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School bus struck by laser-guided antitank rocket fired across Gaza border

When I heard that Hamas had fired an antitank missile across the border directly at an Israeli school bus, wounding the driver and critically injuring a child — only the fact that the bus was otherwise empty prevented an even more horrendous outcome — I thought: they want a war. The fact that the attack was accompanied by a barrage of at least 50 rockets and mortars fired at Israeli towns and cities reinforced that assumption.

You can easily imagine their thinking: if a bus full of Jewish children goes up in flames, Israel will have to take the bait. But the last war was painful for Hamas. Why would they want another go-around?

I wasn’t surprised to see that Barry Rubin agrees with me that Hamas is looking for trouble. But here is his analysis of why:

The recent upheavals in the Arab world have emboldened revolutionary Islamists and Hamas most of all. Its close ally, the Muslim Brotherhood, can operate freely in Egypt. There is much support for Islamism in the Egyptian army. And even the “moderate” presidential candidate Muhammad ElBaradei said that Egypt would go to war if Israel attacked the Gaza Strip.

Does Egypt want war with Israel? Of course not. But Hamas calculates–and, of course, it often miscalculates–that crisis with Israel will increase its support from Egypt and perhaps even create a situation where Cairo intervenes on its side on some level.

At a minimum, thousands of Egyptian volunteers, mobilized by the Brotherhood, might fight on its side, money would be raised in Egypt on its behalf, and large amounts of arms would flow across the border.  Then, too, international public opinion could be mobilized against Israel with tales–often phony–of atrocities as happened last time. And the Palestinian Authority (PA), ruling the West Bank, could be shamed and subverted. While the PA can claim to be delivering some prosperity–which the West thinks is all people care about–Hamas can deliver heroism and jihad.

Rubin also points out that since the fall of the Mubarak regime, the border between Egypt and Gaza has been wide open, with weapons — like the antitank missile used in today’s attack or the Iranian Grad missiles fired at Ashkelon, etc. — freely flowing into Gaza.

Hamas thinks it can’t lose: either (1) the IDF will smash back into Gaza, and Hamas — with Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood help — will be able to put up a vicious fight, perhaps even drawing the Egyptian army into it, perhaps triggering a two-front war with Hizballah in the north. Or (2), Israel will content itself with limited retaliation, and Hamas can continue gaining points in the Arab world for its effectiveness at killing Jewish children with impunity.

Today’s attack was not random: it was a bright yellow school bus, and a laser-guided missile. The creature that pulled the trigger knew exactly what he was doing.

Hamas has already taken credit for the attack with the following statement:

Palestinian resistance factions in Gaza targeted with number of mortar shells the nearby Israeli settlements, bus driver and other Israeli settler were injured after a shell targeted their bus driving in the southern Israeli kibbutz of Sa’ad April 7, 2011.

Not that it matters, but the ‘settlements’ in question are inside the 1949 armistice lines, and ‘the other Israeli settler’ is 16 (some reports say 13) years old.

But you say, doesn’t it look bad to kill children?

Not to many Palestinian Arabs:

Udi and Ruth Fogel and three of their children – Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and three-month old baby Hadas – were murdered in the Israeli town of Itamar on March 11.

“63% of the Palestinians oppose and 32% support the attack in the Itamar settlement in the West Bank in which a family of five was murdered.” [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, official PA newspaper, April 7, 2011] — PMW

Just one out of three! Imagine my relief.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas

There’s a new peace initiative in town. It is similar to the Clinton-Barak proposals of 2000, with the Golan Heights thrown in. It is framed as an Israeli response to the Arab (or Saudi) Peace Initiative. My feeling is that although it was officially created by a group of Israelis, including former security officials and relatives of former PM Itzhak Rabin, it is in essence the Obama Plan. And it is much worse than the Clinton-Barak proposals because of the influence of the Arab initiative.

Some things I noticed:

It begins thus:

Reaffirming that Israel’s strategic objective is to reach a historic compromise and permanent status agreements that shall determine the finality of all claims and the end of the Israeli Arab conflict…

This principle will not be a part of any permanent agreement signed with any Palestinian Arab faction, because it contradicts their national goals as set out in their founding documents — the assertion of Arab (and in the case of Hamas, Muslim) control over the entire area from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.

…the Israeli Palestinian conflict shall be resolved on the principle of two states for two nations: Palestine as a nation state for the Palestinians and Israel as a nation state for the Jews (in which the Arab minority will have equal and full civil rights as articulated in Israel’s Declaration of Independence).

“A nation state for the Jews” is not the same as ‘a Jewish state’. We know that the Arabs will not agree to recognize a “Jewish state”. Is a “state for the Jews” different? Apparently it is something less. It makes my head spin.

Regarding the Arab minority. It says the “will have equal and full civil rights…” Don’t they already? If not, what civil — as opposed to national rights don’t they have? Will they get additional rights that they don’t have today?

The state shall be demilitarized, exercising full authority over its internal security forces. The International community shall play an active role in providing border security and curbing terrorist threats.

‘Demilitarized’ will need to be defined, as will a mechanism for ensuring demilitarization. Count me very, very skeptical about the possibility of doing this in the real world. Regarding the ‘active role’ of the ‘international community’, will it work as well as it did in disarming Hizballah?

The borders shall be based on the June 4, 1967, lines, with agreed modifications subject to the following principles: the creation of territorial contiguity between the Palestinian territories; land swaps (not to exceed 7% of the West Bank) based on a 1:1 ratio, including the provision of a safe corridor between the West Bank and Gaza, under de facto Palestinian control.

I must ask: what is special about these ‘borders’, which are simply the 1949 armistice lines, which both Israel and the Arab states clearly did not accept as borders, and which UNSC resolution 242 implied were not ‘secure and defensible’? How did illegal Jordanian occupation for 19 years create an Arab claim on them? Israel has occupied them for longer than that, if occupation is a criterion for ownership.

How was it decided that ‘Palestine’ must have “territorial contiguity” but Israel not?

If 1949 lines plus 7% territorial swaps define the borders, many Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria will find themselves in ‘Palestine’. What will happen to them? The document doesn’t say, but Mahmoud Abbas has announced that no “continued Israeli presence, military or civil” will be allowed in ‘Palestine’. Will these new Jewish refugees be compensated? Will they be made to leave their homes by force? Will even one Arab be required to leave Israel?

Jerusalem is to be redivided. In Jerusalem,

The line shall be drawn so that: Jewish neighborhoods shall be under Israeli sovereignty; the Arab neighborhoods shall be under Palestinian sovereignty.

This sounds practical in principle, but in practice it may be impossible. The result will be more Jews and important Jewish sites ending up in ‘Palestine’. And I ask the same questions that I asked in the preceding paragraph.

the Temple Mount shall remain under a special no-sovereignty regime (“God Sovereignty”), with special agreed-upon arrangements, ensuring that Islamic holy places shall be administered by the Moslem Waqf, and Jewish holy sites and interests shall be administered by Israel. The implementation of these arrangements will be supervised by an Israeli-International committee

I love this. If only God would make his sovereignty manifest here there wouldn’t be a problem! But since Israel ceded day-to-day control of the Temple Mount to the Waqf in 1967, the Arabs have trampled Israeli sovereignty and priceless archaeological relics underfoot; how much more would they do so with an “Israeli-International committee” supervising them!

The solutions for the Palestinian refugees shall be agreed upon between Israel, the Palestinians and all regional parties in accordance with the following principles: Financial compensation shall be offered to the refugees and the host countries by the international community and Israel; the Palestinian refugees wishing to return (as mentioned in UNGAR 194) may do so only to the Palestinian state, with mutually agreed-upon symbolic exceptions who will be allowed to return to Israel.

Starting at the end, what will the “symbolic exceptions” symbolize? That Arab refugees have a ‘right of return’ in principle that is not actualized for practical reasons? Why isn’t it actualized, then? When will it be? Is this not inconsistent with the idea that the Arabs renounce all further claims against Israel?

Further, why should Israel have any part in compensating them? Compensating them for what? The Jewish refugees from Arab countries are mentioned, but there’s no mention of compensating them. The implication is that it is Israel’s fault, rather than the Arab leadership, both in Palestine and the Arab nations, that is responsible for the flight of the original refugees, and their continued inability to find permanent homes.

The document also calls for Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria. There is no mention in this section of what Syria will do in return except follow the principles of the UN charter and international law, and there is no justification. Just like Czechoslovakia in 1938, Israel is told to give it up.  But the best guarantee of peace between Israel and Syria, one which does not require international peacekeepers, is the highly strategic Golan Heights. A true ‘peace’ agreement would leave it in Israel’s hands.

Further, there is an overriding practical reason that Israel must keep the Golan: many analysts will tell you that if Israel had not held the Golan in 1973, Syrian armies would almost certainly have reached major population centers in Israel. Judging by Syrian treatment of captured Israeli soldiers — horrendous beyond belief — Israel might have been driven to use its last-ditch nuclear deterrent in that case.

The parties will create regional security mechanisms, addressing shared threats and risks arising from states, terrorist organizations, marine pirate groups, and guerrilla organizations. to ensure the safety and security of the peoples of the region.

All of Israel’s conflicts, even the oft-questioned 1982 Lebanon War, have been defensive in nature, albeit on occasion tactically preemptive. The Middle East is full of crazy Arab propaganda about Israeli intentions to conquer the entire Middle East, commit genocide against the Palestinian Arabs, etc., but it is not possible to honestly accuse Israel of expansionism. On the other hand, all of the terrorist groups are supported and encouraged by Arab nations and Iran. So it is impossible for me to imagine that there can be a “regional mechanism” whose effect will be to protect Israel.

Last but not least:

Israel, the Arab States and the Islamic States commit to implement gradual steps towards establishing normal relations between them, in the spirit of the Arab Peace Initiative, which shall commence upon the launching of peace negotiations and shall be gradually upgraded to full normal relations (including diplomatic relations, open borders and economic ties) upon the signing of the permanent status agreements and throughout their implementation.

The “spirit of the Arab Peace Initiative” is precisely this: that until Israel completely meets all Arab demands — full withdrawal to 1967 lines, refugee rights, etc. — then and only then will the Arabs grant “full normal relations.” While the original Arab League initiative doesn’t clearly define “normal relations”, neither in that document nor this one is recognition of Israel as  Jewish state included.

Even insofar as Israel gets anything from this initiative, consider what is being offered: Israel is required to surrender all of its strategic, concrete advantages, including the Golan Heights whose security implications are immense, give up the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, evacuate its citizens from land from which it will withdraw, admit that it is responsible for the plight of the Arab refugees (which admission will have serious legal consequences at some point). In return, there will be no recognition of a Jewish state, and something called ‘normal relations’.

And what, in all this, guarantees Israel’s security after it pulls back to close to what have been called ‘Auschwitz borders’? Treaties, promises and international peacekeepers — peacekeepers which have been tried more than once in the Middle East and have never succeeded in keeping the peace! Indeed, UN troops in Lebanon have protected the terrorist Hizballah against Israel.

As far as treaties are concerned, consider that not one of the candidates for president in Egypt has said that he would not abrogate the peace treaty with Israel. Even the American-backed ‘moderate’ Mohammad el-Baradei said recently that under his presidency, Egypt would fight alongside Hamas if Israel invades Gaza!

This is not an ‘Israeli peace initiative’. It is the Arab initiative with a few tweaks that the Arabs will try to negotiate away anyway. It is blueprint to pressure Israel into giving up the means to defend itself.

Its proponents will tell you that it is intended to preempt a unilateral declaration of ‘Palestine’, which would be worse. Would it? I don’t think that’s clear.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arab peace initiative, Israeli peace initiative

Everyone has by now heard that Richard Goldstone has made a remarkable statement: that the conclusion of his eponymous report was wrong. In these words, he repudiates the primary blood libel of the report, that the intent of the IDF in Gaza was to punish Palestinian civilians for their support of Hamas:

Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

Much of what he writes is self-serving, and some of it astonishing, such as his hope that “in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks.” And many have asked why he did not know then what he knows now.

But the question now is not ‘whither the soul of Judge Goldstone’, rather whether his recanting will matter in any practical sense. The Goldstone report, adopted as a UN document, has been used as ‘evidence’ for filing war crimes complaints against Israeli soldiers and politicians in various places under the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’. It will certainly be called upon as a justification to demand that Israel withdraw, if — as will certainly be the case — there is another Gaza war.

Hamas understands:

In a statement Sunday, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri questioned Goldstone’s regret over the report, and noted that Israel refused to cooperate with the UN investigators “while in Gaza they were welcomed and their work was facilitated.”

The Hamas official also noted that Goldstone did not have sole authority over the report, which was an international document and not his “private production.”

Abu Zuhri added: “The report is not the private property of Goldstone, as it was co-authored by him and a group of international judges.

“Furthermore, the report was based on documents and testimonies giving it credibility and strength.” — Ma’an News

In reality, the ‘documents and testimonies’ were fabricated and false, the ‘international judges’ biased. But can we expect the UN to turn around and say “oops, sorry, now it’s null and void?” Why should they? Goldstone, after all, merely lent his good Jewish name to the document which was pasted together from hostile NGO reports. So what if he takes it back?

Nothing is likely to change in the court of public opinion either. With very few exceptions the IDF’s behavior in Gaza was exactly opposite to that portrayed in the report, with the army taking every possible step to prevent civilian casualties. These facts were made evident (video), and were found unpersuasive by media predisposed against Israel.  Goldstone’s remarks today are unlikely to change the perception that what happened in Gaza was a brutal massacre.

PM Netanyahu, nevertheless, is both demanding an official ‘cancellation’ of the report and planning a public-relations effort to undo the damage:

There are very few instances in which those who disseminate libels retract their libel.  This happened in the case of the Goldstone Report.  Goldstone himself said that all of the things that we have been saying all along are correct – that Israel never intentionally fired at civilians and that our inquiries operated according to the highest international standards.  Of course, this is in complete contrast to Hamas, which intentionally attacked and murdered civilians and, naturally, never carried out any sort of inquiry.  This leads us to call for the immediate cancellation of the Goldstone Report.

I have asked … to formulate practical and public diplomacy measures, in order to reverse and minimize the great damage that has been done by this campaign of denigration against the State of Israel.  I expect their recommendations in the coming days.  We will act on the public diplomacy front, and on other fronts, with the international community and the UN in order to demand the justice that is due to Israel. — Israel Prime Minister’s Office

Strong words, but unlikely to make a difference. The damage has been done. Goldstone himself will now be cast aside — he’s already being attacked — thus showing that at the end of the day, nobody likes a traitor.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Goldstone report

Israel has a problem. OK, Israel has a lot of problems, but one of the biggest is American Jews who

1. take as their primary sources the loud but demographically unimportant media and academic Left in Israel; and,
2. combine ignorance with remarkable arrogance to apply American paradigms and analogies to Israeli society and politics, and
3. conclude that Israel is becoming (or has already become) morally corrupt, right-wing, theocratic, anti-democratic and anti-peace.

I call this position ‘Beinartism’. The Beinartist manifesto is this Peter Beinart article, which I also discussed here and here.

The US is Israel’s only source for vital military hardware (aid dollars are not as important as availability of spare parts and qualitatively superior technology), and its only defender in the UN Security Council. I think it’s safe to say that Israel’s enemies would eat it alive if the US turned against it.  American Jews are only a tiny portion (a couple of percent) of the US population, but enormously important in determining policy toward Israel.

This is because they take an interest in it, because non-Jewish politicians look toward Jews for direction in this area, and because Jewish opinion provides an excuse to justify what officials want to do anyway. So if the administration wants to stop Jewish construction in eastern Jerusalem, it is very helpful if it can point to a large group of American Jews that agrees with it. And this is why Beinartism is dangerous.

Beinartism often expresses itself in statements that begin by declaring undying love for Israel, but then continue by excoriating it in ways usually associated with the extreme anti-Zionist Left. Beinartism, like J Street, is phony: it is dislike (or worse) pretending to be love, and it includes a threat that if Israel doesn’t change in accordance with Beinartist principles, it will be abandoned by American Jewry.

Yaakov Lozowick, discussing speakers at the J Street conference — including Beinart himself, but also David Saperstein of the Union for Reform Judaism — put it this way:

…there’s a consistent tone of disdain of Israeli society coming from these people which I find arrogant and very distasteful. Americans left and right have lost their civility in political discourse; Israelis, admittedly, never had it. Yet there are codes in language, deeper than mere words, and the subtext of these J Street spokesmen when discussing Jews from Russia, religious Jews and centrist Jews, is ugly. I find no other word for it. Just as their compassion for Israel’s Arabs (the citizens) is odd. There’s a level of identification with them which is totally lacking when they talk about the majority of the Israeli Jews. I say this as someone who wishes only the best for Israel’s Arabs.

Beinartism is characterized by false analogies: the situation of Israeli Arab citizens, or even Arabs in the territories, is often compared to that of African-Americans in the pre-civil rights movement South. It fails to note the huge differences, and the ways in which the physical situation of Israel makes it vulnerable in a way that we’ve never been.

Beinartism advocates a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs, but it ignores the real security issues that would have to be dealt with before such a solution would be anything other than suicide. It makes vast assumptions about Arab intentions, or rather, doesn’t even think about them.

Beinartism accepts uncritically the prejudices of the academic and media elite of Israel, who tend to despise Russian immigrants, Jews from Arab countries, observant Jews and of course (last but not least) ‘settlers’.

It also gives great importance to issues that barely move the needle in Israel, like the Women of the Wall or the struggle for recognition of non-Orthodox streams of Judaism in Israel (the degree of influence of ultra-Orthodoxy and the Rabbinate on society are a concern to many Israelis, but the great majority simply don’t see the point of Reform or Conservative Judaism).

The new president of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), Rabbi Richard Jacobs, is a Beinartist — indeed he quotes the manifesto with approval in a sermon to his Scarsdale NY congregation. And today, the URJ emailed to subscribers of its “Ten Minutes of Torah” service, a copy of a recent Forward article by J. J. Goldberg about why “the Zionist Organization of America and various far-right bloggers” are wrong in being upset about Jacobs’ appointment.

Jacobs is no more hostile to Israel than Shimon Peres, or David Ben-Gurion for that matter. Like Ben-Gurion he supports partition of the Land of Israel into two states.

Peres and Ben-Gurion may have favored a two-state solution (Peres, alive, still favors it), even thought it was essential. But unlike J Street and the Beinartists, neither of the above would agree to a deal without appropriate security guarantees. Nor would they urge the US to vote to condemn Israel in the Security Council, as J Street did.

The problem according to Goldberg is not that Jacobs is active in organizations that are, despite what they say, anti-Israel. Nor that he participated in an anti-Israel demonstration in Jerusalem. No, rather it’s that Israel is out of step, not Jacobs:

The problem is that while Jacobs’s views on Israel are quite mainstream among American Jews, the notion that such views endanger Israel and have no place in Jewish communal discourse is becoming mainstream in Israel. In other words, we have a very serious family feud brewing.

I’m not sure where the “no place in Jewish communal discourse” came in. Similar views are expressed daily in the pages of Ha’aretz. But do they endanger Israel? You bet they do. And having an exponent of them lead the largest denomination of American Jews is a bad idea.

Where is the American Jewish mainstream today? You might start your search with the simple fact that the largest Jewish religious movement chose Jacobs to lead it. But then consider this: J Street was founded just three years ago and is already one of the biggest organizations on the American Jewish scene, even before it’s out of diapers. Consider, too, the rapid growth of Jewish activism to the left of J Street, among the boycott, divestment and sanctions crowd and Palestinian-solidarity types. What used to be the left is now closer to the center.

First of all, nobody asked me, a member of a Reform congregation, whether I wanted Rabbi Jacobs. And nobody asked the president of the congregation, either. I do not have details about the process by which the URJ nominated and elected Rabbi Jacobs, but I’m sure that — like most organizational decisions — democracy had little to do with it.

Second, J Street’s Jeremy Ben Ami claims 170,000 supporters. How does he know this? According to the Knesset testimony of former Israeli diplomat and student of J Street Lenny Ben-David, he counts entries to the J Street Website as ‘supporters’!

Third, the fact that the extreme anti-Zionist Left is busy demonizing and delegitimizing Israel does not imply that a somewhat less aggressive — but still anti-Israel — position is ‘mainstream’.  Although the tactic of claiming to be ‘pro-Israel’ and ‘liberal’ may have fooled some people, lobbying against sanctions on Iran and for condemnation of Israel in the Security Council — as J Street has done — is not ‘mainstream’.

Goldberg also falls back on the ultimate recourse of the ‘progressive’ without an argument — he calls his opponents crazy right-wingers:

Also telling is the fact that the objections to Jacobs’s nomination come from a narrow spectrum on the right. Being identified with the New Israel Fund and J Street just isn’t remarkable in American Jewish life anymore. Attacking them is increasingly a sign of eccentricity.

J Street and similar groups are not mainstream. But the question is more of appearance than reality, because their power grows in proportion to how important they can make themselves appear. J Street, for example, received half of its funding in 2008-9 from a mysterious source in Hong Kong, not to mention a large contribution from the anti-Israel George Soros. Grass roots? Not hardly. But if they can convince members of Congress that they are, they become dangerous.

J Street, NIF, Beinartism and now Rabbi Jacobs represent a concerted push to change American Jewry from a source of support for Israel into yet another weapon against it.

Don’t be fooled.

Update [1527 PDT]: Read Rabbi Daniel Gordis’ shocking article about the inroads of Beinartism (he doesn’t call it that) among rabbinical students.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Beinartism, J Street, NIF, Rabbi Richard Jacobs, URJ, J. J. Goldberg

It’s fun to speculate on what drives our administration’s varied responses to unrest in the Middle East.

For Iran, whose regime is trying to develop nukes, take control of the region, push out US influence and eliminate Israel (supposedly a US ally); where political rallies often include chants of “death to America”: a stolen election and murderous violence against honestly pro-democracy protesters was met with mild verbal rebukes. After attempts to apply effective sanctions failed, the administration seems to have forgotten about the Iranian nuclear program.

For Syria, whose dictator helps insurgents kill our soldiers in Iraq, murders politicians in Lebanon, supplies Hizballah and Hamas, stockpiles chemical weapons and tries to develop nuclear ones, and orders security forces to shoot demonstrators: our government renews relations and tries to help it get possession of the strategic Golan Heights from Israel.

For Egypt, in which a mildly brutal dictator (in comparison to Syria’s Assad, for example) mostly supported American interests and opposed Iran: the US encouraged the dictator’s removal, despite clear warnings (that are beginning to come true) that the alternative was not democracy, but Islamism.

In Libya, we jumped head-first into a civil war and only afterward decided to figure out on whose behalf we are intervening.  The first week or so has already cost us $600 million, and our guys (whoever they may be) seem to be losing.

For Israel, a truly democratic and friendly country which could be hugely helpful to the US in keeping a foothold in a region whose resources are essential to its economy, a country which has been under attack for years by forces that want to kill its people and take its land: the US applies pressure to give in to terrorist blackmail, cede territory and weaken security measures.

What’s happening in the Mideast is that authoritarian regimes are mostly weaker than they look. Their opponents — Islamists, ethnic groups other than the presently dominant one, opportunists and democrats — are trying to replace them. Whichever one can get the support of the most powerful armed groups or is the most ruthless will win. This will very rarely be the democrats! In Israel it’s a bit different since the government is democratic. But the groups that want to overthrow it — a segment of the ‘Israeli Arabs’ and the Palestinian Arab factions — are also made up of of Islamists and Arab nationalists.

The important question for US policy is “which of these groups is most likely to support US interests and oppose Iran?” But it doesn’t look like they are asking this question in Washington.

If I had just stepped out of an alien spaceship, I could be excused for thinking that the US is following the lead of countries like Turkey, and joining the Iranian bloc.

The stuff about trying to protect civilians looks good on TV, but doesn’t explain why we did nothing in the case of Iran and intend to do nothing about Syria. There has also been deadly violence in Yemen and Bahrain, but we’ve not intervened there (and a good thing, too). Of course there’s a lot of oil in Libya, but there is in Iran as well.

In the case of Israel, the establishment of a Hamas-Fatah terror state in Judea and Samaria will produce more terrorism and even war, just as the withdrawal from Gaza did. The best way to protect civilians there would be to prevent this from happening, not encourage it.

Technorati Tags: Middle East, Obama Administration