article
It has been my observation certain news articles , especially unpopular ones, tend to mysteriously vanish. So , I'm copying this one , in full, it was written by John Robson , QMI agency , in the toronto sun.
With Israel winding down its incursion into Gaza, we search through
the physical and mental rubble for lessons. As usual, an air of
unreality permeates the exercise.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that a brutal Israeli
overreaction to Hamas provocations outraged world opinion and forced Tel
Aviv back to the negotiating table with reasonable local players and
its staunch American ally to seek a two-state solution to help the poor
Palestinians. Not one bit of that is true.
OK. The Hamas provocations were real, from rocket attacks to an
elaborate expensive network of terror tunnels. But Israel did not
overreact and was not brutal.
Those who say “Israel has a right to defend itself but…” have never
explained what it could have done that would have been less forceful yet
effective. And despite the common narrative of Israel as a callous
bully spraying fire at civilians and outraging world opinion, the IDF
acted to minimize civilian and maximize jihadi deaths with considerable
effect.
Most accounts tell you the bulk of victims were “civilians” then list
a few dead children for added pathos. And all decent people are
horrified by non-combatant deaths, young or old, and wish they could be
avoided. But in fact a far higher proportion of the dead are young men
with terrorist affiliations than would result from careless or random
fire. And Hamas has been storing weapons in schools, firing from beside
hospitals, hiding tunnel entrances behind UNRWA signs and otherwise
seeking to maximize innocent deaths it can then exploit for publicity
and recruitment.
Why do we hear so little of this? Because the official account of
events within Gaza comes from Hamas, which doesn’t just kill Jews and
its own people without compunction, as human shields or in brutal
extralegal torture-murders of suspected collaborators. It also routinely
bullies and threatens journalists, who then say, and omit, what Hamas
dictates without mentioning that they report under duress.
As for international “pressure” helping end the incursion, world
opinion may influence the course of debate in a genuinely divided
society like, say, white South Africa during apartheid. But something
like 95% of Israeli Jews favoured “Operation Protective Edge.” Mind you,
more than half think it ended too soon.
Thus the Obama administration is doubly deluded in thinking UN,
Western liberal and Islamist outrage now force a stubborn Israeli
government to join a negotiating process among various local parties
seeking a genuine compromise solution. John Kerry can trade words with
open backers of Hamas like Qatar and Turkey until his Nobel Peace Prize
comes home, but Israelis know there’s no partner for peace on the other
side so they do what they need to do and stop when they think it’s done.
As it happens most of Israel’s neighbours hate and fear Hamas, and
its Iranian backers, so much that for once they don’t want to kill the
Jews then start in on each other. This time the Saudi, Egyptian and
Jordanian governments, among others, want to do it in the other order.
Finally, the Muslim world does not sympathize with the Palestinians.
No Arab neighbour has offered them refuge and citizenship at any point
in the last 66 years. Instead, like Hamas, those governments find
Palestinian suffering instrumentally useful but otherwise uninteresting.
There is an old saying that a lie is half-way around the world before
the truth gets its boots on. But as the dust settles, at least some
people will keep asking questions like: Why do the negotiations go
nowhere? What does the Hamas Charter say? Why do media peddle Hamas
numbers? Why should we trust Western journalists and politicians who are
so reliably wrong on every important aspect of the Middle East?
Why the persistent air of unreality?