Ending 'Cycle of Mideast Violence' Requires Admitting There Is No 'Cycle of Mideast Violence'

As Israel prepares to mount yet another offensive operation to defend its civilian populations from renewed terrorist rocket and mortar fire from the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, the world’s media trots out its predictable language of moral equivalence to describe what it can only define as a tit-for-tat cycle of violence requiring the stronger party, i.e. Israel, to demonstrate both restraint and proportionality.

Ultimately, of course, the only people directly responsible for terrorism are terrorists themselves. But as commentator Caroline Glick points out in yet another excellent post, terrorism requires an ecosystem – a multifaceted community of mutually dependent, interacting support systems. In addition to terrorists themselves, to thrive, terrorism needs money, logistics, and territory in which to operate and recruit, all of which requires the support of at a significant component of the local population that terrorists purport to serve. In turn, that component itself must find an external ecosystem in which to flourish.

By combining prophylactic criticisms of Israel for actions against terrorists it has not yet even taken with prophylactic congratulations for Palestinian condemnations against terrorism that have not yet been made, world leaders are helping to provide terrorists with precisely the external ecosystems they need to grow their internal ecosystems.

The way to destroy terrorism is to deprive terrorists of their necessary interacting systems of mutually dependent supports, both internal and external. Depriving terrorists of their internal ecosystem is only something that Palestinians and Arabs themselves can accomplish. However, depriving terrorists of their external ecosystem is something outside forces can and must act to accomplish. The first and most essential task to depriving terrorists of their external ecosystem is to drain that diseased swamp of its moral vertigo and ethical inversions. This can be done by applying strong doses of moral clarity about the true causes of the conflict that must be backed up by courage and resolve.

First, the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” is not about borders or land. It is not about oppression, occupation, or even justice. It isn’t about communication or misunderstandings, nor is it a blood feud. The Arab war against Israel, in which Palestinians have become the dominant proxy force, is nothing less than a civilizational battle about envy, hatred, and resentment. Like Jews from time immemorial, Israel is hated today not because of the things she does wrong but for the things she does right. It isn’t Israel’s vices that have transformed her into a global pariah; it is her virtues. The only way Israel can become less hated is for Israel to cease to be. For better or worse, Israel is today what it in essence has always been: ground zero in the grand battle between civilization and barbarism.

Peace between the Arab and Muslim world and Israel is but one simple decision away. Not an easy decision, but a simple one.

One day after the bodies of three Israeli teenagers were found murdered by Palestinian terrorists, six Jewish terrorists – three of whom have already allegedly confessed to Israeli police – kidnapped and murdered a Palestinian teenager. At once, solving that brutal murder became Israeli police’s priority number one. Five days after the murder, Israeli police appear to have solved it. Perpetrators of that savage act will find no quarter in Israeli public opinion capable of sustaining them. The Israeli murderers will be sentenced to life imprisonment. One of Israel’s leading rabbinic authorities, Rabbi Elyakim Levanon (a dreaded “settler Rabbi” no less) has called upon Israel’s Parliament to invoke a capital penalty law so that the Jewish terrorists may be executed.

The night of the Arab murder, a few dozen Jews “demonstrated” in favor of Jewish terrorism against Arabs in Jewish Jerusalem. The “demonstration” was overwhelmed by counter-demonstrators many times its number. It was the first and last “demonstration” in favor of Jewish terrorist murder – proving Caroline Glick’s thesis that “deviant behavior” can not survive, let alone thrive, without at least some public support.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, i.e. Arab Jerusalem, the violent riots in favor of Palestinian terrorism against Jews that started last week have only intensified – obvious evidence that support for Palestinian terrorism against Jews is far more widespread that support for Jewish terrorism against Palestinians.

Not only in fact is such support more widespread, it is institutionalized at the highest levels of Palestinian society to such an extent that there is no support for the development of any significant element in Palestinian society to call for true peace with Israel.

The day Palestinian society decides to responds to evil in its midst in the way that Israel has just responded to presence of evil in her midst is the day there will be peace in the Middle East.