Headed, “Israel’s Enemies are our Enemies,” it had a lot to say about Hamas: “Hamas seeks to destroy Israel.” “Hamas rejects negotiations with Israel.” “Hamas wants to kill all Jews.”
Meanwhile, the pundits have been unanimous in agreeing that Israel’s attack on Gaza has been a boon for Hamas, who are such insane troublemakers that they have been abandoned by all their erstwhile allies. Some pundits allege that the Arab world would love to see Israel destroy Hamas. (It would kill two birds with one stone: get rid of Hamas and reaffirm the judgment of most of the world that Israel is a haughty bully with genocidal proclivities.)
The only card Hamas has left is the sympathy card.
Also, Hamas does not have the power to destroy Israel, much less kill all Jews.
I worked out an analogy – it’s a bit complex, so bear with me.
You live in a rich gated community that has the best security money can buy. There’s a crazy old guy who lives a shack on the beach, surrounded by his extended family. He’s got a gripe with you because for fifty years you have been expanding your gated community onto his land. “I’ll kill you all!” he screams. “I’ll burn down your houses, down to the last macmansion!” And there’s no talking to him.
Sometimes he and his cousins throw Molotov cocktails over your fence. Most of them are intercepted by Security, although someone was actually hit by one.
Naturally, the gated community is fed up. One of your tenets is self-sufficiency, but even if you did want to turn to law enforcement for help, it could get kind of dicey, since it is true that the gated community had illegally expropriated the old guy’s land.
What do you do? It’s a hard question. If I were on the gated community board, I’d vote to beef up security. I’d like to give the guy some of his land back, but I know he’s so irrational that it would only encourage more rage. There are in-laws of his, from whom we also stole land, who aren’t friendly, but at least haven’t gone off the deep end – yet. I would talk to lawyers about a good way to start giving the in-laws back their land, or at least finding some just compensation for what we had taken.
Unfortunately, the majority of the board decided to just go and start killing the whole family on the beach – concentrating on the old guy and his cadre of cousins, but not sparing any of them, man, woman or child. The reason given for using this tactic is the hope that, if the old man is not eliminated in the melee, he will somehow be so cowed that he will crawl out of the rubble and promise to be nice. I suspect that there might have been a bit of primitive vengeance behind it, too.