Let’s Mobilize an Army of Stone Throwers on the Border By Ilana Mercer
In the United States, even our Customs and Border Protection apologizes for doing its job. Allegedly, CBP “protects the public from dangerous people and materials attempting to cross the border …”
On one of the media networks that wants all people, dangerous or not, to cross the southern border into the United States if they so desire, a CBP officer was bending over backwards to appear like a “global force for good.” (That, believe it or not, was the U.S. Navy’s motto, between 2009 and 2015!)
Tear-gassing rabble-rousing migrants, who were charging his officers and breaching the U.S.-Mexico border, was in the service of protecting … the migrants, especially The Children. Perhaps that’s in the oath of office a CBP officer takes?
Law enforcement officers entrusted with the safety of the American people struggle to articulate pride in executing their mandate. Attached to the expected self-loathing repartee is, invariably, a declaration of loyalties to The World. (Of a piece with this confused loyalty is the typical argument made by the typical TV talker: Illegal immigration must be stopped, so as to … save migrants from the journey’s depredations.)
It’s instructive to contrast the apologies around defending the U.S. border and the American people with the absence of apologies on Israel’s borders.
In May of this year, The Economist reported, “Tens of thousands of Palestinians massed near Gaza’s border fence, threatening to ‘return’ to the lands their forefathers lost when Israel was created in 1948.” They wanted in.
Israeli soldiers responded not with tear gas, but with bullets. They killed over 60 protesters who threatened to breach the border. The number has since risen to 120.
Most of us, this writer included, would condemn such excessive force.
Yet surprisingly, The Economist—a liberal, pro-Palestinian, most excellent weekly—pondered but briefly and nonchalantly about Israel’s army having used excessive force, concluding almost callously: “Every state has a right to defend its borders.”
Come again?!
This from the very same editorialists who never tire of protesting any disruption in the holy quest of weary columns of Christ-like caravanners, planning to defy the U.S. government, by illegally entering the United States of America.
Moreover, calmly and with no histrionics does The Economist report, matter-of-fact, that “Any Palestinian, even a farmer, coming within 300 meters of the fence [with Gaza] is liable to be shot.”
And while the august magazine has declaimed dutifully that “Israel must answer for the deaths in Gaza,” its writers have also evinced a good deal of impatience with the M.O.P.E (Most Oppressed People Ever), stating: “It is time for Palestinians to take up genuine non-violence.”
In other words, grow up. The stone throwing was cute when your “struggle” was in its infancy, but no more.
Go figure.
For the longest time, the world raged about Israel’s refusal to accept the necessity for its citizens to be blown to bits or be overrun demographically (by people likewise said only to be “seeking a better life” for themselves and their posterity).
Israel paid no attention to the liberal lunatics aligned against its oft-excessive habit of defending the rights of its citizenry.
In fact, the Jewish State has recently gone one better. Israel has automated the process of defense, creating a set of “auto kill-zones” “by networking together remote-controlled machine guns, ground sensors, and drones along the 60-kilometer border.”
Bluntly put, Israel has deployed gizmos to Gaza; “robo-snipers” instead of flesh-and-blood men and women.
The nation’s “19- and 20-year-old soldiers” are still deployed to the front—but virtually. They sit at a safe distance “behind computer screens,” waiting on “approval by a commanding officer” before “pushing the kill button.”
The IDF Southern Command’s rules of engagement along the Gaza fence are, shall we say, particularly aggressive.
Oh, it’s still pro forma for the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council to open every one of their sessions with a rote condemnation of Israel’s actions on its borders and everywhere else.
But even the U.N., a cesspit of venality and stupidity, has gotten the message over the decades. And it is this:
Israel’s army is not going to put down its guns and mobilize an army of stone throwers to lob back the stones thrown at them by the “persecuted” Arabs. They are not concerned with the U.N.’s habit of labeling what they do as the crime of using “excessive force.”
Israel’s action on its own borders is not unlike many actions taken by the U.S. Armed Forces in defense of borders not our own, after all. Maybe we should consider bringing that strategy home.
Photo Credit: Hassan Jedi/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
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