One Million Ceasefires

Saturday, August 02, 2014 One Million Ceasefires If you like cease-fires, then this is a great time to be alive. Those Israelis who weren't shot in the head by  Hamas terrorists (whom Andrew Sullivan insists weren't real Hamas terrorist, trading in his obsession with Sarah Palin's rogue pregnancy for a new conspiracy theory) or killed by a Hamas rocket, encounter almost as many cease-fires in a given day as terrorist attacks. A cease-fire comes along every few minutes and it can last anywhere from a minute to an hour to a few hours until Hamas once again begins firing rockets or swarming through tunnels to attack Israelis. "War, what is it good for?" The Temptations sang. The obvious answer is that wars done right keep you from having to keep fighting. But cease-fires with Hamas aren't good for that or anything else. Hamas violates its own cease-fires. It declares cease-fires and then denies that it declared them. It seems to have almost as many positions on cease-fires as John Kerry does on Iraq. Israel's unilateral cease-fires with Hamas are as worthless as its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza which allowed Hamas to take over the area. The cease-fires don't stop the fighting. They don't bring an end to the violence. That's what war is for. But John Kerry is almost as obsessed with cease-fires as he is with finding a toupee that stays put during intense windsurfing sessions. The complete uselessness of the cease-fires hasn't stopped the completely useless top diplomat from constantly proposing new ones. Having noticed that the lifespan of one of these cease-fires is roughly that of a good idea inside his brain, Kerry defended his insistence on enrolling Israel in the Ceasefire-of-the-Minute club by claiming that enough worthless cease-fires could eventually be cashed in for one big real cease-fire. Obama's economic policy was all about piling up huge amounts of debt on the theory that enough debt would eventually translate into wealth. The theory of a million worthless cease-fires adding up to peace is that same economic theory applied to the equally fraudulent realm of international diplomacy. "The momentum generated by these short-term cease-fires is the best way to achieve a sustainable cease-fire," Kerry said. So far the only momentum is coming from Hamas rockets falling on Israel every time there's a cease-fire. But maybe that's the momentum that John Kerry has in mind. If enough rockets fall on Israel, maybe the Jews will finally give up on trying to contain Hamas and settle on Qatar's terms. In Hard Choices, a photo of deposed Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi gazing lovingly into Hillary Clinton's eyes is captioned with the false claim that “Morsi helped me negotiate a cease-fire between Israel & Hamas that holds to this day.“ By "to this day" she probably meant the last day someone bought a copy of Hard Choices; piles of which are currently being used as doorstops at every Costco in the country. But even by that standard, the cease-fire that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt negotiated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza didn't hold up too well. The rocket attacks on Israel never stopped. Obama, Kerry and Clinton just pretended that they did. Desperate to get someone in Washington D.C. to notice their homicidal mania, Gaza even fired off rockets during Obama's visit. The target was Sderot, the Israeli city that Obama had visited back in 2008 before he learned how to lower the oceans, amnesty the illegals and stab Israel in the back.   "The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens," Obama told the residents of the city that has come to be known as the nation's bomb shelter. "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing." But in 2013, Obama skipped Sderot. He paid no attention to the terrorists firing rockets at Sderot, even though they had dubbed him a "Roman Dog". Instead he visited the leader of the PLO who welcomed him with a mangled rendition of a Communist song about the glories of the Red Army and collective agriculture. Abbas may have assumed that it was one of the few things that the terrorist leader and the community organizer had in common. Meanwhile everyone went on pretending that the cease-fire still held. Only the Israelis had trouble playing along because were still being shelled. Kerry's spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who attempts to fix his messes by creating new messes of her own, explained that, ”Our focus is now is on short term cease-fires than can be built on each other.” Any construction worker will tell you that putting one fragile and unstable object on top of another an infinite amount of times will not build anything livable, but the party of "You Didn't Build That" doesn't seem to know much about how to actually build things, whether it's economies or cease-fires. Psaki's rhetoric is part of a larger shift in diplomatic expectations about the peace process. Israel is expected to accept a million cease-fires, no matter how worthless, because a cease-fire is an innately good thing, regardless of whether it's actually good for anything. If war is always bad, then cease-fires are always good. It doesn't matter if winning a war actually leads to peace while cease-fires just lead to more war. The devolution of peacenik idealism from a lasting peace to a cease-fire that lasts as long as it takes a bunch of men from Beit Hanoun to lug their rocket from the mosque to a UNRWA school is an adaptation to a new reality. Unlike its PLO cousins, Hamas isn't willing to pinkie swear that it will stop killing Israelis if it gets a few pieces of land on a map. Hamas only offers the Hudna, the temporary cease-fire that Muslims offer to non-Muslims, just before they start killing them again anyway. Arafat framed the peace deal to Muslims in terms of Mohammed's Hudna, a process that eventually led Mohammed to carry out the mass murder and rape of the local Jewish population during that golden age of coexistence between Muslims and the Jews and Christians they were ethnically cleansing that the New York Times keeps talking about when it blames Zionism for everything. But the PLO was at least willing to run its Hudna through the Western framework of diplomacy and peace agreements. Hamas is no more honest than the PLO, but its dishonesty is expressed in purely Islamic terms. If it's going to agree to an agreement that it intends to break anyway, it's going to be a temporary Hudna cease-fire, which it can safely break under Islamic law, and not some infidel Western peace process. The idealism of diplomats and activists is tagging along after the new Hamas reality. The peace process is dead. The temporary ceasefire in which Hamas is allowed to kill Israelis, but Israel isn't allowed to kill the terrorists killing its people is the new ideal. And Israel is expected to get on board. The cease-fire is just the peace process stripped as naked as the fairy tale emperor. It works exactly the same way. Terrorists attack Israel. Israel fights back. The photogs snap staged photos of Israeli atrocities, complete with painstakingly posed brand new teddy bears. The diplomats show up and demand that Israel make concessions to the terrorists in exchange for not being shot at. The concessions are made and the terrorists go on shooting anyway. It's the same old story, without any of the empty talk of "Peace in Our Time." There's no promise of co-existence. No new Middle East. Just Lucy in a Burka holding out an exploding football. Secretary of State John Kerry promises that enough cease-fires will add up to a sustainable cease-fire. But what is a sustainable cease-fire anyway? Unlike peace, sustainable cease-fires happen through a balance of power. Kerry's sustainable cease-fire however is supposed to be achieved by rewarding Hamas for breaking all the other cease-fires with a raft of new concessions. Trying to obtain a sustainable cease-fire by rewarding terrorists who break cease-fires is like going trillions into debt to get rich. Not only won't it work, but it will have the exact opposite effect. Kerry's sustainable cease-fire can't exist because he's paying the terrorists breaking it in Israeli currency. Psaki's giant pile of cease-fires, one of top of another, is just a game of diplomatic Jenga. Everyone from the UN Secretary General to Hillary Clinton keeps shouting for an immediate cease-fire. But what is the cease-fire supposed to accomplish when the problem is terrorism? We didn't respond to Pearl Harbor with an unconditional cease-fire. We didn't address 9/11 with a cease-fire. As miserably defeatist as this administration has been, it still hasn't declared a cease-fire with Al Qaeda no matter how many civilians, including children, die in the process. A cease-fire is even more pointless than a peace process. At least a peace process has a goal. A cease-fire is a temporary interruption in hostilities. It doesn't accomplish anything except to prolong and delay the inevitable. It's not an end to war. It's a war that drags on interminably without any final conclusion. Instead the rockets keep falling year after year in the war that never ends. A million cease-fires solve nothing. Especially when Hamas continues to violate its own cease-fires, accepting them and then rejecting them and then attacking anyway. We don't have a cease-fire with Al Qaeda. Instead Obama keeps promising to defeat Al Qaeda. Doesn't Israel deserve to win its own war on terror? Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog at 11:31 PM Share 18 comments: Anonymous3/8/14 Actually it was Edwin Starr who sang "War, what are you good for....absolutely nothing" Reply Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog3/8/14 So did the Temptations Reply Anonymous3/8/14 Matter of fact, Edwin Starr's version was a cover of the Temptations'. Brilliant, as usual, Daniel. With all the bitching about the Israelis defending themselves, there's not much mention of the tunnels. Was Hamas planning on using them to take milk and cookies to the Israelis? And how about the 100 plus children who died during the construction of those tunnels? The hypocrisy of the left is so unashamedly blatant as to make a thinking person swoon. Reply Anonymous3/8/14 What happens when its all done? Assuming it goes as well as it could, Israel destroys all the tunnels and destroys Hamas. Then what? Can't give Gaza to Egypt and Egypt doesn't want it. Can't give it to be run by Abbas, Abbas has no support amongst his own, and if he were a real leader, he would've denounced Hamas and started creating a transitional government for Gaza, setting himself up as an alternative to Hamas and ready to take over once the war is over, but he is inept. So then what? Only real alternative is to offer some Arab government money to take the Gazans, depopulate Gaza and cement over it. Or is there some other alternative? What do you guys think? Reply Some dude3/8/14 Doesn't Israel deserve to win its own war on terror? The answer to that question will always be "no" or some variant of "no" involving us having to give something up that is ours. The proper way to treat this is by saying the following: http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/mfadocuments/yearbook5/pages/91%20statement%20by%20prime%20minister%20begin%20on%20us%20measure.aspx Reply DenisO3/8/14 Israel needs peaceful borders, so they should make the sea their border and control the land, right to the coast. They should occupy Gaza, claiming they're "peacekeepers", and should never have given it up to appease the U.S. and other Western fools. The people of Gaza would rather have a secure and safe place to live than have crazy religious fanatics sacrificing them and their children to satisfy Allah's blood-lust. Hamas is in, and the People have had their one vote, one time, and will not be allowed to remove Hamas. Israel has to do it, and let the World be damned. Survival is at stake. I don't think Egyptian moderates will object. Regards, Reply Anonymous3/8/14 I definitely think Israel should take it back. Let some of their arab neighbours take in the refugees or whatever they claim to be. Reply Anonymous3/8/14 Could someone explain the language Jen Psaki uses, it is a form of semantics I don't recognize. Reply Anonymous3/8/14 So israel takes back gaza. What do you do with 2 million people that hate you? Reply Johnny3/8/14 Maybe refugee camps should be segregated by sex and the privilege of reproduction be relegated to those who are self supporting. Hey, like the old Catholic monasteries. Had that been done fifty years ago, the pissed off Palestinians would be a bunch of old guys limping around on canes. Reply djr3/8/14 Hadn't been here (this site) for a month or 2; my mistake. Shouldn't the schools w/ arms be called "UN Armories"? Reply Stogie3/8/14 Yes, the Israelis should take Gaza back. Let the firing cease when there is no more Hamas to fire back. Reply TotallyPeeved3/8/14 "Lucy in a burqa holding an exploding football." PRICELESS! Reply Anonymous4/8/14 Ceasefires amount to a weekend off from a hostile M-F work environment. When the ceasefire or weekend ends, hostilities resume. Until Israel truly secures her perimeter, hostile Monday mornings will occur. Eliminate the Gaza threat; root, branch or tunnel. Reply fsy4/8/14 Maybe refugee camps should be segregated by sex Clever idea, but it can only work if there isn't even one male guard. Reply Anonymous4/8/14 "The new Gaza missile defense system..." political cartoon used in this article reminds me of a Netanyahu quote: "We're using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they're using their civilians to protect their missiles." Does anyone know how I can find an old political cartoon that shows, all in silhouette if memory serves me correctly, a PLO fighter with a rifle pointed at an Israeli soldier while an Israeli soldier is, in return, pointing his rifle back at the PLO fighter. The only difference is that the PLO fighter is crouched behind a baby carriage using the child as a human shield while the Israeli soldier is in front of the baby carriage, protecting the child? It is a poignant cartoon and I would love to find it. Does anyone know where it is on the Internet? Thanks for considering. King Western Man Reply Anonymous4/8/14 I'm surprised Kerry isn't pestering Israel to send care gifts of falafel and hummus to Hamas during their cease-fires (I mean rest and reload breaks). Keliata Reply Steve D4/8/14 'Desperate to get someone in Washington D.C. to notice their homicidal mania, Gaza even fired off rockets during Obama's visit.' It's tough to convince people you're a t