The current administration is doing everything it can to prolong the Gaza war and guarantee that Israel cannot win a much-needed decisive victory.
Reports out of Gaza claim that five Palestinians were killed and ten injured by airdropped food packages. The US and Jordan were quick to claim that they were not the guilty party, but in the end, the countries trying to parachute burgers and spaghetti into Gaza are the same ones who have been accusing Israel of killing “too many” Palestinians. It can only be described as poetic justice that the hectoring nincompoops killed two Palestinian children while trying to make Israel look bad for supposedly not getting enough food into Gaza. I do not know how many IDF soldiers have been killed because Israel is trying to reduce Palestinian civilian casualties, but the number is definitely far greater than zero. So the complainers now find themselves guilty of killing civilians, something they did in the exact same manner more than 20 years ago at the beginning of the Afghan campaign. As Western armies fight pronouns rather than real enemies and find themselves with non-working aircraft carriers or burned out billion dollar amphibious landing ships, it is no surprise that they cannot figure out how to open parachutes on high-velocity vittles.
President Biden, during his SOTU shoutfest said that the US Army will build a port for Gaza. This is a dumb idea which means that it is no surprise that it has been put forward. Hamas more or less takes all of the supplies that come into Gaza. The port will offer a new source of income for the Hamas terrorists as they will grab the seaside supplies and resell them on the black market. Truck drivers from Rafah heading north have about a one hour life expectancy, as both locals and Hamas throw rocks or shoot at them so as to stop the rigs and loot their content. You thought that Russia’s prisoners got a raw deal being sent to Ukraine. The aid truck drivers must have watched Death Wish a couple times before crossing into Gaza. The US has never understood the way Arabs think, except for Donald Trump and his people who put together the very successful Abraham Accords. Feeding Gaza only makes the war go on longer, strengthens Hamas and makes the US look weak.
An intellectual assumption over the past fifty years is that all people are interchangeable. We literally see it today with men claiming to be women and vice versa with newspapers, sports leagues and “feminists” perfectly fine with the charade and men taking women's trophies. The same thinking goes for different peoples: all people are simply the same, more or less white or “black or brown” but otherwise the same. But this is demonstrably not the case. People are formed by their families, religions, surroundings, friends, education, etc. Different people think differently. I remember once seeing a cabbie here open his door and simply pour out dozens of cigarette butts onto the street. I was horrified while the fellow himself saw nothing wrong in what he did. People think differently, value things differently, and act differently. But our leaders refuse to accept this obvious point in human relations. A George Floyd mural in Kabul and trans lectures at the university there showed how out-of-touch our leaders truly are. Ditto for the non-Muslim no-go zones in the heavily Muslim areas of Europe. Angela Merkel and her peers thought that they were importing a million Dutchmen.
Recommended
Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords but did not plan to uphold a single word written in them. After the First Gulf War, the PLO had zero Arab support. Since Arafat had thrown his lot with Saddam, the Saudis cut off all funding. I try to imagine the meeting in Tunis in which Arafat informed his fellow terrorist friends that they would soon receive money, weapons, and most importantly, land from none other than the Israelis. They must have thought that he had gone mad as they were out of money, Arab support and hope. But sure enough, Shimon Peres and Yitzchak Rabin produced those accords, the fruits of which have been thousands of Israelis killed and many times more injured. One has to remember that Oslo started in Gaza where Arafat first landed. Arafat understood that by signing the agreement he would be in a much better position to destroy Israel from up close and not from the shores of Tunisia.
Similarly, Hamas sees Israel and the West giving them aid as weakness. The administration sees it as a great humanitarian act, but Hamas sees one more opportunity to keep its fighters fed and further control the population who need to pay exorbitant prices to get basic foodstuffs. People rejoice with free bags of flour for which they can pay $100 each on Hamas’ black market. The alternative is chicken feed made into bread.
The rare exception of Americans projecting their Western ideas onto Arab leaders was with Donald Trump and his team. Unlike John Kerry who emphatically said that there will never be an agreement between Israel and the Persian Gulf states without first a peace deal with the Palestinians, Trump’s people realized that the Arabs could not care less about the Palestinians and that they were tired of the years lost when they could have been benefiting from investment in Israel, Israeli technology and intelligence, and tourism. A few years back, Emirates threw a passenger off for having come off of an Israeli flight; today, they have kosher meals on every plane. That no Arab state offered to take in any Palestinians from Gaza tells you all you need to know about how much they really care about their “brethren”.
Arabs think differently than Westerners who think differently than Russians and Ukrainians. This is not a competition or values comparison but a simple statement of fact. Putin is willing to let thousands of soldiers die in order to achieve his strategic objectives; the US and Israel fight differently and do everything they can to reach an objective with the fewest casualties possible. Hamas and other terror groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah, and the like do not want peace. They are trying to figure out the best way to make Israel and the Jews disappear: terror, war, fake agreements, ersatz “refugees”--whatever can weaken Israel and allow for it to be destroyed is on the menu for them.
This war would have been over two months ago if the West had gotten off of its high horse and not complained about civilian deaths or the need for more humanitarian aid. The Palestinians would have turned on Hamas and demanded to live and Hamas would have been destroyed by both Israel and its fellow Palestinians. But now Hamas is stealing most of the aid that enters and selling it to the people who want to stay alive. So Hamas gets stronger while Israel’s hands get tied while trying to finish Rafah and the four Hamas battalions still functional there.
The Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, etc. will make peace when they are convinced that they have no violent alternative to reach their goals. Western weakness in the eyes of an Arab is reason for contempt, not respect, and hectoring Israel convinces the bad guys that Israel is alone. There can be peace, but before it occurs, the West must start thinking like Arabs and not as Westerners in Arab clothing. Let Biden, et al declare that all Hamas members are dead men walking, including those in Qatar, and Turkey and this war will be over in no time.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member