Argument For War

"No self-respecting Palestinian ... would condemn the killing of a settler, and those people [the three abducted Israeli Jewish teens] were settlers."
"It's the Palestinian's right to resist against Israeli, be it soldier or settler, as long as he lives on occupied land."
"We heard about the ceasefire deal through the media. We were not consulted. Hamas is the main player in retaliating against Israeli aggression against Gaza So how would an initiative succeed whilst disregarding the main players?"
"Every oppressed person fights and tries to gain independence with very limited resources; that's how they fought in South Africa, and in the French Revolution. The Palestinians know Israel is stronger than them, but the Palestinians are also determined to liberate their land."
Khaled Meshal, Hamas political chief, Doha, Qatar

Mr. Meshal gets around. From Syria to Doha, anywhere he might find haven, for fear he may become a martyr. He is not quite prepared to accept such an honour. It is a personal award that he envisions for the Hamas foot soldiers, but not for its elite; far less dispensable than a readily replaceable fighter. That practical philosophy extends as well to the Palestinians living under Hamas administration in Gaza. Who may not share the tunnel bomb shelter havens with the members of Hamas.

They two are readily replaceable, they can breed other children to replace those whom Hamas finds the regrettable need to sacrifice to the rising toll of civilian and child deaths in Gaza. The better to propagandize with, the morbid statistics striking at the compassionate hearts of the international liberal-left who cling to the notion that Hamas is the underdog, Israel the colossus unchallenged in its brutality.

When Meshal speaks of occupation, he speaks well beyond the West Bank settlements. He describes the way that Hamas considers the irreconcilable situation of a Jewish State abiding within Muslim Arab geography, an abomination that he cannot tolerate, and one which his forces are determined to obliterate. The schools operated by Hamas teach Palestinian children the obligation abiding upon them to take up the cudgel against the hated intruders.

That the land of Israel was a Jewish land before intruding Arabs entered it is a heritage point that Mr. Meshal and those of his ilk slough off with disgust as unthinkable and a backward reading of the historical record. It is Israel, after that must "stop the aggression" of air strikes against targets in Gaza. That those targets just happen to be launch sites for Hamas to lob rockets into Israel from, inviting the response that will harm civilians because Hamas situates those sites within vulnerable populations is incidental to his point.

He demands that air strikes must stop, that dozens of Hamas members detained as a result of the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli Jewish students in the West Bank be released, and that Israel "end the siege on Gaza permanently". Egypt will have something to say about that. Hamas's older brother organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, is considered a terrorist group in Egypt, just as most of the international community considers Hamas a terrorist gang.
 

Rockets shot out of Gaza on July 15, 2014. (photo credit: Yossi Aloni/FLASH90

The Rafah border through which the infiltration from Egypt of munitions toward Gaza, and terrorists have passed before it was closed down after the removal of Mohammed Morsi and the ascension of new Egyptian president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, has beggared Hamas. While it feels entitled to receive gas, water, electricity from Israel and humanitarian supplies across the border, the blockade that made Gaza dependent on tunnel smuggling has enraged the Hamas leadership.

Which cannot fully comprehend why a Jewish State would be truculent enough not to just accept that an Islamist neighbour has the right and self-obligation to attack it on a continual basis, in the process manipulating the Jewish State to respond in a manner that will destroy the lives of civilian Palestinians, fodder for the propaganda machine of Hamas.