Eye-opening pieces on Tom Gross’s site which give a flavour of the monstrous reaction to Israel’s plight.

Bruce Thornton effectively nails the truly monstrous distortion that now passes for the received wisdom about the Middle East conflict:

How did Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem , documented in history as the traditional Jewish homeland and capital, become the ‘occupied West Bank’ and ‘Arab lands’? Through violent conquest, of course. The true ‘occupation’ is the Muslim continuing occupation of lands that were Jewish and Christian for centuries. That occupation ended in Palestine when the Ottoman Empire went to war on the side of Germany and, having lost, paid the price that aggressors always pay when they lose. The victors carved up the caliphate and created the states of the modern Middle East, including Israel. The failure of the Arabs to recognize a legitimate state created by the same historical process that created their own nations, and their continuing failure to recognize Israel in deeds rather than in words, are the root cause of the ongoing crisis.

Since Muslim hatred of Israel is the dynamic behind the crisis, the desperate calls for pie-in-the-sky solutions like an ‘international trusteeship over the Palestinian territories’ (Avishai Margalit) or still another toothless U.N. resolution (Chibli Mallet) are useless, mere stop-gaps even if they could be implemented. But of course they won’t be, because for these solutions to work someone would have to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah, and it simply isn’t in anybody’s interest other than Israel ’s to do so –– particularly given how messy a job it is to root out terrorists who have callously embedded themselves among non-combatants. Once again, Israel is compelled to be the Dirty Harry of the Middle East , the one nation with the nerve and skills to do the nasty work eve rybody else knows must be done but do not have stomach to do themselves.

A former official in the government of India gets it:

The Iranian intelligence has been increasingly playing a dangerous game—- it has been arming and instigating different Shia militia groups to keep the pot boiling in Iraq; it has been adding to the instability in Afghanistan by helping elements opposed to the Government of Hamid Karzai; and it has been arming and advising the Hezbollah in order to destabilise the Lebanon and make the Israelis bleed. There has been one objective behind all these actions—-to keep the US and Israeli forces bleeding and preoccupied in the hope of thereby reducing the chances of a military strike against its nuclear establishments.