April 15, 2024

April Showers In The Desert

 

"War is a necessary part of God's arrangement of the world…Without war the world would deteriorate into materialism." 
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.

The die was cast a long time ago. 

When the state of Israel was created without an adjacent state of Palestine beside it, war was declared. And Israel won that war very decisively and easily for multiple generations because it had guts, technological edge, and powerful backers.

They still have all those things but it's not 1946 anymore.

The political decision to disenfranchise Palestine and block the formation of a sovereign state created an opening for all sorts of opportunistic actors in the region to make their name, the most successful of which have been Islamic fanatics.

Their political success would not be possible without the policies, choices, and direct interventions of Israel, England and the United States. This fact cannot be disputed. 

Israel, America, and England chose war over peace at every opportunity. They chose fanaticism over compromise. They chose Islam over everything else in the region when they abandoned the Shah in favour of the Ayatollah in the late 1970s. They then doubled down on their strategy by supporting the Pakistani-backed Islamic opposition against the Russian-backed communist government in Afghanistan. 

And it was a successful strategy. During the Cold War they short-sightedly riled up the Muslims to score political victories against Russia in Central Asia, India, and the Middle East. They won the Cold War. Congrats. Thumbs up. 

But they lost the next war. 

They ran away from Afghanistan after two decades of futile killing, gave Iraq away to the clerics, and reduced small nations like Libya, Yemen, and Syria to rubble because they mistake the destruction of towns and cities with victory.

Israel believes it can achieve total victory over the Palestinians. They are implementing a genocidal campaign in Gaza with some success so they may turn out to be right but there are still more Arabs and Muslims than Jews. Have they planned for the murder of them all? Do they want an all out war in the region? Do they not know that the extremist clerics who occupy Iran value an inch of Jerusalem's soil more than the whole Iranian nation? 

The war won't be over when every Palestinian is dead or when Iranian cities are bombarded day and night. Since the Palestinian cause became a Muslim cause the war stopped being about Palestine. Islam put itself on trial. And Israel simply isn't strong, big, or wise enough to take down a whole religion in the court of war. They have to put their hate and desire aside and find a middle ground.