 March 14, 2024 Special EditionThe Mythologies of the Middle East:By: Victor Davis Hanson Part One – March 5, 2024Hamas Is an Aberration Without Popular Support? After the forced removal of all Israelis from Gaza in 2005, and the Western-sanctioned election of 2006 that led to Hamas taking power, there has not been a single election. The Middle East rule of “one election, one time” has been in effect for over two decades. Hamas is a brutal dictatorship that liquidated Palestinian Authority rivals in 2006 and maintained power by violence. In its 18-year reign, it has diverted billions of dollars in international aid away from the needs of its own people into the largest labyrinth of military tunnels in history. Yet its massive war project was not unknown to civilians of Gaza, whose perennial status as “refugees” (apparently unlike the over one million Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Middle Eastern nations from the 1950s to the 1970s, and forced to flee to Israel or the West) leveraged separate cash streams that explain the hotels, hospitals, schools, mosques, and high rises of Gaza, many of which enjoyed dual-use as shields for the military tunnels beneath them. True, pre-October 7th, there were occasional Western stories purportedly attesting to Hamas’s unpopularity. But if true, it was likely not necessarily because of Hamas’s corruption, its diversions of massive aid to its underground command and control centers, or even the multimillionaire status of Hamas grandees ensconced in the Gulf or Lebanon. Rather, the Gazans resented the combination of corruption with the perception of Hamas’s impotence, more particularly with the reality that Israel was more powerful, more affluent, and more confident than ever before. In other words, the more Gazans saw their money diverted to corrupt officials and the city beneath their feet, and the more they saw Hamas’s inability to do much about Israel’s power, the more they chafed at their autocrats. That changed on October 7. Over 500 Gazan civilians tagged along with Hamas killers to join in the thievery, assault, torture, beheadings, rape, and murder. Many civilians were also among the 20,000 day laborers who worked in Israel and thus lent their knowledge of the geography of the kibbutzim to enable Hamas killers to hunt down Jews. Hostages who were removed to Gaza were struck and spit upon by throngs of civilians. Trophy corpses trucked back were further desecrated by the frenzied street mobs. The knowledge that hundreds of Jews were being murdered a short distance away did not sober Gazans but sent them into hysterical rejoicing. Occasional reports from released hostages or Israeli captives who attempted to escape confirmed the general support of the people for Hamas’s killing spree. Bonuses were offered to freelancing Gazans–in the fashion of Old West bounty hunters–to bring back Israeli hostages: for the most part, young children, women, and the elderly. Reports of selling live hostages circulated. Here in the West, particularly in Europe and the United States, both Arab-Americans and student-visa students from the Middle East in general and Gaza and the West Bank in particular, grew ecstatic on news of the mass murder. How ironic that the American Left and the U.S. government itself did their best to promote the lie that Hamas had no popular support for its October 7th murder spree, and thus was a separate entity from its people, even as massive protests assumed the two groups were one and the same. Even more ironically, pro-Hamas protests not only made no distinctions between the IDF and Israeli civilians, but also treated American Jews as indistinguishable from Israelis, and thus sought to harass and injure them in universities, at their homes, and on the street. The only entity that is making a concentrated effort to separate Gazan civilians from the Hamas murderers who hide beneath them and are shielded above ground by civilian schools, mosques, and hospitals, is the IDF. Oddly, it is doing far more to warn civilians of impending targeting of Hamas concentrations than Hamas itself which has also launched over 7,000 rockets into Israeli civilian centers with the expressed purpose of killing civilians. Our protesters never note that it apparently is felt to be in Hamas’s interest that its civilian shields are collaterally killed. At the same time, it is in the interest of Israeli pilots and ground troops to take all measures to prevent their deaths. For that matter, when Ukraine strikes back against Russian aggressors and occupiers in Crimea and the Donbas, none of the same Western critics of the IDF extend similar censure to the Ukrainian military, which surely does not text or drop leaflets among civilians surrounding targeted Russians to avoid “collateral damage”—a phenomenon that is never reported in the West. When Gazans cheer the murdering of Jews, and their counterpart supporters in the West celebrate the bloodwork of Hamas, we should agree that they are all—both Hamas gunmen and their civilian boosters—on the same page. Part Two – March 6, 2024 The Myth of “Proportionality”As a general rule, in the long history of war, victory is found only by being disproportionate in the use of force. That is a truism so banal as to need little elaboration. When both sides are “proportionate” in their ability to harm their opponents, the result is either a bloody tactical deadlock such as at Verdun or the Somme, or an open strategic sore like Vietnam and Afghanistan, or decades-long “proportionate” killing such as the Peloponnesian War or Thirty Years’ War. The whole point of Western aid to Ukraine apparently and logically is to allow it to harm Russia disproportionally, especially given the vast imbalance in resources, both human and material. The great tragedy of this horrific two-year war is the reality that Ukraine has only been able to achieve proportional success against Russia, as the current deadlocked map of the battle space attests. Hamas began its war on October 7, seeking to achieve a disproportionate success; that is, to kill more Jewish civilians in any single day since the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It knew the Israelis possessed a disproportionate ability in strictly military terms to retaliate and do real damage to Hamas. But the Hamas terrorist leaders in turn assumed they had a disproportionate ability to appeal to the larger Muslim and Arab Middle East of 500 million people, as well as hundreds of millions of supporters in the old Third World as well as in the U.S. and Europe. Their logic was brutally simple: while the West, the UN, and the rest would for a moment deplore their tactics, Hamas assumed that privately they either would approve of the damage inflicted on Israelis or at least tolerate it and thus use their various levels of influence to restrain the Israeli response. In other words, as Israelis sought to destroy Hamas through classical laws of a disproportionate response, Hamas sought to limit the Israeli tactical ability to do so by its own geostrategic disproportionate effort to galvanize Western leftists to force Jerusalem to call off the IDF and to send massive “humanitarian” aid to Gaza. Hamas was confident it would find solidarity with the Muslim Street and thus garner cash and weapons from the Middle East. And, it could appeal to the anti-Western block of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Turkey, and assorted rogue regimes to offer them both public support and stealthy resupply. In general, the more thuggish the regime, the more likely it was to openly support Hamas. So we are in a war of disproportionality: the Israelis rush to destroy Hamas tactically to the point it can never recombine to resume control of Gaza, while the Gazans seek to rev up their benefactors worldwide to force the Israelis to accept a ceasefire, after which Hamas will declare victory on the premise it committed the most heinous crimes against the Jewish people since 1945 and survived. If all belligerents seek to obtain disproportionate and thus victorious strategies and tactics, why does the world seem to demand Israel alone to be proportionate? Lots of reasons. It is a powerful Western country and thus supposedly should suffer from the Western Left’s postcolonial, postimperial guilt, especially in a war against the victimized “other.” As a Jewish state, it suffers the added writ of anti-Semitism, as we saw after October 7th when the supposedly careful distinction between “Israeli” and“Jewish” suddenly disappeared, and pro-Hamas thugs began attacking Jewish Americans with impunity. In realpolitik, there are 500 million Middle Eastern Muslims and 11 million Jewish Israelis, so examine the eerie paradoxes. In the real world of geostrategic power, Israel is vastly outnumbered, at least in terms of population, collective GDP, and area. Yet because it fights individual Arab or Muslim entities successfully, it thus somehow is damned as a bully. In other words, the world sides against Israel in part because the numbers, the oil, and the terrorists are all on the other side, but somehow still fault Israel for ganging up on Hamas or Hezbollah because it proves much more adept than either. And so presto, the underdog is conveniently labeled as the overdog the moment it proves too lethal on the battlefield. Part Three – March 8, 2024 The Myth of the Oppressed PalestiniansThere are lots of refugees in the world with much longer claims of displacement than the Palestinians, and also some with much more recent suffering. And yet we hear nothing about them. Does anyone challenge Turkish president Erdogan for his ongoing threats to send missiles into Athens or to brag that he has a solution like his “grandfathers” for the Armenian “problem”? Or do they lament the 1974 ethnic cleansing of northern Cyprus that resulted when the Turkish military invaded the island, created a puppet separatist regime in the north, appropriated land that had been Greek for three millennia, and then slaughtered Greeks and drove them down into the south of the island? Are there protests today demanding justice and a “right of return” for the Greek Cypriots? Do we talk of “colonialist” or “settler” Turks who were moved from the mainland to Cyprus to alter the demography of the island? For that matter, do any lament the fate of the Volga Germans (nearly two million) who were packed up by Joseph Stalin and uprooted from their ancient homes in 1941–42? Are we aware that until 1939 western Ukraine was the ancient home of millions of Catholic Poles, who were driven out by communist Russia in its hideous 1939 deal with Hitler and never returned after the war? Or do we lament the 13 million East Prussians who were ethnically cleansed after World War II to give lands to a new Poland that was robbed by Stalin of its old domains? Are any of these peoples today considered UN refugees? Do octogenarian Germans dangle the keys of their old homes in Danzig to cameras, as if they will someday have “a right of return” to present-day Poland? Had Hamas not confiscated hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid to build its macabre 300-mile-long subterranean military network and instead simply used the money for the benefit of its own people, would Gaza have been a Hong Kong or Singapore rather than the home of murderous cliques? Twenty-one percent of Israelis are Arabs and enjoy the greatest freedom in the Middle East—and the highest standard of living apart from the oil-rich Gulf states. How can Israel be an imperialist apartheid state when a fifth of its citizens are Arabs who form political parties, vote, and enjoy constitutional protection unheard of in the Middle East? As far as the “right of return,” why would anyone on the West Bank or Gaza wish to return to live in Israel given their eliminationist rhetoric of “From the River to the Sea”? Or is the message that they wish to return to Israel to overwhelm and destroy its constitutional system and then set up a government analogous to the one-election/one-time Palestinian Authority or Hamas—and thus enjoy less freedom and prosperity than the Israeli Arabs do now, none of whom express a desire to move either to Gaza or the West Bank? Why would anyone from Gaza or the West Bank wish to emigrate to the United States, given the venomous rhetoric about the so-called Great Satan? Is the point to emigrate to America, demonstrate on behalf of Hamas, break the law, surge bridges to disrupt traffic, harass Jewish Americans, take over classrooms, and disrupt lectures on university campuses—all in order to abuse such freedoms to support those who never would extend such tolerance to such kindred protesters? Why are the calls to Israel for proportionality, ceasefires, avoidance of collateral damage, and to form a bipartisan wartime cabinet of all views not extended to our other ally Ukraine that seeks to defend itself by being disproportionate, refusing ceasefires, not worrying about collateral damage, and canceling elections and political parties? Why can we agree that the Russians started the war by invading Ukraine and are waging a brutal fight, but cannot say the same about Hamas which started the conflict on October 7th, by outdoing even the Russians in its beheading, mutilations, raping, torturing, murdering, and hostage-taking?If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato |
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 