What To Do About Hamas
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I've been thinking about this problem for a long time, so when the Palestinians or the Egyptians periodically break the Arab/Israeli ceasefire, watching the news is like watching "The Ten Commandments" or "Lord of the Rings." I know what is going to happen, who the main characters are, and who is going to win in the end. The details may be different, but the basic storyline is old hat.
I see three interesting parallels here; American Negro racism, subjugation of the American Indians, and Japanese expansionism in WWII. Some of the following may be out of sequence; the ideas are still floating around in my head.
Negro slavery was a problem to which the United States was a reluctant heir. Thomas Jefferson, and others, wanted to free the slaves, but was unable to figure out what to do with all freed slaves. We're still working that out. Long before the Civil War, the United States was working to put an end to the slave trade, even to the extent of establishing a new African state to which freed slaves could be returned without fear of recapture. Liberia has a constitution almost exactly like ours. Its capital is Monrovia, named after President James Monroe, who left office 44 years before the 13th Amendment that made US slavery unconstitutional was ratified.
Yet today we have millions of people, as American as you or I, who are forever condemned by the self-inflicted wounds of a social situation over 140 years gone with the wind. (A little emancipation humor there, folks.) They blame all of their very real misery on the fact that their ancestors were slaves, not because they: (1) identify themselves as different, (2) screw with the educational system, (3) have children as soon as they reach puberty, (4) stay in trouble with the law, (5) learn no useful skills, and (6) spend their time shooting up and fornicating instead of working or going to school. Negroes supposedly deplore slavery, yet they do everything to maintain it and subject themselves to it so they can use as an excuse for everything. If you want to become a slave, the instructions are here.
The same can be said for poor people in general. It's easy to be poor in the United States; we'll even pay you to do that. I quit contributing money to my church because they encourage people to be irresponsible year after year after year. If you keep a man from becoming hungry enough to get a job, regardless of your motivation, he won't get a job. Give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you'll feed him for life. Guarantee him an endless supply of fish for the rest of his life and I guarantee that he'll eat all your fish; you'll both starve, and he'll blame you. I have instructions on how to be poor for those who don't know here.
Whenever I talk to people who are poor or black or both, about their own poverty, they start confessing other people's sins. They refuse to believe that the basic problem is that they are ignorant, lazy, unprincipled, undisciplined whinybabies whose current problems are mainly the direct result of their free and democratic choice, and nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to change until they, not other people, realize that fact.
Same with the Palestinians. All you have to do is take a look at the signs at their demonstrations. Not one of them says, "Quit murdering Israelis!" Recently I heard on CNN that some Hamas leader announced that "it's OK to kill Israeli children." What good do you suppose will come of that? Palestinians can blame Israelis for their problems, but that doesn't make the Israelis guilty. The fact is, regardless of what happened to their ancestors, Palestinians have the opportunity to live on their ancestral farms, drink at their ancestral wells, and plow the soils their ancestors plowed, but they have to be law abiding Israeli citizens to do that. Some of them are. Two of them are the parents of a friend of mine who is an Israeli Arab. Her family isn't angry at anyone.
Palestinians who can't or won't assimilate suffer the same fate as the American Indians did. The Indians were living their own reasonably peaceful lives until the Europeans came along with superior technology and took over their land. The Indians fought back and lost, fought back and lost, fought back and lost until now they're either: (1) peace-loving American citizens like my Native American inlaws, or, (2) on reservations. The last Indian uprising I heard about was a gang rape of a white woman in the 30's in Pima county, Arizona, when my mom was teaching school there. If anyone knows what happened to the rapists, he isn't telling; they simply disappeared. They're still missing! Problem solved!
One could make a good case for the claim that my house and yard belong to the Biloxi Indians. Regardless of the title claim I have because of the money I paid for it, my land was originally stolen from the Indians, who were forced off it at gunpoint. Of course, none of that is relevant. I bought it; I paid for it; According to my laws it's mine, and I ain't leavin'! Those who have the guns make the laws!
Same with the Palestinians. I'm old enough to remember the Zionist invasion of British-controlled Palestine, a historical event related brilliantly, if admittedly from a slated perspective, by Leon Uris in his book and the motion picture, "Exodus." The Palestinians can complain all they want, but it's all over and done; the Israelis are there and they aren't leaving. The Palestinians can be good Israeli citizens, or they can live on reservations like Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli invasion of those places is the Pima County Gang Rape Avenging on a different scale.
Many of the Palestinians (and their demonstrator supporters) really believe that Gaza and the rest of Israel really belongs to the Palestinian Arabs. It doesn't. Being wrong has always been a capital crime, and sometimes you get convicted. Those who have the guns make the laws!
The Japanese had a legitimate complaint about the American interference with their expansionist plans in the late 30's. They did exactly the wrong thing about it. The Japanese never did take the time to learn American psychology, as a result of which whatever damage they did at Pearl Harbor, the Aleutian Islands or with their fusen bakudan balloon bombs in Washington state was overwhelmingly overshadowed by our reaction. I vividly remember a time when our entire nation was devoted to making sure the Japanese language was spoken only in hell! Those who have the (biggest) guns make the laws!
If memory serves, the Japs had about 25 uncommitted divisions in Formosa that they could have used to prolong the invasion of Japan, but the defeat of Japan was inevitable after the Battle of Midway. Japan didn't have a domestic source of anything they needed to continue the war except manpower; that's why they went to war in China in the first place. President Truman thought that the Atomic Bomb might end the war, but not all the generals did. The Japanese were preparing to kill 1,250,000 Americans and 6,000,000 of their own people before they were starved into submission. Fortunately, they were saved by an Emperor who "could not bear the continued suffering of his people" and a President who was compassionate enough to recognize a ceasefire as a surrender.
The Palestinians have no such savior. Because they are bigoted and stupid, they are inclined to believe that they should vote for Hamas because Hamas is saving them from annihilation by the Israelis. The fact is, Hamas, a terrorist organization, simply cannot survive without conflict, and the moment the Palestinians might get it through their heads that Hamas is causing all their problems, Hamas would be doomed. Unfortunately, that is not likely to happen. Hamas is also heavily engaged in propaganda like Nazi Germany, and for the same reason. The Palestinians voted them into office; now they're stuck with them.
For the last several years, Hamas has initiated hostilities against Israel time and again by firing 122 millimeter Russian Katyusha and other types of rockets from Gaza into Israel. The rockets have a maximum range of about 18 miles, and are primarily antipersonnel weapons, designed specifically to kill or maim people, not to destroy things. They are fired one at a time to do that to anyone, man woman or child, wherever they happen randomly to land. For legitimate military purposes, they are fired in salvos of 40 to compensate for their poor accuracy, which makes them ineffective against point targets. In the past, they have killed or injured few Israelis because of Israel's relatively low population density. Since March 27, 2011, Israel has been essentially invulnerable to them because of Israel's "Iron Dome" missile defense system, which reliably destroys incoming rockets calculated to impact in populated areas.
Israel typically responds with precisely directed artillery and air attacks on Hamas strongholds. These are often deliberately located in populated areas, "protected" by voluntary (and sometimes involuntary) "human shields." This method of locating lucrative military targets in areas of high population density makes them easy for Israeli targeting analyists to locate, and the Iron Dome counterbattery radar instantly identifies which ones are active. It also makes collateral damage and injury virtually certain!
The Israelis do everything possible to prevent casualties. They warn people away from the area by dropping leaflets, broadcasting warnings by telephone, Internet, radio and television, and even by firing warning shots known as a "knock on the roof" before firing for effect. They then surgically destroy the targets one by one with precisely targeted munitions. Unfortunately, large numbers of "civilians" are killed in the process, including those who use their wives and children as human shields and the "civilians" who are loading and firing the weapons in the first place. Unlike Hamas, which fires into Israel without warning or record, Israel frequently films their targets and allows others to do so to demonstrate the precision of their aim and the huge secondary explosions that prove that the targets are, in fact, Hamas weapons caches of large, extremely dangerous, amounts of high explosives.
Perhaps predictably, various "rights groups" have criticized Israel for "violation of the Geneva conventions," totally ignoring that the only purpose of the Hamas attacks are to achieve precisely the effects for which the Israeli's are being criticized. Among these criticisms are:
Of course, none of these criticisms applies to Hamas, because they give no warning at all, and random civilians are the only targets of the antipersonnel munitions they use against Israeli neighborhoods. The Palestinians seem to think this constitutes some kind of virtue. Hamas and their supporters have stated in various media reports and interviews assertions that:
The Palestinians subsequently have achieved their intended goal of suffering from the actions of the Israelis, which has been duly reported in descriptions and pictures by the major news media. The problem for the Israelis and world diplomats is that every Palestinian death is a Hamas propaganda victory, thanks to western news coverage. Hamas considers the Israelis who were (and will be) killed in the conflict an additional, but trivial, collateral benefit, whereas a Palestinian getting killed by Israelis is seen as a major accomplishment. A popular slogan among the Palestinians is "Let all martyrs die in their homes!" So far, Israel has not made the decision to eliminate Palestinian suffering once and for all by simply eliminating the Palestinians, which they surely have the ability to do, should they choose.
After every Palestinian attack, the Israelis capture or destroy large amounts of Palestinian weapons and ammunition, kill or capture several Hamas bigwigs, and temporarily frustrate the ability of Hamas to harass Israel. They then withdraw from Gaza or the West Bank, Hamas typically proclaims a great victory, Egypt and Syria begin supplying weapons and ammunition to them again, and the cycle begins anew. It's been going on since Biblical times.
The Palestinian strategic goal is to continue suffering so they can blame their problems on the Israelis. Like the poor, downtrodden Negroes and the island bound Japanese, their sense of identity depends on blaming their problems on somebody else. They want the Israeli tanks to come rumbling into Gaza, killing their women and children, so they can show off dead women and children on CNN and blame the Israelis. Unfortunately, those women and children will still be dead! War is hell!
My recommendation for a permanent solution would be for Israel to announce to the world (after they withdraw) that they will leave the Palestinians alone as long as no more Israeli citizens are killed by enemy action. Then they should announce that they will annex a specific amount of Palestinian land in Gaza or the West Bank, respectively, in response to any Israeli citizen who is killed by any kind of enemy action from either of those places. So much for a man, so much (more) for a single woman, mother, child, elderly person, et cetera. Then do that. It's relatively easy to take over a small urban area with tanks and artillery; just destroy all the infrastructure and round up any survivors. It's even easier with open land. They could put the survivors on a barge and leave it somewhere close to where the Egyptians, Lebanese, or other Gazans could get at it, if no other way.
I think this would have one or both of the following benefits: It would make the Palestinians think twice about allowing rocket launchers in their neighborhoods if they thought that they would lose their neighborhoods and never be allowed to return. This would perhaps slow down the attacks upon Israel somewhat. It would also guarantee that eventually, the Palestinians would be gone, because they are never, never, never going to leave Israel in peace.
But nobody asked me.
PS: My family motto is "Those who have the guns make the laws" ("Armis habiant, leges faciant").