Ill-conceived ‘crusade’

As we write these words on Wednesday, more than 1,000 deluded or possibly venal souls from 43 nations are massing on the Egypt-Gaza border, agitating to cross into Gaza on Dec. 31 to protest Israel’s assault on the strip one year ago and the continuing Israeli blockade.

Some are staging a hunger strike, including an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor from the United States, who is either in her second childhood or a fool, lending the luster of age and history to a cause that does not deserve it.

As we reported last year, a war plan was approved on Dec. 24, “after some 70 Kassams and mortars slammed into southern Israel in a single day” – and after thousands of others had been lobbed onto the city of Sderot more or less daily for eight years. What nation would continue to put up with that?

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What Israel did in Gaza one year ago, during Operation Cast Lead, was make war on Hamas – on Hamas, we stress, a terrorist organization determined to kill Israelis and destroy Israel. It did not make war on the people of Gaza – although Hamas, by using them as human shields and basing its operations in civilian sites like schools, mosques, and hospitals, put them in harm’s way.

Yes, there was great suffering in Gaza. More than 1,000 Palestinians were killed, and countless wounded. But Hamas valued its own people’s lives even less than it valued Israelis’ lives.

Who are these people gathered at the Gaza border? What do they know of Israel’s suffering? What do they know of Hamas’ machinations? Where do they get their information? From the seriously flawed and flat-out biased Goldstone Report? Richard Goldstone will have a lot to atone for come Yom Kippur. (His comrade in shallowness, Jimmy Carter, has already made his Al Het. See below.)

A kind of “activists’ high” surges through a crowd convinced of its righteousness.

But they are wrong – and so carried away by their wrongness they’ve lost sight of what ought to be the goal. If they care about the Gazans, if they care about the Palestinians at all, they should show their solidarity with Israel in its efforts to make peace.

RKB