While We Wait
The Government of Israel is considering its options in the war the Palestinians are waging. We strongly believe that the appropriate role for the American government, and for other friends of Israel (ourselves included), is to say that we will support whatever measures the elected government decides will best protect the people and the interests of the State of Israel for the long term. Not to suggest, not to second-guess, and not to complain after the fact.
While we wait, some food for thought.
The Government of Israel is considering its options in the war the Palestinians are waging. We strongly believe that the appropriate role for the American government, and for other friends of Israel (ourselves included), is to say that we will support whatever measures the elected government decides will best protect the people and the interests of the State of Israel for the long term. Not to suggest, not to second-guess, and not to complain after the fact.
While we wait, some food for thought.
1) The Palestinian war against Israel is not about “settlements” or “settlers.” No agreement between Israel and the Palestinians ever prohibited the building of houses by or for Jews in the disputed territory. The issue was specifically reserved for final status talks, making Ehud Barak’s Camp David offer of an independent Palestinian State on nearly 95 percent of the territory even more extraordinary. For those of you without a map, the general calculation is that 85 percent of the 180,000+ Israelis living beyond the Green Line live on roughly 15 percent of the land area. Thus, Barak’s offer not only meant that settlement activity would have been frozen (a la the Mitchell Report), but would have been rolled back, forcing thousands of Israelis to move or live under PA “protection,” if Arafat agreed to the presence of Jews at all.
2) Between the signing of the Israel-Palestinian Declaration of Principles in 1993 and September 2000, 256 Israelis were killed in terrorist violence. More than in the seven years before the DOP.
3) Since September, 114 more have been killed and hundreds wounded. These include two boys who skipped school, two boys waiting for a school bus, twenty kids at a disco, two women driving in a funeral procession and another driving to a wedding, a boy lured to his murder by an Internet “friend,” a father and a son killed weeks apart, cousins eating in a restaurant, shoppers in a mall, a baby picked off by a sniper, two parents killed in front of their six children, and two workers fixing a fence.
Calculating the size differential between Israel and the U.S. (roughly 6 million to 287 million, or 47 * times) and then the casualty differential (The WSJ called Israeli casualties the equivalent of 25 Oklahoma City bombings BEFORE the disco bombing), that is roughly the equivalent of a staggering 5,400 Americans killed just in the past eight months, since September 2000!
Now, ask yourself what you would want your government to do for you.
And what you would want other people’s governments to say about it.