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Israel and the Surrender of the West

(Wall Street Journal) Shelby Steele - When the Israeli commandos boarded that last boat in the flotilla and, after being attacked with metal rods, killed nine of their attackers, they were acting in a world without the moral authority to give them the benefit of the doubt. By appearances they were shock troopers from a largely white First World nation willing to slaughter even "peace activists" in order to enforce a blockade against the impoverished brown people of Gaza. This, of course, is not the reality of modern Israel. Israel does not seek to oppress or occupy - and certainly not to annihilate - the Palestinians in the pursuit of some atavistic Jewish supremacy. But the merest echo of the shameful Western past is enough to chill support for Israel in the West. Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's Camp David offer of 2000 in which Israel offered more than 90% of what the Palestinians had demanded. To have accepted that offer would have been to forgo hatred, and Arafat knew that without the Jews to hate, an all-defining cohesion would leave the Muslim world. So he said no to peace. This recalcitrance in the Muslim world, this attraction to the consolations of hatred, is one of the world's great problems today. The writer is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
2010-06-21 10:06:49
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