Part Two: Is Wealth A Crime?

…continued from “What’s the deal with Israel?” (i.e. read the part below first)

Why shouldn’t Israel have the capability to defend herself? It’s not as though her neighbors inspire confidence. Ahmadinejad denies her existence at every international meeting while doggedly pursuing nuclear power; Palestine elects a terrorist group as a “government”; Syria sends rockets to Hezbollah in Lebanon… seems like everyone is an anti-Semite. While these countries do lack complete autonomy, since Israel could reduce them to rubble if they stepped out of line, this is completely reasonable. There is no one in the world that has the ability to act completely independent of international consensus (the US comes closest, but they do so by pushing boundaries, not ignoring them). No one is entirely autonomous. Why should we allow them to possess WMDs when they won’t act like grown-ups?...but I digress. I believe I was interested in Israeli-Palestinian affairs.

Israel has often been called a mistake, but this doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion (I’ll tell you what I think about this line of reasoning in another blog, don’t worry). So I’m going to ignore that aspect for now on the grounds that most rational people will agree that we can’t ask them to leave now; we can’t “fix” it by uprooting the Jews to satisfy the Palestinians. So Israel must be allowed to exist. However, a more constructive debate might be whether Israel should be forced to allow more liberties to the Palestinians. Free up transportation routes and the like. From the Israeli viewpoint, this must come perilously close to ceding to terrorism. Not just because they have to give up something for nothing, they must be used to that by now, but also because it allows the terrorists more freedom to plan against them (it’s a little easier to smuggle in weapons when no one is inspecting the crates).

The problem with allowing the Palestinians more freedom is evidenced by their history. It could be argued that terrorism continued even when Israel left Gaza and retreated to “defensible borders” because it still wasn’t enough. However, terrorists are not a unified political front. It’s much easier to get them rolling than to make them quit. Indeed the terrorist groups all seem to have a common ambition, the complete destruction and elimination of Israel. Some people might say that if Israel would just relax its control eventually the Palestinians would recognize this generosity and cease to terrorize them; but even if this is absolutely true, would it be fair to expect Israel to endure this sacrifice? What would happen to them in the interim between releasing their intense control and the supposed Palestinian cessation of hostilities?