Cease the Cease-Fires
By Thomas Sowell
TownHall.com
Many years ago, on my first trip around the
world, I was struck by how the children in the
Middle East -- Arab and Israeli alike -- were among
the nicest looking little children I had seen
anywhere.
It was painful to think that they were going to grow
up killing each other. But that is exactly what
happened.
It is understandable that today many people in many
lands just want the fighting between the Israelis
and the Palestinians to stop. Calls for a cease-fire
are ringing out from the United Nations and from
Washington, as well as from ordinary people in many
places around the world.
According to the New York Times, Secretary of State
John Kerry is hoping for a cease-fire to "open the
door to Israeli and Palestinian negotiations for a
long-term solution." President Obama has urged
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have an
"immediate, unconditional humanitarian cease-fire"
-- again, with the idea of pursuing some
long-lasting agreement.
If this was the first outbreak of violence between
the Palestinians and the Israelis, such hopes might
make sense. But where have the U.N., Kerry and Obama
been during all these decades of endlessly repeated
Middle East carnage?
The Middle East must lead the world in cease-fires.
If cease-fires were the road to peace, the Middle
East would easily be the most peaceful place on the
planet.
"Cease-fire" and "negotiations" are magic words to
"the international community." But just what do
cease-fires actually accomplish?
In the short run, they save some lives. But in the
long run they cost far more lives, by lowering the
cost of aggression.
At one time, launching a military attack on another
nation risked not only retaliation but annihilation.
When Carthage attacked Rome, that was the end of
Carthage.
But when Hamas or some other terrorist group
launches an attack on Israel, they know in advance
that whatever Israel does in response will be
limited by calls for a cease-fire, backed by
political and economic pressures from the United
States.
It is not at all clear what Israel's critics can
rationally expect the Israelis to do when they are
attacked. Suffer in silence? Surrender? Flee the
Middle East?
Or -- most unrealistic of al -- fight a "nice" war,
with no civilian casualties? General William T.
Sherman said it all, 150 years ago: "War is hell."
If you want to minimize civilian casualties, then
minimize the dangers of war, by no longer coming to
the rescue of those who start wars.
Israel was attacked, not only by vast numbers of
rockets but was also invaded -- underground -- by
mazes of tunnels.
There is something grotesque about people living
thousands of miles away, in safety and comfort,
loftily second-guessing and trying to micro-manage
what the Israelis are doing in a matter of life and
death.
Such self-indulgences are a danger, not simply to
Israel, but to the whole Western world, for it
betrays a lack of realism that shows in everything
from the current disastrous consequences of our
policies in Egypt, Libya and Iraq to future
catastrophes from a nuclear-armed Iran.
Those who say that we can contain a nuclear Iran, as
we contained a nuclear Soviet Union, are acting as
if they are discussing abstract people in an
abstract world. Whatever the Soviets were, they were
not suicidal fanatics, ready to see their own cities
destroyed in order to destroy ours.
As for the ever-elusive "solution" to the
Arab-Israeli conflicts in the Middle East, there is
nothing faintly resembling a solution anywhere on
the horizon. Nor is it hard to see why.
Even if the Israelis were all saints -- and
sainthood is not common in any branch of the human
race -- the cold fact is that they are far more
advanced than their neighbors, and groups that
cannot tolerate even subordinate Christian
minorities can hardly be expected to tolerate an
independent, and more advanced, Jewish state that is
a daily rebuke to their egos.