Who could have known that I would agree with the mysterious Fafblog! author — or in this case, specifically the Medium Lobster — on the subject of Israeli self-defense? I know, it seems unlikely. Still, here we are.
Palestinian onslaught of pleading and stump-waving, but Israel realizes
this is a war between good and evil, right and wrong, civilization and
those too poor to afford civilization. True, it's far from a fair fight
– Israel has a mere three hundred nuclear warheads while the
Palestinians have countless rocks to throw – but somehow the pluck and
determination of this scrappy regional superpower has prevailed over
the deadly horde of orphans, beggars and amputees who threaten to live
next to it.
Israel's critics will forever bicker over the spilled milk of Israeli policy – a few thousand homes demolished here, a few thousand corpses over there – but we must allow that Israel has a right to defend itself, and we must also
allow that defending itself necessarily entails the indiscriminate
bombing of thousands of screaming refugees. After all, if an implacable
terrorist enemy had been launching rockets at one of your villages,
wouldn't you do everything in your power to stop them? And once those
same implacable terrorist enemies agreed to a cease-fire, wouldn't you break
that cease-fire by bombing them and their families, reasoning that they
are, after all, implacable terrorist enemies, and not to be trusted?
And when you went to bomb those terrorists and their families, wouldn't
you also bomb everyone and everything around them, reasoning that only
a terrorist would live near, go to school with, or be hospitalized in the same vicinity as a terrorist? And when you went to bomb everything around them, wouldn't you be sure to plan that bombing months before the event that nominally precipitated it? And before planning that massive bombing campaign, wouldn't you be sure to cut the entire population off
from terrorist food, militant medicine, and jihadist electricity for
months in advance? And when that population retaliated against your
pre-retaliation retaliation by launching rockets at one of your
villages, wouldn't that merely confirm their nature as implacable
terrorist enemies who must be destroyed at any cost?
. . . As much as we might all yearn for
peace, history has shown that Palestinians understand only violence.
Well, violence and Arabic, but Arabic is notoriously difficult to
learn, while most of us can become fluent in violence in just under a
semester.
It is indeed difficult to argue with the notion that Israeli self-defense "necessarily entails the indiscriminate bombing of thousands of screaming refugees."
Accidental Blogger 
2 responses to “A brave little tank defends itself against a menacing twelve year old. (Joe)”
With the recent Israeli elections putting Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard right cronies in power, I can only see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict getting uglier and messier. Not that the so called left leaning governments in Israel have been any less relentless when it comes to occupation and aggression. But things will probably now get worse. As long as the US, the “honest” broker in the middle east looks the other way, I don’t see how the situation is likely to improve.
The attitude of Israelis citizens and their leadership is further hardening, not just against “refugee” Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank but even against the Israeli Arab citizens. There is increasing sympathy among Israelis for disenfranchizing them. See Fareed Zakaria’s article in Newsweek. If that happens, the specious claim that Israel is the “only democracy” in the middle east will become a cruel farce. Israel will then no longer be any different from other oppressive theocracies in the neighborhood. Being home to sophisticated moral /political philosophers and a western life-style are not enough to qualify.
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Here is a pertinent and touching statement by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami on the occasion of his accepting a literary prize in Israel.
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