This is a chilling, ominous moment for the people of Israel, yet one best captured by an old Jewish jest. A rabbi was leaving his synagogue after several years of service and at the good-bye party he was accosted by an elderly woman. “Rabbi, we hate to see you go.”

“Oh,” murmured the cleric humbly. “I am sure my replacement will be just as good.”

“Nah,” snapped the old-timer. “There have been four rabbis over my years here, and each one was worse than the one before.”

When Barack Obama promises the Muslims a new beginning, Israel has a pretty good idea who is going to bear the brunt. Not that the scenario laid out in the body of Obama’s speech is adversarial to Israel intrinsically. If all its prescriptions were carried out, we would have Hamas renouncing violence (inspired by Martin Luther King), Palestinian schoolchildren will no longer be taught to hate (inspired by Reverend Wright?), and a sleepy suburban middle-class Palestine would share the landscaping bill with its Jewish neighbor. Israel would have to give up some stuff, but nothing it has not agreed to in the past.

The problem is not with this visage, this stained-glass window into utopia. This image has been around for years. Israel signed up for this in Oslo a full sixteen years ago, later reinforcing this commitment in the Wye Accords signed by Prime Minister Netanyahu himself. On top of that Israel spontaneously withdrew from Gaza four years ago, hardly the mark of grasping power-mongers.

The problem is that this window has already been shattered by Palestinians who continue to foment hatred. Their textbooks, their entertainments, even kiddie cartoons, are saturated with vitriol against Israel. From the Gaza side they began shooting rockets as soon as they took control of the territory. Then they voted Hamas in and stood by a few months later when the Fatah members were killed or exiled to the West Bank. They kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and continue to hold him hostage. The rocketry Hamas fires is supplied by Iran, which backs it up with rhetoric promising to wipe Israel off the map.

Israelis have been involved in this process long enough to know that each “new beginning” is worse than its predecessor. The Palestinians are never asked to make the first move. Instead Israel is prodded to offer ever more gestures of good faith. They have already relinquished two huge territories while the Palestinians have done nothing in return, but the onus always falls on them to prove sincerity.

Look at the quotes from Arab leaders after the Obama speech. Not a single one refers to the concessions demanded from Palestinians or Iran, but rather to the critique of Israel. They are about evenly divided if it was strong enough or whether he should have expanded on the extent of Israeli misbehavior. This mirrors the response during the speech itself. The chastisement is greeted by silence but the slapdown of Israel gets huge ovations.

Incidentally, none of what Obama expressed is new. It has been the refrain of European nations for some time. What it indicates is America coming to echo Europe, an outcome much desired by liberals in the United States from Hollywood to the Supreme Court. It has also been standard fare in American universities for many decades. Elect a college professor to the Presidency and you know what to expect.

Benjamin Netanyahu probably has no choice but to make positive noises. But if you got to be a fly on the wall behind closed doors, you can be sure that the sound waves will curl your dainty wings. Some of the lesser Israeli dignitaries are not afraid to speak their mind in public. Knesset member Dr. Michael Ben-ari said, “We survived Pharaoh. We will survive this.” One of the settlers averred: “More Hussein than Barack.” These are some very unhappy folks.

Probably the best answer is to say Israel is willing, but only after Palestinians live up to the deals already signed, none of which they are keeping. Which leads us to another classic gag. After a magician performs, a man from the audience asks him how the tricks are done. “I can tell you,” the trickster cracks, “but then I would have to kill you.”

“Fine,” the man answers. “Then tell my wife instead.”

By Thomas Sowell
No phrase represents more of a triumph of hope over experience than the phrase “Middle East peace process.” A close second might be the once-fashionable notion that Israel should “trade land for peace.”

Since everybody seems to be criticizing Israel for its military response to the rockets being fired into their country from the Gaza strip, let me add my criticisms as well. The Israelis traded land for peace, but they have never gotten the peace, so they should take back the land.

Maybe a couple of generations of Palestinians in Gaza living in peace under Israeli occupation and a couple of generations of the occupation troops squelching the terrorists — “militants” for those of you who are squeamish — would set up conditions where the Palestinians would be free to vote on whether they would like to remain occupied or to have their own state — minus terrorists and their rockets.

Casualty totals alone should be enough to show that the Palestinian people are the biggest losers from the current situation, where the terrorists among them, firing rockets into Israel, can bring devastating retaliatory strikes.

Why don’t the Palestinians vote for some representatives who would make a lasting peace with Israel? Because any such candidates would be killed by the terrorists long before election day, so nobody volunteers for that dangerous role.

We don’t know what the Palestinians really want — and won’t know as long as they are ruled by Hamas, Hezbollah and the like.

Whatever the benefits of peace for the Palestinian population, what are the terrorists going to do in peacetime? Become librarians and furniture salesmen?

So-called “world opinion” has been a largely negative factor in this situation. Nothing is easier than for people living in peace and safety in Paris or Rome to call for a “cease fire” after the Israelis retaliate against people who are firing rockets into their country.

The time to cease fire was before the rockets were fired.

What do calls for “cease fire” and “negotiations” do? They lower the price of launching attacks. This is true not only in the Middle East but in other parts of the world as well.

During the Vietnam war, when American clergymen were crying out “Stop the bombing!” they paid little attention to the fact that bombing pauses made it easier for North Vietnam to move more ammunition into South Vietnam to kill both South Vietnamese and Americans.

After Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, if British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had heeded calls for a “cease fire,” that would have simply lowered the price to be paid by the Argentine government for their invasion.

Go back a hundred years — before there was a United Nations and before “world opinion” was taken into account.

An Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands at that time would have risked not only a British counter-attack to retake the islands but also British attacks on Argentina itself.

Anywhere in the world, attacks such as those on Israel today would not only have risked retaliation but invasion and annihilation of the government that launched those attacks.

Today, so-called “world opinion” not only limits the price to be paid for aggression or terrorism, it has even led to the self-indulgence of third parties talking pretty talk about limiting the response of those who are attacked to what is “proportionate.”

By this reasoning, we should not have declared war on Japan for bombing Pearl Harbor. We should have gone over to Japan, bombed one of their harbors — and let it go at that.

Does anyone imagine that this would have led to Japan’s becoming as peaceful today as it has become after Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Or is the real agenda to engage in moral preening from a safe distance and at somebody else’s expense?

Those who think “negotiations” are a magic answer seem not to understand that when A wants to annihilate B, this is not an “issue” that can be resolved amicably around a conference table.

By Mark Steyn

So how was your holiday season? Over in Gaza, whether or not they’re putting the Christ back in Christmas, they’re certainly putting the crucifixion back in Easter. According to the London-based Arabic newspaper al Hayat, on December 23rd Hamas legislators voted to introduce Sharia — Islamic law — to the Palestinian Territories, including crucifixion. So next time you’re visiting what my childhood books still quaintly called “the Holy Land,” the re-enactments might be especially lifelike.

The following day, Christmas Eve, Samuel Huntington died at his home at Martha’s Vineyard. A decade and a half ago, in his most famous book The Clash Of Civilizations, Professor Huntington argued that western elites’ view of man as homo economicus was reductive and misleading — that cultural identity is a more profound behavioral indicator than lazy assumptions about the universal appeal of western-style economic liberty and the benefits it brings. Very few of us want to believe this. “The great majority of Palestinian people,” Condi Rice, the Secretary of State, said to Cal Thomas a couple of years back, “they just want a better life. This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society. I just don’t believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that’s what people are going to do.”

Cal Thomas asked a sharp follow-up: “Do you think this or do you know this?”

“Well, I think I know it,” said Secretary Rice.

“You think you know it?”

“I think I know it.”

I think she knows she doesn’t know it. But in the modern world there is no diplomatic vocabulary for the kind of cultural fault line represented by the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, so even a smart thinker like Dr. Rice can only frame it as an issue of economic and educational opportunity. Of course, there are plenty of Palestinians like the ones the Secretary of State describes: you meet them living as doctors and lawyers in Los Angeles and Montreal and Geneva … but not, on the whole, in Gaza. In Gaza, they don’t vote for Hamas because they want access to university education. Or, if they do, it’s to get Junior into the Saudi-funded Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza, where majoring in rocket science involves making one and firing it at the Zionist Entity. In 2007, as part of their attempt to recover Gaza from Hamas, Fatah seized 1,000 Qassam rockets at the university, as well as seven Iranian military trainers.

At a certain unspoken level, we understand that the Huntington thesis is right and the Rice view is wishful thinking. After all, when President Sarkozy and other European critics bemoan Israel’s “disproportionate” response, what really are they saying? That they expect better from the despised Jews than from Hamas. That they regard Israel as a western society bound by civilized norms, whereas any old barbarism issuing forth from Gaza is to be excused on grounds of “desperation”.  Hence, this slightly surreal headline from The New York Times: “Israel Rejects Cease-Fire, But Offers Gaza Aid.” For whatever that’s worth. Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a young Palestinian woman who received considerate and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheva, returned to that same hospital packed with explosives in order to blow herself up and kill the doctors and nurses who restored her to health. Well, what do you expect? It’s “desperation” born of “poverty” and “occupation”.

If it was, it would be easy to fix. But what if it’s not? What if it’s about something more primal than land borders and economic aid?

A couple of days after Hamas voted to restore crucifixion to the Holy Land, their patron in Teheran (and their primary source of “aid”) put in an appearance on British TV. As multicultural “balance” to Her Majesty The Queen’s traditional Christmas message, the TV network Channel 4 invited President Ahmadinejad to give an alternative Yuletide address on the grounds that it was a valuable public service to let viewers hear him “speak for himself, which people in the west don’t often get the chance to see”. In fact, as Caroline Glick pointed out in The Jerusalem Post, the great man “speaks for himself” all the time — when he’s at the UN, calling on all countries to submit to Islam; when he’s presiding over his international conference of Holocaust deniers; when he’s calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map” — or (in his more “moderate” moments) relocated to a couple of provinces of Germany and Austria. Caroline Glick forbore to mention that, according to President Ahmadinejad’s chief adviser Hassan Abbassi, his geopolitical strategy is based on the premise that “Britain is the mother of all evils” — the evils being America, Australia, Israel, the Gulf states, Canada, and New Zealand, all of which are the malign progeny of the British Empire. “We have established a department that will take care of England,” said Mr. Abbassi in 2005. “England’s demise is on our agenda.”

So when Channel 4 says that we don’t get the chance to see these fellows speak for themselves, it would be more accurate to say that they speak for themselves incessantly but the louder they speak the more we put our hands over our ears and go “Nya nya, can’t hear you.” We do this in part because, if you’re as invested as most western elites are in the idea that all anyone wants is to go to university, get a steady job and settle down in a nice house in the suburbs, a statement such as “England’s demise is on our agenda” becomes almost literally untranslatable. When President Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we deplore him as a genocidal fantasist. But maybe he’s a genocidal realist — look at the threads linking North Korea to Iran and to Iran’s clients in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza — and we’re the fantasists.

The civilizational clashes of Professor Huntington’s book are not inevitable. Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something the west no longer has the stomach for. Unfortunately, the Saudis do, and so do the Iranians. And not just in Gaza but elsewhere the trend is away from “moderation” and toward something fiercer and ever more implacable.

To be fair to President Ahmadinejad’s hosts at Channel 4, the “department that will take care of England” probably doesn’t get the lion’s share of the funding in Teheran. On the other hand, when Hashemi Rafsanjani describes the Zionist Entity as “the most hideous occurrence in history” which the Muslim world “will vomit out from its midst” with “a single atomic bomb”, that sounds rather more specific, if not teetering alarmingly on the “disproportionate”. Unlike its international critics in North America and Europe, Israel has no margin for error.

By Victor Davis Hanson

The Israelis just struck back hard at Hamas in Gaza. In response, the United Nations, the European Union and the Arab world (at least publicly) expressed their anger at the killing of over 300 Palestinians, most of whom were terrorists and Hamas officials.

For several prior weeks, Hamas terrorists had been daily launching rockets into Israeli towns that border Gaza. The recent volleys of missiles had insidiously become more frequent — up to 80 a day — and the payloads larger. Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists were reportedly supplying their own training and expertise.

These terrorists point to the Lebanon war of 2006 as the proper template for provoking an Israeli counter-response that will bog down the Israeli Defense Forces in the streets of urban Gaza and ensure that Palestinian civilians are harmed on global television.

Watching both this week’s war and the world’s predictable reaction to it, we can recall the Gaza rules. Most are reflections of our postmodern age, and completely at odds with the past protocols of war.

First is the now-familiar Middle East doctrine of proportionality. Legitimate military action is strangely defined by the relative strength of the combatants. World opinion more vehemently condemns Israel’s countermeasures, apparently because its rockets are far more accurate and deadly than previous Hamas barrages that are poorly targeted and thus not so lethal.

If America had accepted such rules in, say, World War II, then by late 1944 we, not the Axis, would have been the culpable party, since by then once-aggressive German, Italian, and Japanese forces were increasingly on the defensive and far less lethal than the Allies.

Second, intent in this war no longer matters. Every Hamas unguided rocket is launched in hopes of hitting an Israeli home and killing men, women, and children. Every guided Israeli air-launched missile is targeted at Hamas operatives, who deliberately work in the closest vicinity to women and children.

Killing Palestinian civilians is incidental to Israeli military operations and proves counterproductive to its objectives. Blowing up Israeli non-combatants is the aim of Hamas’ barrages: the more children, aged, and women who die, the more it expects political concessions from Tel Aviv.

By this logic, the 1999 American bombing of Belgrade — aimed at stopping the genocide of Slobodan Milosevic — was, because of collateral damage, the moral equivalent of the carefully planned Serbian massacres of Muslim civilians at Srebrenica in 1995.

Third, culpability is irrelevant. The “truce” between Israel and Hamas was broken once Hamas got its hands on new stockpiles of longer-range mobile rockets — weapons that are intended to go over Israel’s border walls.

Yet, according to the Gaza rules, both sides always deserve equal blame. Indeed, this weird war mimics the politically correct, zero-tolerance policies of our public schools, where both the bully and his victim are suspended once physical violence occurs.

According to such morally equivalent reasoning, World War II was only a tragedy, not a result of German aggression. Once the dead mounted up, it mattered little what were the catalysts of the outbreak of fighting.

Fourth, with instantaneous streaming video from the impact sites in Gaza, context becomes meaningless. Our attention is glued to the violence of the last hour, not that of the last month that incited the war.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 to great expectations that the Palestinians there would combine their new autonomy, some existing infrastructure left behind by the Israelis, Middle East oil money and American pressure for free and open elections to craft a peaceful, prosperous democracy.

The world hoped that Gaza might thrive first, and then later adjudicate its ongoing disputes with Israel through diplomacy. Instead, the withdrawal was seen not as a welcome Israeli concession, but as a sign of newfound Jewish weakness — and that the intifada tactics that had liberated Gaza could be amplified into a new war to end the Zionist entity itself.

Fifth and finally, victimization is crucial. Hamas daily sends barrages into Israel, as its hooded thugs thump their chests and brag of their radical Islamic militancy. But when the payback comes, suddenly warriors are transmogrified into weeping victims, posing teary-eyed for the news camera as they deplore “genocide” and “the Palestinian Holocaust.” At least the Japanese militarists did not cry out to the League of Nations for help once mean Marines landed on Iwo Jima.

By now, these Gaza asymmetrical rules are old hat. We know why they persist — worldwide fear of Islamic terrorism, easy anti-Westernism, the old anti-Semitism, and global strategic calculations about Middle East oil — but it still doesn’t make them right.