Ha-Ha Hari Harangues Israel

Huffington has Hari writing an anti-Israel piece here (sorry, it's from The Independent). It's entitled: The True Story Behind This War is Not the One Israel is Telling.

It start's like this:

The world isn't just watching the Israeli government commit a crime in Gaza; we are watching it self-harm. This morning, and tomorrow morning, and every morning until this punishment-beating ends, the young people of the Gaza Strip are going to be more filled with hate, and more determined to fight back, with stones or suicide-vests or rockets. Israel's leaders have convinced themselves the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer they will become. But when this is over, the rage against Israelis will have hardened, and the same old compromises will still be waiting by the roadside of history, untended and unmade.

and ends like this:

Why would Israel act this way? The Israeli government wants peace, but only one imposed on its own terms, based on the acceptance of defeat by the Palestinians. It means they can keep the slabs of the West Bank on 'their' side of the wall. It means they keep the largest settlements, and control of the water supply. And it means a divided Palestine, with responsibility for Gaza hived off to Egypt, and the broken-up West Bank standing alone. Negotiations threaten this vision: they would require Israel to give up more than it wants to. But an imposed peace will be no peace at all: it will not stop the rockets or the rage. For real safety, Israel will have to talk to the people it is blockading and bombing today - and compromise with them.

I left his following comment there:

An article such as this does not lend itself to a rebuttal and even comments are difficult but let me pick one example of the author's insidiousness.

He writes: "...Yuval Diskin, the current head of the Israeli security services Shin Bet, "told the Israeli cabinet [on the 23rd] that Hamas is interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its terms." Diskin explained Hamas was requesting two things: an end to the blockade, and an Israeli ceasefire on the West Bank. The cabinet - high with election-fever, and eager to appear tough - rejected these terms."

The author, one assumes, would have accepted these "terms of improvement" and is critical, if not downright denigrating, of the cabinet which rejected the offer. But an end of the blockade would only have increased the Hamas ability to obtain more dangerous weapons and other war materiel, as they have been doing with the blockade in place (the bombing, though, of a good percentage of the tunnels might hamper any future underground smuggling of such). A ceasefire in Judea and Samaria would surely permit not only Fatah terrorists and those of the Islamic Jihad to strengthen themselves, to the point when they, too, would be able to rain down Qassams, Grads and whatnot on other Israeli residential civilian areas, but allow Hamas eventually to assume power as they did in Gaza.

But a fool would be criticial of such an Israel government decision such as the one the author opposes.