Condemnation Versus Reality

The idiocy and blatant hypocrisy of a United Nations commission tasked to look into the Turkish aid flotilla meant to break Israel's blockade of Gaza in finding Israel guilty of human rights abuses and of using unjustified force is beyond belief. In the face of video footage widely aired showing unambiguously that militants aboard the flotilla's lead vessel had connived to attack the Israeli commandos as they boarded the Mavi Marmara.

The government of Turkey was involved with these plans which were meant to embarrass the government of Israel. Turkey is now relatively newly-invested with challenging Israel as a malign state within a staid and kindly-disposed geography of Islamic states. The Islamist government of the new Turkey prepared to divest its formerly common interests with Israel in favour of closer ties with Iran and Syria.

Gaza is blockaded because it is in the administrative possession of a terror group, Hamas. Hamas's sole purpose is to destroy the State of Israel, to reclaim the land upon which the nation was built - legally, and with the full support of the United Nations - for Arab Palestinians. That the original "Palestinians" of the area were not Arabs but rather Jews, is another irrelevancy to the world at large which now views the Palestinians displaced by Partition, as pitiable victims.

That Israel, a sovereign democratic country whose nationhood was built upon the premise that Jews required a homeland of their own to be re-established, for only there would they find a safe and secure haven in the world that had always shunned and tormented Jews, offended Arab sensibilities. The irony of course is that Jews living in the diaspora while still living with anti-Semitism are safer now living in Europe and in North America than they are in their own country.

Where their Middle East neighbours, 'dispossessed' Arab Palestinians harbour deep-seated anger, resentment and hatred toward them, encouraged to continue expressing those emotions by a Palestinian Authority which teaches its young that Israel is an oppressive occupying force squatting on land rightfully belonging to Arab Palestinians. Encouraged, aided and abetted by the larger Arab communities.

Fully one-quarter of Israel's citizens are non-Jews, most of them Israeli-Palestinians, and even they conspire to defeat the country that has given them equal rights and citizenship. Israeli-Arabs elect their own Members of the Knesset who themselves foment unrest and dissatisfaction as citizens of the country, yet if given the choice of living in Israel as opposed to the West Bank, they choose Israel.

With matters in the West Bank on the quiescent side, mostly due to the separation of the encircling wall separating Israel from would-be suicide bombers, the economy there is on a decided upswing; good news for a nascent Palestinian state. That has occurred because an uneasy peace is in place whereas in Gaza, Palestinians living under the strictures of a blockade have few opportunities to advance themselves.

The blockade is there for the simple reason of self-protection. Hamas and its colleagues-in-terror are steadfastly dedicated to the destruction of Israel; this is clearly stated in their manifesto, and clearly obvious in their ongoing violent actions. Under international law any state has the right to protect itself as Israel has done. Gazans, despite the hand-wringing of the international community and the UN, do not live in dire straits.

All of these established facts appear to make little impression on the gullible and tractable Palestinian sympathizers who prefer to view Israel as an overbearing, human-rights-abusing, Arab-hating state. But then why allow truth and reality to get in the way of prejudice and malice?