Even the lowest expectations for Gaza will not be exceeded. Some quick hits from just after the pullout:
The international community was outraged a few years ago when Afghanistan's Talibans blew up giant Buddhist statuaries. But outrage was conspicuously absent against the destruction of Jewish antiquities on the Temple Mount. Nor was there any particular international notice, let alone concern, when Nablus mobs ransacked Joseph's Tomb in 2001.
The wish to spare the Israeli public scenes of jubilant terrorists and their admiring disciples wreaking vengeance on synagogues is what prompted the government's original decision against abandoning any synagogues to the marauding rioters' predations. But why must it be assumed that such barbarism is uncontrollable, or even understandable?
To find a counterexample, one need look no further than Tel Aviv. The Hassan Bek Mosque was built about a century ago by Ottoman Turks on the border of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. During the British Mandate, Jaffa's Arabs had no qualms about using this house of worship to sow death and destruction. Arab snipers regularly fired into Tel Aviv streets from the minaret, killing and wounding passersby. After the War of Independence, Israelis had every reason to pull down the infamous mosque. But they didn't.
Israel even allowed Saudi money to finance the mosque's renovation and expansion. It's an operating mosque today. The police reportedly suspected that the suicide bomber who killed 22 youngsters at the Dolphinarium had been harbored there. When a known underworld character recently deposited a pig's head in its courtyard, he was summarily arrested.
But no matter what happens, it's still the Israelis at fault as the column linked in the title of this post shows:
Israelis awoke yesterday to the news that the gates to Gaza had been ceremoniously shut, and that the Palestinians' joyous burning of Gush Katif's synagogues, which the cabinet had voted not to destroy, had begun. We were also informed that the US State Department had criticized the cabinet decision not to destroy the synagogues because it "put the Palestinian Authority into a situation where it may be criticized for whatever it does."
. . . such statements are instructive because they either reflect a conscious, high-level decision or are considered so uncontroversial that a low-level official can say them without fear of contradiction. In this case, the uncontroversial notion is evidently that the problem is not Palestinian savagery but Israel's refusal to spare the world images of it. Regardless of how Israeli decision makers expected the Palestinians to behave, Israel's decision not to destroy the synagogues gave the Palestinians the opportunity to exceed rock-bottom expectations.
Would the Palestinian Authority be "criticized" if it had decided to spare a single former synagogue from the raging mobs, perhaps for use as a library, or for some international aid agency? Is the idea of sparing a former place of worship of another religion so foreign that it cannot even be asked for, let alone expected?
The unwritten script here is that nothing more can be expected from the Palestinians because, after all, they are enraged by 38 years of Israeli presence in Gaza. This ignores both the questions of why Israel was there in the first place, and why Israel was targeted for destruction before it set foot in Gaza. But it also papers over the real source of Muslim rage: the reigning intolerant interpretation of Islam.
Despite attempts to explain it away as a benign form of striving, the Arab-Islamic notion of jihad remains essentially unchanged since Ibn Khaldun described it in 1406: "holy war is a religious duty ... to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or force." Only Islam, he added, "is under obligation to gain power over other nations."
This has been reflected in a "what's mine is mine, what's yours is mine" approach that we see dominates Palestinian thinking. It goes without saying that no Jew, building, or grave must remain in Gaza, as much as it does that Israel must treat its own million-strong Arab minority with utmost respect.
Meanwhile, the nations of the West allow themselves to be used as instrumentalities for Palestinian Jew-hatred and left-wing Israeli self-hatred:
An Israeli left wing group has filed a lawsuit in the United Kingdom against Chief of General Staff, Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz and his predecessor, Lt.-Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya'alon, for their involvement in the 2002 assassination of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh [who was killed while hiding among random civilians -- his human shields].
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Meanwhile, a lawyer representing a UK Palestinian group that filed a lawsuit against IDF Maj.-Gen. (res.) Doron Almog has demanded that the Scotland Yard investigate the actions of Israeli diplomats in aiding the senior officer's hasty departure, the Guardian reported on Tuesday.
Just another day in the world.
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