There is a famous scene in the classic movie “Annie Hall” in which protagonist Alvy Singer visits his girlfriend’s family, and encounters her somewhat untethered brother in a hallway. Singer listens as the brother rambles incoherently before politely taking his leave. “Right, well, I have to go now, Duane,” he says, “because I’m due back on planet Earth.”
“Planet Earth” came to more than one person’s mind about 36 hours after the news emerged about Israelis slaughtered in cold blood, babies riddled with machine gun bullets in their cribs, hundreds of young people mowed down at a music festival, human beings decapitated, raped and abducted by Hamas,1,300 Israelis murdered, 3,700 Israelis maimed. Over 150 terrified innocents held hostage in the terror state established in Gaza by Hamas for the purpose of annihilating Israel.
At a solidarity rally for Israel in Boston, Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey announced that what was called for was “de-escalation” of “the conflict.” He was booed by several thousand incredulous people gathered there, since “de-escalation” would mean that Israel simply ignore the mass slaughter, move on and pray that nothing like this happened again – or at least not too soon.
Unless Israel consigns itself to simply absorbing the mass slaughter visited upon it by a neighboring terror state, it has literally no choice but to attempt to dismantle Hamas, no easy task. No nation that gives a fig about its own existence could do otherwise – and Israel has plenty of reason to be concerned about its existence, a point about which its critics could not care less.
Some concluded that Markey was simply addled, but he is addled like a fox. Once a stalwart supporter of Israel when it helped him politically, Markey, a shrewd student of raw politics, correctly adjudged that when he wished to secure and then hold the Democratic nomination for Senator in Massachusetts, his best move was to prioritize locking up the support of the AOC wing of the Democratic Party. That’s a wing which has adopted a “see-no-evil” policy about tens of thousands of Hamas rockets slamming into Israeli civilian centers over the past 15 years, and which ritualistically condemns Israel’s attempts to defend itself as “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.”
If Markey’s call for Israel to “de-escalate” after 5,000 of its citizens were murdered or maimed was mindless, others’ pronouncements were risible. MSNBC commentator Peter Beinart, who has called for Israel to self-dissolve, claimed that Hamas had little choice but to be violent because Palestinians lacked a “pathway” for “ethical protest.” This, of course, is drivel: Hamas was founded in the 1980s in order to obliterate Israel, and since then it has devoted itself to blocking an independent Palestinian state next to Israel. After Israel uprooted 11,000 Israelis living in Gaza in 2005 in order to pave the way for a Palestinian state, Hamas forcibly seized control of Gaza and expelled the Palestinian Authority, for the purpose of scuttling the very Palestinian state that Palestinians assert they want. After Beinart delivered himself of this balderdash on national television, MSNBC host Jen Psaki thanked him for his “insight.”
Israel’s critics now demand that it somehow achieve the magic trick of responding to Hamas without hurting civilians, even though even those who don’t know the Gaza Strip from the Louisiana Purchase know that Hamas deliberately makes that impossible, embedding its fighters and their weapons in apartment buildings, mosques and hospitals, forcibly making civilians human shields. Longtime Hamas whitewasher Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley conceded over the weekend that “the murder of innocent Israeli civilians at the hands of Hamas is unacceptable,” but demanded that Israeli ensure that civilians are not hurt. Has she not a clue about what happens in Gaza? And if the massacre of Israeli civilians is “unacceptable,” then what exactly is Israel supposed to do to avoid accepting it? Must Israeli permit it to happen again – and then again after that?
When it comes to Israel, some people have simply departed planet Earth. The challenge now is to keep others from joining them.
Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
