In time of crisis we must stand with Israel

Israel is simply different – born out of hate, maintained by an abiding love, and attacked from all sides.

It is 6,568 miles from Lakeland to Gaza, and it sometimes seems to be a few minutes away – seconds, in media time — and a lifetime away in understanding.

Israel is at once one of our most distant, most problematic and troublesome allies, and at times it is, at once, one of our closest and best loved. We regard it like a sibling – a brother or sister with a mind of their own — short-fused at taking advice, seeking their own way, a source of both trouble and great affection.

Israel is not just an ally in the realist geopolitical array. Israel is family.

And what happened in Israel last week is inexcusable, immoral and inexpressibly tragic.

Israel was founded in the brutal wake of the attempted extinction of a people – a new home, where safety might be sought, dreams realized, the furies exorcised. A new nation and a new culture, bringing together people from across the globe – a diaspora thrown grindingly into reverse. All gathering in a miserable desert with few resources. A strip of land in a rocky, desolate part of the world, the people arrived with the vision of a garden. Israel is simply different – born out of hate, maintained by an abiding love, and attacked from all sides.

This October War is the 18th major conflict embroiling Israel in the modern era. This includes invasions, intifadas, interventions in civil war and now, the invasion of the state by a non-state actor. So, too, have Chad, Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia been embroiled in violence. And the horror of ISIS plunged the entire region into bloody chaos, until their Caliphate was dismembered and destroyed through the offices of the Kurds, the Turks, the Americans, the Russians, the Syrians and even the Israelis. Not what one could call an alliance of friends. And that’s the point: there’s awful and there’s intolerable.

ISIS was smashed. The same fate should befall Hamas, and for the same reasons. Even war has rules. The taking of hostages, using innocent civilians as human shields, the grim violation of the most vulnerable

of non-combatants (children, the elderly – often those simply too ill to run away from their pursuers) is not war. It is, by definition, an act of terror. Attacking a crowd of unarmed kids dancing to music is unforgivable. No cause can justify it. None.

Israel is a democracy. One of my friends pointed out, in hard tears, that many of the people slaughtered had been protesting Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s policies towards the Palestinians only days before they fell to Hamas bullets.

And the sheer horror of the attack, and the revulsion it induces, assures a cataclysmic response – it’s hard to imagine the government of Israel settling for anything short of the complete dismemberment of Hamas and its allies in Gaza.

So who wins?

Surely not the Palestinian cause – or Hamas. Even in the short term, this invasion was suicidal and the longer the hostages are held, and the longer the war goes on, the worse the situation becomes.

The attack was meticulously planned, so secret that this planning eluded one of the finest intelligence services in the world almost completely. More than 1,500 fighters were organized, targeting over 30 places in the border wall with earth-moving equipment and drones. Some 40 or more villages were attacked, four major military bases – and the border wall was breached with ease.

But the attack was absolutely doomed to failure. The superior firepower of the Israeli Defense Force would eventually – after mass death and destruction – overcome.

The intractable conflict between Palestinians and Israelis does occasionally settle to a fragile state of near peace, but following such an act, that peace could not now be more distant.

We must stand for peace. But, now, at this moment, we must stand firmly with Israel.

Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger.