A Different International View of Israel Since 1985

Submitted by GWK (United States), Jan 11, 2009 at 05:50

Back in the late 1940's, international sympathy was with Israel, even if it had some hardened enemies in England (over earlier incidents, like the King David Hotel bombing) and the Middle East. But back then, Europe and the Americas were the dominant political, industrial, military, financial, and population growth centers.

But a lot has happened since then, The West's population virtually stopped growing, and the Muslim world's had exploded. The UN shifted from being a Western League of Nations, to becoming a forum where smaller and hypocritical totalitarian countries can extort freer and moe democratic countries. (Not that that is al the UN does, but if shifts the balance of international position on a wide range of issues, including Israel.)

Just as Japan conducted a diplomatic offensive to minimize international resistance and oppobrium before it attacked Port Arthur in the Russo Japanese War, a would-be aggressor needs to lay the diplomatic framework to diminish international anger if it acts militarily in a non-defensive manner. Israel seems not to have paid attention to the PR aspect of waging war. It seems that it has lost touch to that dimension of international politics.

But the bigger theme seems that id Israel wanted to stop Katushas, it needed to wage a PR campaign to alert the world that this was a problem the world need to work on first. And if Israel's aim is to crush Hamas, it needd to win some international support for the military actions it would take against Hamas.

It doesn't seem that settling the Gaza Strip by hard core settlers helped Israel's cause at all. So evacuation was perhaps the only way to get the settlers out of Gaza. Perhaps now, Israel can re-occupy Israel with guardposts and early detection equipment, but it should not "settle" or "colonize" Gaza. That wil never lead to peace.

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