Purpose, Please...?
The world's Elder Statesmen seek to parlay what's left of their time on this earth continuing to pursue truth and justice. To use their credentials, the huge respect given them, the trust with which their past endeavours have brought peoples' opinion to their embrace of social issues to ensure that the rights and entitlements of the oppressed are not forgotten. No one could claim there aren't a whole lot of issues in the world that require urgent addressing.Anyone could rhyme off quite a few problems of a really vital nature that vex the world community. So it comes as just a little bit of a shock, to put it lightly, to learn that the Carter Center and its titular head, along with South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, are up to what looks like nasty mischief. Really, it's depressing that those two notables have nothing better to turn their considerable attention to than the State of Israel.
They've been mute on items such as abductions of children to induct them into African militias, the ongoing rape of women in various African countries beset by internecine violence. I've read or heard nothing whatever regarding condemnatory pronouncements by either of these two seasoned human-rights activists with respect to the crises in Zimbabwe, Congo, Sudan, Burma. Nor have I heard condemnations of resolutely intransigent Islamists.
It is Israel with which they are concerned, mesmerized, held in the bondage of condemnation. They are concerned with Israel's determination to ensure that the Gaza coast not be utilized beyond what the Israeli navy can prevent, to smuggling weaponry to Hamas. Hamas, that Islamist entity that makes no secret of its violent intent to destroy Israel. Why not engage with Hamas in an effort to bring its leaders around to recognition of Israel?
From there, much could be accomplished. The fearless duo of Carter-Tutu-Human-Rights Emeritus, could conceivably settle down to seeking a peaceful solution to the bloody conflicts ongoing between Fatah and Hamas. In the knowledge that once peace has been achieved there, it could commence toward its ultimate goal; the Palestinian state, alongside the Israeli state. Instead confrontation with Israel is the goal.
The Carter Center sponsoring a sea voyage from Cypress to the Gaza coastline to challenge the authority of Israel. The 60 passengers who have volunteered to man the ship do so with the expectation that they will be arrested once they've left international waters, some 7 miles from the Mediterranean Coast. What might be the ultimate purpose, other than to obviously create new, damaging publicity, once wearily again damning the State of Israel.
The conspirators in this mission to judge and condemn Israel have reached the conclusion that Israel has no sovereignty over the Gaza coast as it withdrew unilaterally three years earlier from the land mass of the Strip under the country's Disengagement program. At the time Israel cautioned, however, that it had no intention of disengaging from control over the air and sea until such time as the Palestinian Authority could guarantee its security.
Not yet, obviously, reality. And the trip organizers whose blame-and-shame game reeks of anti-Semitism, for carefully selecting a Jewish country as its human-rights-abuse target when there are so many other countries just aching to be noticed in that category, countries like Iran, for example, chafing at the bit to destroy a neighbouring country, and whose obvious search for catastrophic nuclear weaponry will set the geography on existential edge.
Plan B goes into effect if Israel's naval forces put a halt to the protest ship's advance beyond international waters. For, instead of arresting at the Gaza coast, rather than retaining them inside international waters, the game plan remains unfulfilled. If they face that kind of dilemma, skewing their plan, the 60 protesters are prepared to remain on board for a minimum of two weeks, revelling in their not-quite-there status.
At issue, according to one of the ship's passengers, is the need to "remind the world that we will not stand by and watch 1.5 million people suffer death by starvation and disease." A moot point; no one should be prepared to do nothing while countless people suffer. And why are they suffering, other than that they launched a guerrilla war against an occupying force which is there to protect itself and its citizens from the violent attacks of the suffering peoples' heroes?
It is the intransigent disavowal of Israel's right of existence, the continual and ongoing assaults against its citizens that has the country's defence forces engaged in just that: defence. The vaunted, once-flourishing economy now in disaster mode was a deliberate mission embarked upon by the Palestinians who form terror militias and who claim to represent the best interests of the Palestinian people - not yet disavowed either from the West Bank or from Gaza.
When Israel forcibly removed its Gaza settlers, with the hope that leaving the Territory to the Palestinians as an indelible sign of goodwill, it was soon disabused of the notion that it would be received as such. Hoping that the Palestinians in Gaza would finally take it upon themselves to establish order and safety and work to reduce their dependence on international aid by constructing a future for themselves, not by re-launching an even more violent series of actions against Israel came to naught.
The separation wall, so thoroughly detested by human-rights activists who don't have to live under the constant barrage of rockets, nor suffer the bloody violence of Fatah- and Hamas-sponsored-and-encouraged suicide attacks, has stilled the constant threat of death and destruction to a manageable level. The closures of border crossings were undertaken as a necessary deterrent to the entrance into Israel of death's deliverers.
Perhaps it's past time that reason dictate the Elder Statesmen retire in honour rather than besmirch their past successes in leading the world's attention toward human rights beyond areas where they truly occur, and toward places where existential desperation causes liberal democracies to take urgent, unavoidable steps toward survival.
Labels: Anti-Semitism, Heroes and Villains, Israel, Political Realities, Terrorism
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, July 30, 2008
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