This is why we can’t have nice things… like peace.
Thursday, May 7th, 2009Mere days after its leader-in-exile Khaled Meshaal told America, the New York Times, and the world that Hamas would cease firing rockets at Israel in order to better “serve the people’s interest” and reevaluate their strategy, Hamas militants fired rockets into Israel. Again. Several people were wounded in Israel and then in Gaza when Israel returned fire.
And people want Israel to make peace with this: an organization that will not even obey its own leader if he gives that most heinous, sinful, and harum (Arabic for “forbidden”) of orders, to stop firing. It really does appear that people don’t understand the Palestinian situation. The Palestinian situation is that if a Palestinian of importance tries to moderate his approach or even simply cease violent action temporarily for strategic purposes, he risks disobedience at least and murder at worst. Even back in 1967, Palestinians told Israel that they could not accept a state in the contiguous, then-unsettled West Bank and Gaza Strip because Yaser Arafat would kill them. Thus, violence has become the Palestinian disease, a overriding all other approaches to life for its own sake.
This is why Jews and Israelis tell a joke about ceasefires. We know that when the UN or someone else presses us into a ceasefire with our foes, it means that we cease, and they fire.