If you think that the attack by Palestinians on Israelis along Egypt’s Sinai border is just another in the long history of attacks from Gaza, you’re not paying attention.
The new round of rocket attacks were planned and orchestrated out of Tehran, Iran using missiles smuggled into Gaza through a Sinai that is barely under the control of the Egyptians.
The Arab Spring is being manipulated by the Iranian ayatollahs whose goal of destroying Israel has been central to their actions since 1979. They have created proxy armies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, but there are reports that even Hamas was taken by surprise when the Iranian controlled group, Jihad Islami, perpetrated the attacks.
Palestinians have been famous for seizing defeat whenever even the possibility of peace could be achieved or statehood gained. Middle East analysts now believe that statehood is irrelevant to the Iranians for whom the Palestinians have always been their pawns. This has been true as well of the region’s Arab nations.
The Palestinians have a history of greeting Israeli efforts for peace with renewed violence. A perfect example is Gaza, a strip of land from which Israel withdrew in 2005, forcing out Jewish residents, along with those in four settlements in the northern West Bank. In return, Gaza became a launching area for 12,000 rockets directed at Israel and, after three years of extraordinary restraint, Israel responded in late December 2008 with Operation Cast Lead, a military action, to discourage further attacks. They began again last week.
As always, Israel is denounced as the aggressor, the perpetrator of violence against the Palestinians who initiated the attack. Moreover, the Palestinians are divided among themselves. In order to seize control of Gaza, Hamas forced representatives of the Palestinian Authority to retreat to Rahmallah in the West Bank.
The victims of the latest attack included an Israeli commuter bus, civilian cars, and soldiers on patrol; eight Israelis died. The Israelis retaliated, dealing out punishment against the terrorists who planned the attack and were engaged in rocketing. Caught in the fog of battle, several Egyptian soldiers were killed.
There are reports from inside Gaza that the Palestinian Authority has been talking about the need to escalate “popular protests” against Israel and, while Mahmoud Abbas, the PA leader, has said he is opposed to armed struggle, he has also “repeatedly voiced his full support for a ‘popular intifada’ in the West Bank.”
For Americans and other westerners, it is necessary to understand that when the PA and other Palestinian spokespersons say one thing, it usually means the opposite. Palestinians and those who must deal with them do not trust one another and it is pure folly for others to do so. The role of Iran only adds a new layer of deceit.
The UN has never objected to China’s occupation of Tibet, but tiny Israel has been under constant attack by the UN as the “occupier” of lands secured in the wake of the 1967 war that was initiated as Egypt made plans to attack. Joined by Jordan and Syria, both nations lost territory that included, for Jordan, the so-called West Bank. It is composed of ancient Israel's provinces of Judea and Samaria.
To achieve peace with Egypt, Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula. Until the recent overthrow of the Mubarack regime there was peace. Now the Egyptian military has aligned itself with the Muslim Brotherhood and, thus, the prospect for war has escalated.
The bid for Palestinian statehood, as one longtime observer puts it, “is being sold as a test of legitimacy.” What legitimacy can it have when Palestinians have ceaselessly attacked Israel before and since Yasser Arafat formed the Palestinian Liberation Authority? What legitimacy can it have when Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah are sworn to the destruction of Israel?
Put simply, there never was a nation of Palestine. The areas claimed and fought over by the PA and Hamas barely function as a nation. They were Israel's. They are Israel's.
The so-called Palestinians are the oldest “refugee” group in modern history. They have been sustained by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for over six decades. It is the same UN that has organized and held several hate fests against Jews, dubbed Durban conferences. Among the speakers at the next one to be held September 22 will be Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran.
The Middle East has been in turmoil since the Tunisians overthrew their longtime dictator, followed by the Egyptian removal of Mubarack, the current effort to remove Libya’s Gadhafi, and the Syrian people’s efforts to drive out Basher Assad. The Iranians have sought to turn all these events to their own advantage and agenda.
In sum, an entire region in transition and its people seek real freedom and real justice. They won’t have it if the Iranians continue to manipulate events, the latest of which has been to provoke a war with Israel.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
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