War Fever
What a horrible prospect for a tiny country surrounded by voraciously blood-avenging aggressors. To have to contemplate the very real possibility that war may be on the horizon, and there may be little that can be done to avert it.For one thing, no sovereign nation can accept the constant bombardment over its border targeting its civilians, and the ongoing attempts of terror militias to abduct or kill members of its armed services as "normal", day-to-day activities.
From ongoing threats to the country's stability from West Bank-based secular Fatah's Palestinian Authority affiliated militias, to those of Islamist Hamas in the Gaza Strip, to the depredations by Israeli Arabs living within Israel, who daily launch physical attacks against Israeli Jews.
And from the taunts and expressions of future military intent from Lebanon-based Hezbollah, acting as terror agents of Syria and Iran.
Add to that the fact that both Syria and Iran have unequivocally stated their intent to annihilate the State of Israel from the Middle East geography, and you have a formula for embattlement of any society, any population.
The grinding effect of this continual existential threat toward a population wishing nothing more than to be able to get on with life as a normal functioning country, is incalculable.
Hezbollah keeps threatening revenge for the ostensible assassination by Israel of one of their chief tacticians and inordinately talented bomb-maker, Imad Mughniyeh. Although it's far from clear that the man wasn't murdered by Syrian agents. Speculation even has it, in collusion with some members of Hezbollah.
Blaming Israel - regardless of who actually committed the deadly act - simply leaves the way open to explain an attack against Israel as one of revenge; completely explicable to the Arab mind. Hezbollah fundamentalists, terror-minions of Syria and Iran, are ready to exploit that murder as a reason to attack Israel.
And Israel has warned Syria that she will be held responsible for such an attack being launched by Hezbollah.
The fever of war is upon the region. Weapons smuggling and preparations for attacks have been ongoing, and the militias of Hamas and Hezbollah feel themselves prepared to launch a multiple-pronged attack against their hated enemy.
They have ample support from among the Palestinian population who have been led to believe explicitly over the past half-century, that the solution to their misery is the destruction of Israel.
The Christian Science Monitor has reported an interview with one of Hezbollah's fighters, claiming that the terror group has been rapidly expanding its numbers. Traditionally attractive to Shiites, it is now, it would appear, attracting the interest of Sunni Arabs as well. "The holy fighters are leaving universities, shops, places of work to go and train."
The cult of death-dealing is proving provocatively, compellingly attractive to young Arabs.
The London-based Iraqi writer, 'Aref 'Awan described this phenomenon well when he wrote that: "When the Salafi mob in Gaza tied the hands and feet of a senior Palestinian official and hurled him, alive, from the 14th floor, I asked myself: What political or religious precepts must have been inculcated into the minds of these young people to make them treat a human life with such shocking cruelty?
"Earlier, I had watched on TV as the bodies of two Israeli soldiers were thrown from the second floor [of a building] in a Palestinian city. Whether or not it was the same Salafi mob behind that incident, [one asks oneself]: What language, [or rather,] what historic linguistic distortion could have erased from the human heart [all] moral sensibilities when dealing with a living and helpless human being?
"Arabs who are so averse to such inhuman behaviour must help me expose and eliminate the enormous lie that has for 60 years justified, extolled, and supported brutality. [Such behaviour] is no longer limited to the expression of unconscious [impulses] by individuals, but constitutes a broad cultural phenomenon, which began in Lebanon, [spread to] Iraq and Palestine, and then [spread] - slowly but surely to other Arab states as well.
"This enormous lie is what the Arabs called the Nakba - that is, the establishment of two states in Palestine: the state of Israel, which the Jews agreed to accept, and the state of Palestine, which the Arabs rejected.
"In our times, when science, with its accurate instruments, can predict climatic changes that will lead to drought or the movement of tectonic plates that causes earthquakes, it is inconceivable that a modern man can, without making a laughingstock of himself, attribute the destruction of cities ancient or modern to the wrath of Allah. Nevertheless, today, 80% of Arabs claim this to be the case. They are neither embarrassed nor afraid of being laughed at.
"This high percentage includes not only the illiterates who densely populate rural areas, villages, and small and large cities, but also students, teachers, lecturers, graduates of institutions of higher education, scientists, technology experts, physicians, graduates of religious universities such as Al-Azhar, historians and politicians who have held or are currently holding public office.
"It is those numerous educated elites who have forced the Arab mentality into a narrow, restrictive, and deficient cultural mold, spewing violence, terrorism, and zealotry, and prohibiting innovative thought... All this was done to instill a false sense of oppression in the hearts of the Arabs, and to destroy them with the infectious disease of despair and confusion.
"This [attitude] is rooted in the 1947 Arab League resolution stating that Palestine is a "stolen" land and that none but a Muslim Arab is entitled to benefit from it as an autonomous [political entity], even if another's historic roots there predate those of the Muslims or the Arabs."
Those historic roots of which he speaks, none other than that of the people of Israel. Who have never given up their historic place as residents of the Middle East.
And who returned, finally, to the place of their ancient heritage in an attempt to find for themselves a place of succour, a haven of peace, where Jews could live without fear of the kinds of social ostracization they have so long been subjected to.
Where state- or religion-sponsored pogroms would never again be a part of their daily life. Where their lives would never more be proscribed by ghetto-dwelling. Where the threat of discreet discrimination in polite European society would diminish the ongoing quality of their lives.
A heartsick remedy for the Final Solution when the Holocaust was imposed upon world Jewry. And now, in their homeland, surrounding neighbours make ready to impose yet another holocaust, of their own devising.
Labels: Israel, Middle East, Terrorism, Traditions
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, April 17, 2008
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