By Ira Sharkansky
JERUSALEM — How many times have we seen it? Abba Eban said that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Here from the eastern edge of French Hill (and Jerusalem), we often see the black smoke of Palestinians burning tires. It’s most likely a protest against Israel’s existence or what they see as Israel’s mistreatment, but the prevailing winds bring the smoke to other Palestinians.
They’re latest efforts in Gaza began with a heavy investment of their aid money in building tunnels meant to bring killers into nearby Israeli settlements. But IDF and Israeli defense firms developed a technology to locate and destroy those tunnels.
Then it was a simpler and cheaper device– homemade kites with burning bottles of gasoline using the prevailing winds to light fires in Israeli fields.
So far the rush of thousands toward the border on successive weekends hasn’t accomplished anything more than occupying thousands of IDF personnel, burning a few acres of Israeli crops, losing some 100 Palestinian lives, and the wounding of what’s said to be thousands, as well as destroying the Gazan side of a crossing point that cut the supply of Israeli gas, fuel oil, food, medicine and other consumer goods from Israel.
That isn’t the way to create a Palestinian state, much less accomplish the pronounced aims of destroying Israel.
The last time the Gazans sought to conquer Israel with their rockets cost them more than 2,000 lives.
This upsurge in Gazan aggression seems to have been quieted with the intervention of Egypt and Qatar, as well as the disinterest of the Gazan cousins in the West Bank and the fatigue of other Arabs with the Palestinians.
Nakba Day was relatively quiet in Gaza and the West Bank, as was the high profile first Friday of Ramadan.
It appears that Israel’s show of force, along with the cooperation of Arab governments, have helped to fizzle what the Gazan’s were proclaiming as their latest great campaign.
Parallel predictions from Tehran that Iran will destroy Haifa and/or Tel Aviv have so far produced Iranian wreckage in Syria, and funerals of Iranians and their mercenaries from Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or wherever else there are ambitious Shi’ites.
The Gazans have had some success in the media. While Israeli politicians and media commentators have shown considerable support for what’s happened in Gaza, international media and some governments have been nasty in their condemnation. No surprise. Goliath gets a worse press than David. Iran remains an excited supporter, reportedly sending money for Hamas to use in this campaign.
Donald Trump and Nikki Haley are firmly in Israel’s corner.
Turkey has upped its enmity, sending home Israel’s Ambassador and making him take off his shoes in front of local media while passing through airport security.
Israel also has some clout in this spat. In cooperation with Egypt, also not a great friend of Ottoman aspirations, Turkey won’t be able to get wounded Gazans to its hospitals. And the expulsion of Turkey’s Consul in Jerusalem will hamper its efforts to play the Palestinian card in Al Quds.
Hamas sent its soldiers along with others recruited and paid for the effort to a shooting gallery, where Israeli soldiers did what is necessary and justified to defend their border, and the civilian settlements close to it.
Should Palestinians get through that border, we could expect a slaughter of Israeli civilians, in the style of pogroms once popular in Europe and the Middle East.
Israelis should be more concerned about the post-traumatic care of soldiers having to kill than for the Gazan aggressors who were killed.
Maybe the Gazan motto should be success via suicide. But success seems unlikely, except in showing pictures of bodies being carried, and then crowds at the funerals.
Palestinian activists are calling it a slaughter. They are right. But they are wrong to blame Israel. They should blame Hamas.
Media reports from Gaza are unreliable. Overseas journalists allowed into Gaza are subject to control by those who see the slaughter of their children and the closing of supply routes as a way to international support.
Prominent American publications, including CNN and the New York Times, are shaming themselves by accepting Hamas claims that the thousands were unarmed civilians, and joining the call for an international investigation likely to censure Israel.
The tilt of the New York Times recalls the action of that same Jewish-owned paper in the 1940s, burying its discomfort in having to report the early news of the Holocaust somewhere in the back pages, what one study described as alongside the ads for soap and shoe polish.
Hamas said that 50 of the most recent 60 killed were its people, most likely armed, and motivated to lead who ever could get through the border to massacre Jews.
The IDF positioned its soldiers in groups of ten or so, opposite clusters of thousands, with officers to monitor the actions of snipers.
International worthies, claiming to be even-handed, say that Israel should do more to help Gaza.
Beginning with the pullout of Gazan settlements, and extending to last week when Israel refurbished three times the supply lines that the Gazans had destroyed again and again, we can wonder what else a reasonable Israeli could have done.
Hamas and its allies are affected by intense hatred and an unwillingness to deal with Israel. It seems part of their political-religious-cultural DNA, and apparently beyond the capacity of Israel’s critics and some of its well wishers to grasp.
Worsening the plight of its people–for the purpose of attracting overseas media attention–appears to be the essence of the Gazan strategy.
The Gazans must begin to help themselves. Israel’s prime concern is to protect its own people from the savagery we hear.
A majority of what’s called the UN Human Rights Council has voted to establish a commission to investigate Israel’s use of deadly weapons against peaceful protesters.
Seen that. Done that. What else’s new?
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Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University. He may be contacted via ira.sharkansky@sdjewishworld.com