Operation Protective Edge is apparently over.Terrific.
In a recent piece for Israel Thrives and Jews Down Under entitled, Netanyahu and the West Doom Israel to Perpetual War, I argued that US and western pressure to let up on Hamas in Gaza inclined Netanyahu to accept limited war aims in this most recently concluded spasm of hatred and blood.
In my estimation the main thing that the Netanyahu government accomplished is merely kicking the proverbial can down the proverbial road. So long as Hamas remains intact in the Gaza strip then violence and war remains inevitable. Degrading Hamas's ability to shoot rockets at Israeli civilians such as those that lived in kibbutz Nir Am, just west of S'derot, was an exceedingly important war aim that was only partially met. The destruction of dozens of terror tunnels was also an exceedingly important war aim and we can only hope that the great majority of those tunnels have been destroyed.
But we do not really know, now do we?
Something over 2,000 people were killed in this latest operation and the great majority of those dead are Arab dead. Well over 2,000 Arabs gave their lives so that Hamas could gain a PR victory over Israel. I cannot believe that their families would think it was worth it, but I also do not believe that their families are likely to blame anyone for this most recent catastrophe on anyone but the Jews.
Furthermore, according to the reports that I have read, the areas around S'derot and Ashkelon have been cleared out. The region is devastated and who knows when, or if, it will recover? Will Dana Bar-on and her family return to kibbutz Nir Am? And if they do not, who could possibly blame them?
Whatever the harm to southern Israel and the absolute devastation of parts of the Gaza Strip, the fact of the matter is that Hamas "won" this recent encounter in at least two ways.
The first is that they created true fear in the Jewish minority in the Middle East.
Not only was kibbutz Nir Am hit with rocket fire, so was Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The Jewish minority in that part of the world has ensconced itself into Fortress Israel and now is obligated to constantly defend itself from the Arab-Muslim front-line troops in places like the Strip. This has the effect of forcing people, both Jewish and Muslim, who live within Israel near the Gaza border to move elsewhere, thereby making a large part of that small country essentially defunct and unlivable.
Making Jews uncomfortable on historically Jewish land has been an Arab war aim at least since the rise of Zionism in the nineteenth-century and it works. Of course, the tiny Jewish minority, despite Israel's military strength, can be made to feel exceedingly uncomfortable in their own homes. Take a moment to listen to Dana Bar-on talk about what life is like under all those "toy bottle rockets" that Leftists mock as a weak "indigenous" response to alleged Jewish atrocities. Presumably they would prefer it if more Jews were killed so that hostilities could be more "proportionate" as they sit on the sidelines and eat popcorn.
Dana Bar-on was there when these vicious Jihadis jumped out of the ground within sprinting distance of her own house. She heard the rifle fire as the IDF confronted and killed a number of these Islamist head-choppers and then she and her family subsequently moved away from the home that she was born into.
Of course, if kibbutz Nir Am had a problem from Jihadi terror, just take a gander at the devastation the IDF gave to parts of Gaza.
People look at this image, and all the thousands of similar images put out by the general media - not to mention all the photos of dead or crying children and weeping old women in black - and naturally develop feelings of loathing and disgust for Israel, if not for Jews, more generally. And that, my friends, represents Hamas's other victory in this recent upheaval of stupidity and violence.
Hamas was more than willing to sacrifice thousands of its own people for the purpose of whipping up hatred toward Jews and it worked magnificently. It worked like a charm. It worked despite the fact that many of us warned the west that they were willfully playing a roll in an anti-Jewish deception. We told them that Hamas was putting innocent women and children into harms way for the specific purpose that they would be killed by Israelis seeking to degrade Hamas rocket-fire on their own civilian population. This is not even disputed by the United Nations. We told them that the reason that Hamas does this is to create more hatred toward Israel and Jews in the West.
Nonetheless, what did Protective Edge create?
More hatred toward Israel and Jews in the West.
There was only one, real, long-standing possibility within Operation Protective Edge and that was in the possibility that Israel would finally take out Hamas entirely. Short of that, all Israel did was bolster Hamas's prestige throughout the Middle East and throughout the sensitive, soft-hearted, caring West, while allowing perhaps one-quarter of Israel to be rendered something near unlivable.
Ultimately Netanyahu caved to western pressure, or so I suspect. I do not believe that the west will ever allow a real Jewish victory over never-ending Arab aggression. The conflict will continue, year upon year and decade upon decade, because the west - in its alleged desire to be balanced and fair - throws much of its weight behind the enemies of the Jewish minorty. If the EU and the UN and the US did not fund Arab aggression against the Jews of the Middle East then that aggression would eventually dry up and blow away.
What keeps the hatred and the fear going is western funding of that hatred and fear and what keeps the blood flowing is the hatred and fear, itself.
If the West honestly cared about ending the ongoing Arab-Israel conflict then it would stop consuming the conflict, it would stop pouring money into Hamas and the PLO / Fatah and UNRWA, and it would stop hounding the Jewish minority for daring to live in Judea and Samaria, the land where Jewish people come from, and would start pressuring the hostile Arab majority to leave the Jews the hell alone.
And if you are concerned about alleged Jewish-Israeli abuse of power toward the local Arabs, perhaps you should consider speaking out against the absolutely blood-curdling messages screeching from the mosques throughout the entire region.
The Jews of the Middle East are a small people under perpetual siege in a region in flames and until you understand that then you do not begin to comprehend the problem.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.