Suicide by Israel
by Spengler, Asia Times, Jan. 8, 2009
A policeman’s nightmare is the prospective suicide who forces the constable to shoot in self-defense. No matter how justified the killing, others always will wonder whether the shooter had an opportunity to avoid a fatal outcome.
Peoples commit suicide as much as do individuals. The geopolitical cognate of “suicide by policeman” is Hamas’ attempted suicide by Israel. Israel’s objective is to eliminate Hamas rule. There are only two ways to do that: destroy Hamas’ international support, or make its rule in Gaza insupportable.
I hate to be the one to bring up the unpleasant things that no one else wants to talk about, but just what do you do when a substantial group of people would rather die on their feet than live on their knees? For Hamas, to live on one’s knees would be to accept a permanent Jewish presence in the historic land of Israel, an outcome which Hamas was formed to prevent in the first place.
One answer is that a slow-motion humanitarian disaster will gradually erode the fighting capacity and morale of Hamas and its popular base in Gaza, presuming that external sources of support can be throttled. What the International Red Cross calls “a full-blown humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is, in a certain sense, part of the solution, not part of the problem. A million and a half people have no way to live in Gaza except on the dole of the international community, in a Petrie dish for Islamist extremism. (Continue Reading this Article)
I have been trying to explain to people for years (especially when I was living in Israel) that suicide bombing is not just an individual act that arose out of the aether, but the expression of a cultural attitude. The palestinians are perfectly happy to present themselves as a cultural suicide bomb … hoping that they kill Israel in the process. People seem to want to ignore this, mostly because they don’t want to have to kill the numbers required to put an end to this. I used to note to my Israeli friends that the Allies killed, rightfully, almost 10% of the German population and about 5% of the Japanese population (with threats to kill every last one of them). For arabs, who are not as smart as the Germans or the Japanese, the percentage required to be killed (in order to turn the cultural attitudes around as we did with Japan and Germany) will probably be even higher, and very few are even willing to contemplate this necessity.