January 14, 2009

By CHRIS POWELL, Journal Inquirer

What’s unique about the war between Israel and the Hamas regime in Gaza is that Israel is expected to provision the army of its enemy — and indeed is provisioning the army of its enemy with the daily three-hour respite from combat so that “humanitarian aid” can be carted in, aid from which the Hamas gunmen draw sustenance along with Gaza’s civilian population.

While this is unique in the history of war it is only a small extension of a long and bizarre practice, since for years now Gaza has existed only to threaten Israel even while surviving only on the world’s charity, for which Israel has allowed passage rather than starve its enemy out. The more “humanitarian aid” the world has poured on Gaza, the more Gaza has been enabled to mobilize for war, which Gaza renewed a few weeks ago by launching missiles into Israel. Without as much “humanitarian aid,” Gaza might have had to choose between war and survival, between war and developing a self-supporting and peaceful society. But the aid was provided without conditions, without any guarantees of peace.

The laws of war require some respect for civilian populations, and the sight of killed and maimed children in Gaza is awful. But when combatants operate within civilian populations and use them as shields — as Hamas does shamelessly, lately launching rockets from densely populated residential streets, as news videos and photographs often depict — civilians can be protected only by surrendering to those who have taken them hostage.

In any case civilians will always bear some responsibility for their governments and will suffer on account of them, even tyrannical governments like the Hamas regime, which the people of Gaza themselves brought to power fully knowing of Hamas’ rejection of any compromise with the “Zionist entity.” Recently otherwise innocent Iraqi civilians have suffered catastrophically for not having overthrown Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical regime. So too have otherwise innocent American civilians suffered (though only a tiny bit as much, through the deaths of members of their families serving in the military) for electing a president and Congress who got them into a stupid imperial war by mistake and then persisted in it, just as otherwise innocent American civilians suffered during the Korean and Vietnam wars. (Fortunately for Americans, it has been a long time since their country picked on somebody its own size.)

As Israel both fights and provisions its enemy in Gaza, the world chants that it wants a “durable cease-fire,” which means, as anyone can see but only Israel can say, a period of respite and rearmament so that Gaza can renew the war under more favorable conditions. In regard to Gaza and Israel the world does not clamor for what it usually clamors during war — a peace settlement. For Israel is never to have peace. As the Hamas regime proclaims, the cause of the war is not Israel’s blockade of Gaza but Israel’s simple existence. The world clamors for negotiations but there is as yet nothing for Israel to negotiate but the speed of its own dissolution.

Israel is an imperfect democracy and can be heavy-handed, but it is the only democracy in the neighborhood and is much less heavy-handed than most nations are when they are at war, much less heavy-handed than even the United States, which lately has more or less suspended habeas corpus and judicial review not because of war or rebellion but only because of a single if spectacular incident of terrorism that arose entirely from the country’s own grotesque and continuing negligence in ordinary border control and immigration law enforcement.

No matter how heavy-handed Israel may seem, peace terms are available from it, terms that would leave its enemy in control of the same amount of territory and perfectly able to live a decent life, and even these terms could be negotiated. But there is no reason for Israel to stop fighting in Gaza until someone in authority there wants to make a peace settlement rather just regroup for war. And no one in authority in Gaza is likely to want to make peace, for he would risk the hatred of those of his fellow Gazans who have most of the guns and who are pledged to prevent any peace.

So Israel should stop wringing its hands, just as the Hamas regime and its supporters around the world and enablers at the United Nations should stop complaining. Here at last is the chance to fulfill that mandate from God to kill the hated infidels and make sure that there is no place for them in the neighborhood. God never said the infidels wouldn’t fight back, and peace will be more likely if this fight now is fought to the end.

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Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.