generalspeaking

Peace In Gaza

Is that even remotely possible? Given its sullen and violent history? A cessation of hostilities would be a blessing to the million and a half souls who inhabit that miserable Strip. To allow them the opportunity to introspectively determine that they deserve a normal life for themselves and their children. One in which they surrender to the need to forge ahead, to leave behind that deadly enmity toward their neighbour.

Only when they choose to abandon the resolution that they will not be satisfied until and unless their neighbour disintegrates from one assault after another, will peace arrive. Ongoing opposition to the presence of Israel will avail nothing but further bloodshed. And how would that further their future? They did nothing to advance themselves prior to the advent of the State of Israel, living primitive and insubstantial existences.

The manner in which the Jewish population within Israel absorbed the necessity of forging a new world for themselves, creating the civic infrastructure of a well balanced democratic society, with an independent judiciary, news media and military, constructing hospitals and universities and a primary education system, developing on traditional art and culture, establishing a business class, and a successful agronomic culture, demonstrated what could be done.

The Palestinian Territories have the option to surrender their aspirations to re-occupying land that was partitioned to accommodate all the people who lived upon it. The Arab population with Israeli citizenship have their Knesset representatives, and they live, as a minority population, like the Kurds and the Christians, as full-fledged members of the nation. They too, must surrender their opposition to the very state which succours them.

Israel has an obligation herself to surrender some of the privileges she has undertaken to absorb throughout the course of her existence as a nation-state. Her own integrity has been compromised on many occasions, not the least of which have been the settler-occupations of portions of land in the West Bank. What reason does Israel now have to believe she can safely remove those settlers, based on her experience with removing Israeli settlers from Gaza?

The Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza have the potential to unburden themselves of their grievances and hatred and self-pitying victim status, and to form their own independent and autonomous nation. Where they could thrive in establishing their own functioning civic infrastructure, establish thriving businesses, and engage in exchange and trade with their neighbours, flourishing in the process.

There is that choice. That choice is dependent upon their rejecting the intransigent trajectory of Hamas to continue a state of siege mentality and foment violently against a perceived oppressor who is in reality a neighbour struggling to survive and protect itself against the violence directed toward it. Hamas's ardent need to destroy Israel as a forbidden interloper on land held by fundamentalists to be sacred to Islam resonated in the Medieval era; we no longer inhabit that era.

The choice is simple: engage in life, eschew death. It is Hamas and their terror-delivering brethren who are devoted to death, to delivering its finality to others, and to absorbing it as tribal-honoured martyrs for themselves. Deny them.

Labels: Israel, Middle East, Terrorism

posted by Pieface @ Friday, January 16, 2009