Swatting at Wasp Nests

Israel has had a rough time with a very angry Islamist state buried into its midsection. Gaza. Extremist Gazan leaders, Hamas, have been quite willing to sacrifice innocents to Israeli retaliation… figuring out how to get Israeli soldiers to fire at kids throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails from the border region, how to plant their rockets and mortars at and around schools and hospitals so that Israeli artillery generates truly devastating visuals of innocents killed. Perplexed but unwilling to tolerate these Hamas-directed assaults, Israel obliged. It always does. Another ceasefire set in. For a while. It comes back. It always does.

This time, it only took a couple of days: “In the sharpest escalation of violence in weeks, Israel carried out widespread and fatal airstrikes in the Gaza Strip on [July 20^th], which the Israelis said were in response to attacks on its soldiers… Before the assault, sniper fire killed an Israeli soldier along the Gaza-Israeli border, the first Israeli to die in months of conflict that have claimed the lives of more than 140 Palestinians.

“At least four more Palestinians were killed in Friday’s bloodshed, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, three of them members of the militant Islamist group Hamas, which controls the enclave. About 120 others were injured, most of them protesters suffering from tear gas exposure… The Israeli military said it struck dozens of Hamas targets — including warehouses, aerial defense systems and observation posts — after its soldiers came under gun and grenade fire. It also said it had identified three rockets aimed at Israel, two of which were intercepted by the country’s Iron Dome defense system.” Los Angeles Times, July 21^st. 140 to 1, and the one was a clear military target? It will stop soon. But only for a while.

While West Bank Palestine (where a more moderate Fatah Party rules) is still functional, Gaza is a scene of decimated infrastructure, rubble, poverty and massive unemployment, with haphazard access to potable water, medical care, with flickering and inconsistent electrical power, amidst one of the greatest concentrations of militant hopelessness on earth. Ruthless Hamas, funded by extremists from Iran’s Hezbollah to militant Sunnis across the Middle East, has parlayed those visuals – amplified by Israel’s hardliners who currently run the government – into a nearly unanimous global perception of Israel as a heartless rogue state with little or no concern for human rights… I should say non-Jewish human rights.

Emboldened by a flood of carte blanche support from the Trump administration, Israel finally feels secure enough to cast off any pretense of equality and fairness to its substantial Arab population (at current birth rates, destined to be the majority in the Jewish state). As the world – including the United States – has heretofore objected to every new Jewish settlement in the primarily Palestinian West Bank as creating barriers to the two-state solution accepted in an international accord to which both the United States and Israel are parties, Israel of late has accelerated authorizing new such Jewish settlements and has stepped away from the notion of that two-state solution. Today, however, the United States has dropped any semblance of neutrality in the Palestinian crisis, even as Trump-son-in-law, Jared Kushner, writes editorials in the New York Times saying Hamas needs to do what the U.S. mandates to restart U.S. financial aid to Palestine. Right. Uh-huh! Guess Hamas does not read the New York Times.

Simply, the Trump-led United States stands in unquestioning support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vision, exercising U.S. veto power at the United Nations Security Council and introducing measures at the Council in support of the Israeli positions… without any other nation on that Council siding with those efforts. Helpless in the General Assembly, where it has no such veto power, the U.S. can only bemoan the lopsided votes against what is constantly labeled as “Israeli aggression” and withdraw monetary support where it believes such cutbacks will benefit Israel.

As the United States has officially moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the first country to do so, it has also accepted that the two-state solution is no longer a necessary goal. Jerusalem is as important to Muslims (and incidentally Christians) as it is to Jews. It is a political and religious center to all Muslims. Israel, under the hardline Netanyahu right-wing coalition, has dug in its conservative heels and moved further to marginalize the second-class Arab residents of Israel with a new sweeping addition to its Basic Law (a quasi-constitutional legal structure).

The anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian force of this new, 14^th amendment to The Basic Law, is unmistakable. It is a taunt to the entire Arab world, a statement by Israel that it does not care at all about global opinion (except for the U.S. which is supporting these moves), and an invitation to all the angry Palestinians that violence might be their only recourse… where moderates were once willing to take a slower negotiated road. Israel seems to delight in swatting at this angry wasp’s nest of hopeless Palestinians. It is a rather clear statement to the world that Arab rights must completely subordinate to Jewish Zionist values and goals.

The BBC News (July 19^th) describes what this legal addition really means: “Called The Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People, the [new] legislation essentially defines Israel first and foremost as a Jewish state.

“Among [the amendment’s] 11 provisions, it describes Israel as ‘the national home of the Jewish people’ and says the right to exercise national self-determination there is ‘unique to the Jewish people.’

“It also reiterates the status of Jerusalem under Israeli law, which defines the city - part of which is claimed by the Palestinians as the capital of a future state - as the ‘complete and united... capital of Israel.’ have long complained of discrimination

“Controversially, the law singles out Hebrew as the ‘state's language,’ effectively prioritising it above Arabic which has for decades been recognised as an official language alongside Hebrew… It ascribes Arabic ‘special status’ and says its standing before the law came into effect will not be harmed.

“In one of its clauses, the law stresses the importance of ‘development of Jewish settlement as a national value,’ though it is unclear whether this also alludes to settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.” If Jews around the world believe that this change is “about time,” that its implementation is in the best interest of Israeli Jews, it may well be based on a general notion that the Israeli military has, on average, fared well against Arab adversaries, as evidenced by its successes in the 1967 and 1973 wars with neighboring Arab states. There is an expectation that the Israeli Defense Force will always rise to the occasion, that any Arab offensive will be dispatched… once again.

Not only do these recent changes to The Basic Law literally vitiate the viability of negotiation and encourage a shift to forcing a violent alternative, but there are signs that over the past couple of years the Israeli military has not been as able to contain its Arab militants and hostile neighbors quite as well as anticipated. Indeed, Russia has been reinforcing Shiite-dominated Syria and Iran, with modern anti-aircraft defensive systems and better overall military hardware.

Power shifts in the region have added some terrifying new weapon systems in favor of Israel’s most diabolical and historical foes. Oddly, Israel may well need to align with once-arch-enemy Saudi Arabia – a truly unholy alliance – to contain the rising regional Shiite powers dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Saudi Arabia itself is facing existential threats of its own, and the monarchy not only is staring at anti-Saudi Iranian surrogates battling in neighboring Yemen but at a vast horde of Iran-sympathetic Shiite workers in its own legendary oil fields.

Bottom line: Israel is virtually guaranteeing that military confrontation at every level is going to escalate – internally with Palestinian resistance with unlimited regional support and externally with some of the most modern redefined and restructured regional military powers… nations with hatred in their hearts toward Israel with weapons that Israel has never faced before. Israel will become further isolated, clinging to the United States but basically knowing that it will probably have to go it alone in a most hostile neighborhood. Would Israel have taken these steps without the rather obvious support of the United States? Probably not.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while on the surface the newest American policies seem powerfully beneficial to Israel, in the longer term the violence that is being encouraged may prove to be one of the deadliest assaults on ordinary Israeli citizens since that nation was born… 70 years ago.