Making Bad Decisions

According to the UN Gaza is on the brink of full-scale famine. Media images have started appearing of dirty children in soiled, ripped clothing in the rubble-strewn streets of Gaza holding metal cups and bowls clambering for ladles of watery soup, like a scene out of a Dickens novel. No doubt Israel will be blamed. CNN did a story the other day about the ten countries including the US and Canada who have suspended funding to UNRWA in the wake of a report that as many as 10% of the agency's 12,000 employees in Gaza have ties to Hamas, and a dozen are known to have physically taken part in the attacks against Israel on October 7th. The CNN story ended showing a desperate Palestinian woman pleading to the camera that if UNRWA ceases services everyone in Gaza will die. Count on CNN to focus, not on the corruption of the organization that has both implicitly and explicitly supported terrorism with their activities, but rather on a victim's heartbreaking plea for continued funding of that same corrupt organization. It's hard to fathom how by now everyone doesn't understand that the catastrophe of the Palestinians in Gaza (and the West Bank) is the responsibility of the Palestinians and their so-called leadership, underwritten, enabled and supported by the funding of the international community via the UN. It's somewhat heartening to see that the rot below the surface is finally being exposed. But I'm not terribly encouraged that anything significant will come of it. Unfortunately, some important funders of UNRWA, like the EU fearing a backlash from their Arab citizenry, are not getting the message. In a recent podcast, Sam Harris, in his inimitably calm rational way, lays out the moral and political stakes of Israel's war against Hamas. He covers most of the points I posted about in my Moral Clarity series (he calls them 5 myths), but much more clearly and succinctly than I do. It's one of his remarks near the end of the podcast that sticks with me most. A factoid I didn't know. Harris notes that when Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7th attack, was in an Israeli prison, he was treated to remove a life-threatening brain tumour. I'm not suggesting that Sinwar should not have received the medical care he needed while in Israeli custody (although I doubt that the hostages in Palestinian detention are receiving anywhere close to the same care.) But think about it. Israeli surgeons in an Israeli hospital (at Israeli taxpayer expense) saved the life of the man who years later would plan and execute the slaughter of their citizens in the most savage attack on Israeli soil in its history. I can't think of a more straightforward example of the way that Israel and the Palestinians operate in separate moral universes. Of course, it wasn't only Sinwar's surgery that permitted him to become Israel's nemesis, it was also his release from jail as part of the absurd 1:1000 prisoner swap. All of it highlights how we in the west have continually undermined our own position because we fail to grasp how our (higher) moral standards have been leveraged against us by our enemies. They do it through our media. They do it through our universities. They do it through our international aid organizations and charities. I'm not suggesting we should lower or alter our moral standards. On the contrary, we need to do everything we can to raise and protect them. And to do that we need to acknowledge when we're being played and stop making bad decisions based on it. Our bad decisions have allowed the Palestinians to live in the delusion for decades that Israel will one day go away. They've chosen and supported their corrupt and genocidal leaders based on this delusion. We've enabled the delusion with our funding of UNRWA, with our anti-Israel demonstrations, with our anti-Israel universities, with our bleeding heart media coverage, and most importantly, with our own weak political leadership and decision-making, both in Israel and in the diaspora. Weakness sends a signal that we can be played with. As Harris says in his podcast, had Israel responded to hostilities with pacifism it would have been suicidal, had the Palestinians responded with pacifism, they would have had a state long ago. They had no incentive to act responsibly and take a reasonable position because we in the west have shown time and again that given enough pressure we'd cave. It's time that we helped the Palestinians, learn from their catastrophically self-defeating mistakes, by no longer showing weakness, and not making any more mistakes of our own.