Israel accepts an Egyptian-proposed Gaza
cease-fire; Hamas keeps firing. Hamas
deliberately aims rockets at civilians; Israel
painstakingly tries to avoid them, actually
telephoning civilians in the area and dropping
warning charges, so-called roof knocking.
“Here’s the difference between us,” explains
the Israeli prime minister . “We’re using missile
defense to protect our civilians, and they’re
using their civilians to protect their missiles.”
Rarely does international politics present a
moment of such moral clarity. Yet we routinely
hear this Israel-Gaza fighting described as a
morally equivalent “cycle of violence.” This is
absurd. What possible interest can Israel have
in cross-border fighting? Everyone knows
Hamas set off this mini-war. And everyone
knows the proudly self-declared raison d’etre
of Hamas: the eradication of Israel and its
Jews.
Apologists for Hamas attribute the blood lust
to the Israeli occupation and blockade.
Occupation? Does no one remember anything?
It was less than 10 years ago that worldwide
television showed the Israeli army pulling die-
hard settlers off synagogue roofs in Gaza as
Israel uprooted its settlements, expelled its
citizens, withdrew its military and turned every
inch of Gaza over to the Palestinians. There
was not a soldier, not a settler, not a single
Israeli left in Gaza.
And there was no blockade. On the contrary.
Israel wanted this new Palestinian state to
succeed. To help the Gaza economy, Israel gave
the Palestinians its 3,000 greenhouses that had
produced fruit and flowers for export. It
opened border crossings and encouraged
commerce.

The whole idea was to establish the model for
two states living peacefully and productively
side by side. No one seems to remember that,
simultaneous with the Gaza withdrawal, Israel
dismantled four smaller settlements in the
northern West Bank as a clear signal of Israel’s
desire to leave the West Bank as well and thus
achieve an amicable two-state solution.
This is not ancient hitstory. This was nine years
ago.


And how did the Gaza Palestinians react to
being granted by the Israelis what no previous
ruler, neither Egyptian, nor British, nor
Turkish, had ever given them — an
independent territory? First, they demolished
the greenhouses. Then they elected Hamas .
Then, instead of building a state with its
attendant political and economic institutions,
they spent the better part of a decade turning
Gaza into a massive military base, brimming
with terror weapons, to make ceaseless war on
Israel.
Where are the roads and rail, the industry and
infrastructure of the new Palestinian state?
Nowhere. Instead, they built mile upon mile of
underground tunnels to hide their weapons
and, when the going gets tough, their military
commanders. They spent millions importing
and producing rockets, launchers, mortars,
small arms, even drones . They deliberately
placed them in schools, hospitals, mosques and
private homes to better expose their own
civilians. (Just Thursday, the U.N. announced
that it found 20 rockets in a Gaza school.) And
from which they fire rockets at Jerusalem and
Tel Aviv.
Why? The rockets can’t even inflict serious
damage, being almost uniformly intercepted by
Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. Even
West Bank leader Mahmoud Abbas has asked:
“What are you trying to achieve by sending
rockets?”
It makes no sense. Unless you understand, as
Tuesday’s Post editorial explained , that the
whole point is to draw Israeli counterfire.
This produces dead Palestinians for
international television. Which is why Hamas
perversely urges its own people not to seek
safety when Israel drops leaflets warning of an
imminent attack.
To deliberately wage war so that your own
people can be telegenically killed is indeed
moral and tactical insanity. But it rests on a
very rational premise: Given the Orwellian
state of the world’s treatment of Israel (see:
the U.N.’s grotesque Human Rights Council),
fueled by a mix of classic anti-Semitism, near-
total historical ignorance and reflexive
sympathy for the ostensible Third World
underdog, these eruptions featuring Palestinian
casualties ultimately undermine support for
Israel’s legitimacy and right to self-defense.


In a world of such Kafkaesque ethical
inversions, the depravity of Hamas begins to
make sense. This is a world in which the
Munich massacre is a movie and the murder of
Klinghoffer is an opera — both deeply
sympathetic to the killers. This is a world in
which the U.N. ignores humanity’s worst war
criminals while incessantly condemning Israel,
a state warred upon for 66 years that
nonetheless goes to extraordinary lengths to
avoid harming the very innocents its enemies
use as shields.
It’s to the Israelis’ credit that amid all this
madness they haven’t lost their moral scruples.
Or their nerve. Those outside the region have
the minimum obligation, therefore, to expose
the madness and speak the truth. Rarely has it
been so blindingly clear.



By Charles Krauthammer