Thoughts about Gaza

Warning. This is not about health care. It is about Israel. If you don't think I should be writing on the subject, please skip to another post.

Several months ago, I had a chance to visit Israel and wrote about it here, ending with this thought:

The creation of a Palestinian state is an existential requirement for the future of Israel as a Jewish state. But, the creation of a Palestinian state which has a credo of denying Israel’s right to be a Jewish state is an existential threat to the future of Israel. Resolution of that contradiction is the job facing this country and the world community.

The recent events with regard to the blockade of Gaza are part of this whole scene. It is all too easy for those of us removed from those events to make judgments as to who was right and who was wrong. But I found this article by Bret Stephens to be indicative of many issues raised when people make judgments about motivations and actions. It is so clear that there is a double standard with regard to actions by Israel compared to actions by countries set on destroying it.

A few excerpts:

Questions for liberals: What does it mean to be a friend of Israel? What does it mean to be a friend of the Palestinians? And should the same standards of friendship apply to Israelis and Palestinians alike, or is there a double standard here as well?

... [C]onsider what it means for liberals to be friends of the Palestinians.

Here, the criticism becomes oddly muted. So Egypt, a country that also once occupied Gaza, enforces precisely the same blockade on the Strip as Israel: Do liberal friends of Palestine urge the Obama administration to get tough on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as they urge him to do with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? So a bunch of "peace" activists teams up with a Turkish group of virulently anti-Semitic bent and with links both to Hamas and al Qaeda: Does this prompt liberal soul-searching about the moral drift of the pro-Palestinian movement? So Hamas trashes a U.N.-run school, as it did the other week, because it educates girls: Do liberals wag stern fingers at Palestinians for giving up on the dream of a secular, progressive state?

Well, no. And no. And no. Instead, liberal support for Palestinians is now mainly of the no-hard-questions-asked variety. But that is precisely the kind of support that liberals decry as toxic when it comes to Western support for Israel.

... [T]he task of defending Israel is hard. It's hard because defenders must eschew cliches about "the powerful" and "the powerless." It is hard because it goes against prevailing ideological fashions. And it's hard because it requires an appreciation that the choice of evils that endlessly confronts Israeli policy makers is not something they can simply wash their hands of by "ending the occupation." They tried that before—in Gaza.