Response to Sultan Knish's "How the Media, the UN and the Diplomats Saved Hamas 18 Years Ago"

As much as I enjoy and agree with the writings of Daniel Greenfield in his Sultan Knish blog, but I must take exception to this article:

"How the Media, the UN and the Diplomats Saved Hamas 18 Years Ago"

Found at:

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-media-un-and-diplomats-saved-hamas.html

The facts as Mr. Greenfield states them are accurate but there’s one assumption within it that I think is faulty. The assumption that he maintains is that Israel has been “forced” to accept terrorists and terrorism by other countries or by the nations. In his words:

"... the Bush and Clinton Administrations forced Israel to accept 'contributed to peace' "

"The terrorists that Israel was forced to accept..."

"And so Israel was forced to submit to Islamic terrorism."


Of course the pressure on Israel to comply and the pressure is not insignificant but that doesn’t constitute “force”. No ostensibly friendly country has held the proverbial gun to Israel’s head with conditions that gave Israel literally no other choice between life and death. No country that is an ally or one that is seemingly friendly to Israel has declared that, unless Israel bows to certain conditions, then it will unleash a nuclear holocaust on her. No ally of Israel has said that unless Israel complies with their demands it will cut all relations and boycott Israel entirely like they did with South Africa and regard her as an enemy adversary. The Arabs states have done this but those are Israel’s enemies not countries that claim to be her friend. Instead Israel’s “friends” have been pressuring her to accept weakened and more vulnerable positions with regard to her mortal enemies and she’s been submitting. But this constitutes pressure not “force”.

What would have been the consequences if Israel had not bowed to US pressure to allow Hamas terrorists back? What would have been the consequence of Israel simply saying “No.” to the US when it pressured Israel to accept Yassir Arafat and his terrorist PLO back into Israel? Would the US have severed relations? Would the US have dropped all sales of military hardware to Israel – considering that the loss of those sales would have meant the loss of jobs in their military-industrial complex. Would the US have refused to offer Israeli politicians and military men their perks that influence them to regard the US favorably and thus be open to the influence of the US? I doubt it because the US needs Israel’s state-of-the-art electronic systems very much. When Israel GAVE the Lavi jet fighter – the fighter that was hailed as the fighter so advanced that it was the fighter of the 21st Century – she GAVE the prototype of the aircraft with all the plans and designs to the USG, gratis, with no strings attached. Do you really think that with staggering gifts like that to the United States and the potential for more like that in the future, that the US would just dump Israel if she didn’t bend to pressure? Hardly.

Israel has given a great deal to the US government in the way of intelligence and hardware. Yet the Israeli government now and in the past feels compelled to bow to US pressure, even though Israel has had every option to apply reverse pressure on the US, say, by threatening or actually withholding intelligence that the US has always needed, by deciding to delay indefinitely the delivery of advanced electronic system to the US.

Israel is not “forced” to bend to foreign pressure. She has had every option to say “No.” To demonstrate that I must point out that she has taken unpopular steps in the past knowing that she would receive condemnation from the nations. Israel violated international opinion and when she used violence to rescue our abducted and hijacked airline hostages from Entebbe Uganda in 1976. She was condemned for bombing the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq at the time, and was later thanked by President Bush after the US-Iraq war began. She fought the Six Day War and won despite enormous pressure from the nations to lay down and passively accept annihilation.

I submit that the reason that Israel complies with international pressure by her “friends” is for psychological reasons. Jews have been beaten and abused by the nations for at least the past 2,000 years and we have developed the mentality similar to that of the abused spouse. Now that we have a country like the other nations we have taken our mentality of abuse and applied it to the context of international relations. The Israeli governments and Israeli Jews feel that the big bad world is after them and they feel that there’s no other choice but to submit. They feel handicapped and restricted by the rest of the world. The result is that their assumption is that if they give-in to the nations and do whatever they want, they will please them that they will like us in return, and let us take an accepted place among the nations. They feel handicapped in the sphere of international relations and so Israel tries very hard – overly hard – to please. Since I am an Israeli and have lived in Israel for over 31 years I have heard this theme from my fellow Israelis time and time again. The average Israeli wants Israel to be liked, if not LOVED, by the nations and the gentile world. Since the ghetto walls were torn down in Europe Jews have craved the acceptance by gentiles, and that craving has continued to this day in the Diaspora and in Israel. So that craving has been carried over to Israel’s approach to international relations. When we established the State of Israel the mentality that craves acceptance by gentiles on the individual level has been carried over the international level. The Israeli government’s unspoken goal in international relations is to get the world to like us, if not love us. They have probably not announced this explicitly but by the behavior and reactions of the Israeli government demonstrate this as their operating principle in international relations. And this attitude is part and parcel of Jewish Israelis. Morning radio talk-shows in Israel air callers who ask ‘when will the nations/UN/US/x-nation like or LOVE us?’ This kind of caller gets on especially after Israel has been condemned by one or more nations for another defensive action or reaction – mostly when Israel tries to take reasonable steps to defend her people from terrorists. Yet, ask the average Israeli Jew how strongly he/she wants Israel to be accepted by the nations and they will typically put that at a high priority. Religious Jews tend to value acceptance by the nations at a lower level than non-observant Jews. One of the signs of an “extremist” Israeli right-winger is that he says he doesn’t give a fig about what the nations think and that Israel should do whatever directly needful to defend herself. Extremists don’t care about what the world thinks, while the average Israeli Jew craves that acceptance.

If one studies the typical reactions, feelings and behaviors of abused spouses Israel fits this extremely well into this picture. Abused spouses feel that the abusing spouse must be appeased in order that the abuser will like or love the abusee. The abusee will endure physical and emotional pain and suffering in order to court the good graces of the abuser, but the abuser will never approve of the abusee and if the abusee successfully satisfies the demands of the abuser, then the abuser increases the demands to more demanding levels. The abusee always tries to meet the expectations of the abuser but the abuser makes impossible demands. Thus is the situation Israel has found herself for decades. In international relations the standards for Israel are absurdly high while the nations support the abuse of Israel by supporting and courting to her declared enemies. The nations, as the abusers, don’t necessarily abuse Israel directly; they rather pressure Israel in ways that weaken her to make her more vulnerable. Nations that claim to be her “friend” but are hostile to her under the table don’t directly abuse her, instead they try to manipulate Israel into positions that make it easier for terrorists to do their job of murdering Jews and destroying the Jewish state. Those “friends” support Israel by pushing her to surrender territory to the PLO even though the PLO has yet to change their covenant that explicitly says that they are engaging in the “armed struggle.” They object to Israeli defense operations into Gaza against Hamas, when Hamas makes no secret of trying to destroy Israel. Those “friends” not only accept the destructive rhetoric of Hamas they, turn a blind eye as Hamas has fired over 8,000 rockets into the Israel’s Coastal Plain. Those “friends” abuse Israel indirectly by assisting Israel’s sworn enemies. Because Israel craves to be liked or loved by the nations, she chooses to submit to her “friends”. Israel chooses to bend to the desires of western nations that display overt friendliness but also show underlying hostility to Israel. Because Israelis crave acceptance, crave to be liked someday, crave to be loved someday by the nations, they accept the abuse in hopes that if we give they what they want that they’ll like or love them. The cruel reality is that the nations have never liked Israel, and will never like Israel. If Israel would satisfy their demands exactly, Israel would be so vulnerable that the Arab states would overrun Israel and destroy her. But Israelis have this emotional block to seeing this. Just like the abused spouse who can not emotionally comprehend that the abuser can not love back but can only abuse, Israelis can’t comprehend that it’s impossible to get the Arabs states and terror organizations, and those nations that are friendly to terrorists, to like or love Israel.

Those who are emotionally accepting of or addicted to abuse will always go back to the abusers - just as Israel has been doing for decades.