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Israeli Retaliation Necessary

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JOHN HERBERT From Where I Sit

The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 11, 2009

If your neighbor has been tossing garbage over your back yard fence more or less nonstop for the last 60 years, you'd be pretty fed up. Calling the cops (the United Nations) didn't help, so you've been left with the option to take things into your own hands - and guns.

That largely is where the Israelis stand now in their tough approach to the latest problems with aggressive neighbor Palestine.

Cease-fire appeals from other Arab states, the European Union and even the U.N. have not generated much more than the usual hot air. Indignant draft statements didn't even mention the 600 Palestinian missile strikes in southern Israel in the past three years.

The U.N. can be forgiven; it's long past its prime - if it ever had one. The European countries are forced to say something for the audience back home. Most of them, after all, have huge Muslim immigrant communities. They are also small, insignificant nations who, in principle, don't like to see any big boys beating up on little guys.

While the lack of U.N. or European effectness in dealing with the latest Middle East flare-up can be understood to some extent, where on earth are the other Arab states? You'd expect they'd at least have some influence over their Palestinian blood brothers and the Hamas terrorist government.

The Jordanians, for example, are little more than Palestinians themselves. Why don't they donate land and sand dunes and help relocate the Gaza Strip? With other Arabs bankrolling the new Gaza?

Arab aid would be perfectly logical - if they ever really entertained the idea of a Middle East at peace. Maybe some day, surviving Palestinians will wake up and ask themselves, "What was the point of all this bloodshed, anyway?"

Fat chance. Hamas, which boasts of a single-minded foreign policy to obliterate Israel for good, is the democratically elected government of Gaza, if not of all Palestine. Supposedly impartial observers said the same thing about Germany under Hitler. Hamas has never called for peace, only destruction.
Hamas has one leg up on the Nazis, though. They are employing the "human shield" concept in which they strategically put Palestinian civilians in harm's way: weapon hoards in mosques, missile launchers in schools and high-ranking terrorists in disguise in hospital gowns.

And then let the Gaza Gas Bag - Palestine's own Baghdad Bob, the laughable liar - scream to hungry TV reporters that the Israelis are indiscriminately killing innocent women and children. Not a word, of course, that Hamas politicians have chosen to pimp the human miseries they have themselves created.

Any war's strategy includes controlling the message. Hamas has at least mastered that part.

Israel has shown remarkable restraint in not just carpet-bombing the Gaza Strip and then enforcing the peace at gunpoint. The Jewish nation is morally bound to give the Gaza Strip a shellacking to end all shellackings. It certainly has the military skills and equipment to do it.

Chances are, though, that they will never go that far - public opinion around the world would not tolerate so much perceived brutality, even if it might be justified.

Take that pro-Hamas demonstration in southern Florida a few days ago. "Back to your ovens," chanted demonstrators at Israelis in general. Looks like we've still got a long way to go.

Israel already has stirred enough irritation, even at home. Nowadays, only the Russians have the gall to attack their own - witness Chechnya and Georgia in recent years. As a major oil exporter, Russian can get away with anything it wants - including being strangely silent on the Palestinian conflict. But, we'd be forgetting valuable lessons from World War Two, when American Gen. Douglas MacArthur pronounced those famous (and durable) words, "In war, there is no substitute for victory."

Plus, Israel has a reputation to defend. The Israelis are supposed to be invincible. Their wishy-washy battle against Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon two years ago must have been an aberration. At least let's make sure this time that Hamas can never be a military threat again.

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert lives in Spring Hill.

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