Cease the Ceasefires: The International Pressure on Israel to Stop Fighting Back Enables the Terrorists. By Thomas Sowell
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383996/cease-ceasefires-thomas-sowell
Many years ago, on my first trip around the world, I was struck by how the children in the Middle East — Arab and Israeli alike — were among the nicest-looking little children I had seen anywhere. It was painful to think that they were going to grow up killing each other. But that is exactly what happened.
It is understandable that today, many people in many lands just want the fighting between the Israelis and the Palestinians to stop. Calls for a ceasefire are ringing out from the United Nations and from Washington, as well as from ordinary people in many places around the world.
According to the New York Times, Secretary of State John Kerry is hoping for a ceasefire to “open the door to Israeli and Palestinian negotiations for a long-term solution.” President Obama has urged Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have an “immediate, unconditional humanitarian ceasefire” — again, with the idea of pursuing some long-lasting agreement.
If this were the first outbreak of violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis, such hopes might make sense. But where have the U.N., Kerry, and Obama been during all these decades of endlessly repeated Middle East carnage?
The Middle East must lead the world in ceasefires. If ceasefires were the road to peace, the Middle East would easily be the most peaceful place on the planet. “Ceasefire” and “negotiations” are magic words to “the international community.” But just what do ceasefires actually accomplish? In the short run, they save some lives. But in the long run they cost far more lives by lowering the cost of aggression.
At one time, launching a military attack on another nation risked not only retaliation but annihilation. When Carthage attacked Rome, that was the end of Carthage. But when Hamas or some other terrorist group launches an attack on Israel, the aggressor knows in advance that whatever Israel does in response will be limited by calls for a ceasefire, backed by political and economic pressure from the United States.
It is not at all clear what Israel’s critics can rationally expect the Israelis to do when they are attacked. Suffer in silence? Surrender? Flee the Middle East? Or — most unrealistic of all — fight a “nice” war, with no civilian casualties? General William T. Sherman said it all, 150 years ago: “War is hell.”
If you want to minimize civilian casualties, then minimize the danger of war, by no longer coming to the rescue of those who start wars.
Not only was Israel attacked by vast numbers of rockets, but it was also invaded — underground — through mazes of tunnels. There is something grotesque about people living thousands of miles away, in safety and comfort, loftily second-guessing and trying to micromanage what the Israelis are doing in a matter of life and death. Such self-indulgences are a danger, not simply to Israel, but to the whole Western world, for they betray a lack of realism that shows in everything from the current disastrous consequences of our policies in Egypt, Libya, and Iraq to future catastrophes from a nuclear-armed Iran.
Those who say that we can contain a nuclear Iran, as we contained a nuclear Soviet Union, are acting as if they are discussing abstract people in an abstract world. Whatever the Soviets were, they were not suicidal fanatics, ready to see their own cities destroyed in order to destroy ours.
As for the ever-elusive “solution” to the Arab–Israeli conflicts in the Middle East, there is nothing faintly resembling a solution anywhere on the horizon. Nor is it hard to see why.
Even if the Israelis were all saints — and sainthood is not common in any branch of the human race — the cold fact is that they are far more advanced than their neighbors, and groups that cannot tolerate even subordinate Christian minorities can hardly be expected to tolerate an independent, and more advanced, Jewish state that is a daily rebuke to their egos.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2014 Creators Syndicate Inc.
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