downside of mixing Islam and democracy, particularly for a people that (1) has been propagandized toward anti-Semitic hatred for several generations, (2) acting on that anti-Semitic hatred via terrorist warfare, and (3) doesn't have the armed supervision of an American occupation force to school them out of it, as does (for now, anyway) Iraq.

Short of sending such armed supervision into the "Palestinian territories," the only means we have of coercing Hamas is to cut off their Western gravy train - a dole to which they consider themselves to be unconditionally entitled. And with Western spinelessness such as the Bush Administration and its European "allies" showed in April, it's no wonder. Part of the concept of democracy is that an electorate gets the kind of government it deserves, and that includes incurring and accepting the consequences of its actions. If a people like the Pals elects a bunch of bloodthirsty Islamic fanatics to lead them, we are under no obligation to continue to subsidize them just because the bloodthirsty Islamic fanatics enjoy democratic legitimacy. Yet so haplessly inured is Foggy Bottom to the "peace process," even though there's never been any "peace" worthy of the name, that even in the midst of an ostensible war against Islamic fundamentalism even the Bushies continue the long and dismal Western tradition of Arabistism, irrational wishful thinking, and history-ignoring appeasement.

The truly alarming thing for the Israelis themselves is that, ironically, as a result of their own electoral choices, they're now led by a regime that is scarcely any less delusional than its Western pressurers:

In another example of the power of wishful thinking, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert concludes from editorials in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the British Guardian "condemning" Hamas that the world recognizes the absence of a peace partner for Israel and thus that Israel has no choice but to draw its own borders on the West Bank.

It's one thing to let your country's survival be determined in foreign capitals; it's beyond belief to let it be determined by Extreme Media editorial boards. Particularly the buying into the notion that Israel "needs" a "peace partner." The very notion is irrational; if the Israelis had a true "peace partner," there would be no need for a "peace process" or international pressure on the Jews to "take risks" for it. Indeed, that very term acknowledges that Israel has NEVER had a "peace partner," because if it ever had, such "risks" wouldn't arise. What "peace partner" really means is "appeasement beneficiary," the basic premise of which is inherent hostility the appropriate response to which is decisive military action for which the West, on Israeli's unsolicited behalf, has no stomach. Hence the endless leaning on the Jewish state to placate the Pals despite their relentless terrorist war - or, in other words, the "peace process."

Prime Minister Olmert, the nondescript successor to the late, disgraced Ariel Sharon (who was elected back in 2001 to defend Israel, not sell it out like he did), decided early last month, in the face of irreconcilable (and ludicrously predictable) Hamas instransigence, to unilaterally determine his country's new "border" with the PA. Which sounded refreshingly bold until you learned that what this actually means is an Israeli retreat from the West Bank akin to PM Sharon's disastrous flight from Gaza last summer:

On its surface, Olmert’s convergence plan appears to align with U.S. national security interests by seeming to enhance both the traditional American support for a land-for-peace formula that will bring about the establishment of a peaceful Palestinian state, and the traditional U.S. opposition to Israeli settlement of the West Bank. However, when the convergence plan is examined critically, it becomes clear that if the U.S. government lends its support to the plan’s implementation, it will undermine its most important interests in the Middle East – namely the defeat of jihadist forces and the fostering of security, freedom, democracy and liberal values throughout the Arab and Islamic world.

This would seem to reside in the "duh" category. Hamas is an Islamist terrorist organization akin to al Qaeda; accordingly there should be no question of funding the PA under their control under any circumstances or conditions; but we continue to do so anyway. Just as we fight terrorists in Iraq, but demand that Israel refrain from doing so in their own territory. And now we applaud the Jews cutting and running from the West Bank - without which their frontiers will be even more indefensible now than they were forty years ago when the Six Day War led to its original acquisition by the Israelis - even as the same Administration continues to resist defeatist calls for our own cutting and running from Iraq because it would - brace yourselves - reward Islamist terrorism.

The more Olmert attempts to defend this policy of deliberate retreat, the more pathetic he becomes:

Olmert's assertion that the existence of isolated Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria is a root cause of the Palestinian and Arab war against Israel today is exposed in all its strategic blindness. Far from moderating the Palestinians, Israel's retreat from Gaza last summer radicalized them and their allies throughout the Islamic world by fanning their faith that Israel will one day disappear completely.

At the end of the day, Israel will achieve peace only when the Palestinians and the Arab world in general accept the fact that Israel will never be wiped off the map and so agree to peacefully coexist with the Jewish state. By asserting that the commingling of Jews and Arabs in Judea and Samaria is a cause of the war, Olmert is saying that there is no chance of ever coexisting with the Arabs. In so doing, he is effectively telling Israel's worst enemies that they are right - that the Jews are retreating and will eventually disappear if they keep fighting.

It's worse even than that, though. The Israeli PM was actively apologizing for the very existence of Jews in territory that they would not occupy but for prior Arab/Islamic aggression. And which they must continue to occupy if future Arab/Islamic aggression is to be forestalled. As Brother Meringoff wrote, "It is the Jewish state, not its settlements, that Palestinians resent above all. They have said so repeatedly. One wonders why more people can't show the Palestinians enough respect to take them at their word, especially when their deeds corroborate their word."

I wish I knew. Because Olmert's plan, in addition to being tantamount to Israeli national suicide, would turn the West Bank, as Frank Gaffney aptly observed, into "a[nother] Taliban-style safe-haven for other terrorists" - something that appears to concern the White House when it happens in, say, Somalia, but doesn't even occur to them when the prospective new venue is the Holy Land.

And the worst part of Prime Minister Olmert's self-prostration? Even it isn't enough:

[T]he [Bush A]dministration's unease with Olmert is not based on [rational] concern. Instead, the Administration thinks that Olmert is being too tough. According to the [Washington] post, Bush is pleased that Olmert's plan contains the seeds of a Palestinian state, but worried that it constitutes a "land grab" (remember this is the unilateral surrender of land and the forced closure of 72 settlements with at least 60,000 residents) or at least will so appear to the Europeans. Thus, the Administration reportedly has been leaning on Olmert to negotiate with Palestinian figure head Abbas rather than simply withdrawing.

The Administration's posture demonstrates the ultimate futility of Olmert's plan, even assuming that it doesn't massively set back Israeli security. What Olmert sees as a final settlement of the dispute over Israel's borders the rest of the world sees as an illegitimate land grab. Thus, Israel will come under more pressure from the U.S. and others to negotiate with the Palestinians (if Bush is leaning on Israel on behalf of the Europeans, imagine how much more a Democratic president would lean) and eventually will succumb.

But instead of negotiating from the present highly favorable map, it will be negotiating from a shrunken position.

I've always wondered how the Israelis - the fiercest anti-terror warriors and sheer tenacious survivors the world has ever seen - would ever be brought to the point where they would be willing to entrust their national survival entirely to outsiders. I'm still not sure of the "why" beyond sheer attrition of will. But it's happening right before our very eyes.

Of course, we also know that the Israel we see now will never again be destroyed, so the demonic dreams of Hamas and the Iranian mullahs will never fully be realized. But the Jews - and the West, and the rest of the world, for that matter - are going to pay a harrowing price for this unforgivable foolishness.