Feature:Opinion

TheDC’s Jamie Weinstein: Israel-Hamas conflict is not morally ambiguous

Jamie Weinstein Senior Writer
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The Middle East is full of ambiguities, but the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza that was temporarily halted with a ceasefire last week is not one of them.

Judging from CNN International and the Twitterverse, there is no clear right or wrong in the conflict. Both sides are equally bad or at fault for the fighting — that is, when all the blame is not being pinned on Israel.

But this just isn’t so.

The Israel-Hamas battle is as morally clear as any I can think of. On one side you have Israel, a free and democratic state that targets only those who threaten its citizens. Tragically, civilians inevitably die in the process — this is war, not Candy Land — but the Jewish state goes out of its way to minimize the killing of innocents as much as humanly possible.

How do I know this?

Because if Israel were seeking to inflict as much carnage as humanly possible, Gaza wouldn’t exist anymore. It would have been leveled. We wouldn’t have seen video of Israeli jets pinpoint-targeting a terrorist killer in Gaza. We would have seen a massive ball of fire consuming Gaza itself.

On the other side of the equation is Hamas, the terror group that controls Gaza. Hamas’ founding charter openly declares that it is an organization intent on not only killing Israelis, but all Jews.

There’s a word for that: genocidal.

“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees,” the charter favorably quotes the Muslim prophet Muhammad as declaring.

“The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

You would think this little tidbit would warrant mention on CNN.

Hamas makes no attempt to avoid killing innocent civilians. If fact, killing innocent civilians is their modus operandi. That the terror organization lacks the capacity at the moment to kill as many Jews as it would like to does not make it any less vile or insidious. We should be thankful that Hamas isn’t better armed, not sad that Israel has better weaponry.

If Hamas could eliminate all Israelis, it would. It’s only a resistance movement in the sense that it is resisting the existence of Jews on the planet.

Israel could indiscriminately decimate Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza, but it hasn’t and never would.

It might just be me, but that strikes me as a pretty significant moral difference.

It is true the Palestinians are a long-suffering people — as are many other peoples in the world because of the brutality and corruption of their own leaders. It doesn’t have to be that way. Not in North Korea, not in Somalia, not in Gaza. But blame for the Palestinians’ woes lies with their leadership, not with Israel’s.

Gaza should be a resort destination. It should be economically prosperous. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza should have their own state.

They could have had one. In 2000, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered them a remarkable deal, one that even Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan reportedly told the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat he would be committing a crime against the Palestinians if he rejected.

Arafat rejected the deal, of course. When the Saudis are telling you that you are being too uncompromisingly anti-Israel, it’s a good bet you are being too uncompromisingly anti-Israel.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas walked away from a similar offer in 2008, though it was probably too late by then. It’s hard to see how Abbas could come to terms with Israel when he doesn’t even control Gaza. He has a tenuous grip on the West Bank, while Hamas runs Gaza.

In the 1990s the big catchphrase was “land for peace.” But that formulation never proved true in practice. Israel would take great risks for peace, even leaving some territories — Southern Lebanon in 2000, Gaza in 2005. For this, it reaped only endless war.

Hezbollah and Hamas turned the vacated territory into havens of terror from which to attack Israel. “Land for war” seems a more accurate description.

I’m not a military technician so I’ll refrain, like so many other commentators, from offering Israel military advice about whether it should have launched a ground invasion of Gaza to further weaken Hamas. But I will say this: Israel has every right to defend itself against a genocidal foe that salivates at the thought of slaughtering Israelis.

No nation would tolerate a constant stream of rockets being fired at its citizens, and Israel ought not to be an exception.

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