When The Narrative Falls Apart - The Disassembly Of Progressive Fancy As Gaza Crumbles Into The Sea

Bobby Benson had been on the front lines of the Free Palestine movement, a radical's radical.  Drawing on his lifelong commitment to civil rights, he found the Israeli occupation of Gaza intolerable.  Here was a nation of white men occupying the land of brown asylees - Palestinian men and women who had been thrown out of their native land, interned, murdered, and tortured in ways worse than the Jews ever were.

Israelis had become far worse than Nazis and we’re committed to perpetual, brutal harassment, territorial expansion, and terrorism, all leading to the extermination of the Palestinian people.  The Jews were the overseers, the Jewish landlords of an entire land determined to wipe it off the face of the earth.  They were bound and determined under the transparent cover of sovereignty, to stop the spread of Islam, to rid the Middle East of brown-skinned peoples, and to establish Jewish hegemony in the region. 

There was never a doubt in Bobby's mind about the rightness of the Palestinian cause.  No historical reference, no annals of Jewish, Roman, and Greek historians, no geopolitics, no Josephus, Trajan, Kierkegaard, or Kant, no Biblical exegesis could change his mind. The Palestinians were God's chosen people, not the Jews.  The whole idea of divine entitlement was nothing but a Jewish fiction, an arrogant, self-important fiction. 

 

The oppressed of the world were one people, united in their struggle, in solidarity with people of color, defiantly honorable and righteous, and they would have their day of reckoning.  Once Israel and the Jews were wiped off the map, the world could return to its humanitarianism, civil order, and peace. 

Of course all this was just nonsense. The Palestinians were a ragtag, backward, insular, cretinous bunch whose only ethos was hatred. While Israelis were honored for their musical artistry, their science and mathematics, their technical brilliance and their cybernetic wizardry, nothing of any note had ever come out of Gaza or the West Bank.  It was an intellectual, creative wasteland, a nation of peasants whose only ambition was to destroy their neighbor. 

Every dollar poured into Palestinian territories by naive, idealistic nations went into rockets, AK-47s, tunnels, ordnance and military hardware.  The leaders of Hamas, only out for retention of power and status and standing in the Islamic world, robbed their people, deprived them of the progress and prosperity that could be theirs, and ran their land into the ground, ruined it, consigned it to perpetual underdeveloped, Third World status. 

 

When Hamas attacked Israel, killed over 1200 Israelis, took hostages, and began a military campaign, Israel returned fire and began an operation not only to neutralize Hamas but to eliminate it.

‘Never Again' had been the byword of all Israelis who vowed that Jews would never again be threatened, intimidated, or murdered.  There would never, ever again be death camps, gas chambers, and ovens. 

Somehow, the world progressive community saw the terrorist incursion of Hamas into Israel as the right and proper response to the occupation of a brutal oppressor, but nothing could have been further from the truth.  Israel had given the Palestinians ample opportunity for civil self-rule on the simple condition of acknowledging Israel's right to exist.  A peace accord between the two political entities was always in Israel's interest and should have been in Hamas'.  

It was almost made possible decades ago when American President Bill Clinton brought the Palestinian leader and the Israeli president together with a treaty only awaiting signature. Because of the terrorist roots of Yasser Arafat, his craven, self-serving obeisance to Iran and Islamic hegemony, and his consequent refusal to sign, Palestine was consigned to decades of war. 

Years later, Israel agreed to a measure of Gazan political autonomy, recognizing a Palestinian election and promises by Hamas to rule peacefully.  That chimera disappeared quickly and Israel was forced once again to take up arms against its enemy and prepare for a protracted war of survival. 

There has been not one scintilla of doubt about Hamas's desire to destroy Israel and kill Jews; nor has there been any about Iran's wish for a second Jewish holocaust.  There was never any serious interest in creating a prosperous, peaceful, progressive state - easily attainable through meeting simple conditions, none of which were punitive or harmful to Palestinians.  There was only interest in hatred and extermination. 

Yet Bobby and his colleagues persisted, looked the other way as Hamas sent rockets into Israeli civilian populations and Iran increased its supply of arms and materiel.  It was a fight of Liberation, La Lucha Continua, shouted Bobby as he and his friends sang the Internationale. 

When Israel retaliated with massive force, Bobby shouted 'fascist', and joined thousands of others herded by the progressive American Left into a violent groupthink, a new, more hysterical wailing over the plight of the terrorist aggressors - the Palestinians - and calling for the extermination of the Jews.  The Israeli hostages taken by Hamas were not victims but important negotiating tools - anything to bring Israel to heel. 

 

Israel was unmoved and unbowed, and Gaza was reduced to rubble. This was no place for peace until the hateful, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi regime was eliminated.  The civilian population was not spared, for as in the case of Nazi Germany, civilians were at the very least complicit in the Holocaust.  

America did not spare civilian populations of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.  Nor did American Union General William Sherman in his march through Georgia and South Carolina.  'The South will never rise again', he said. 

When Donald Trump obliterated Iran's nuclear capacity he was not only neutralizing their atomic threat, he was sending a message to the Middle East, and to Hamas in particular, that they would be next.  That unequivocal stance plus Israeli President Netanyahu's historic defiance brought Hamas to the bargaining table - a defeated, shamed, humiliated regime.  There is now a real chance for Middle Eastern peace, stability, and prosperity. 

The fanciful, politically driven, antagonistic and wholly unrealistic Palestinian claims for the right of return and the ceding of Jerusalem to Islamic authority are now history.  Hamas will never again rule Gaza, the right of Israel to exist will be codified, and every chance given to the Palestinian people to rebuild in peace.

The whole Leftist narrative of a Free Palestine, a land of righteous civil libertarians fighting for autonomy and recognition has been destroyed, discredited, and removed from discussion.  The world has seen Hamas for the terrorist organization as it always has been, a venal, self-serving government of hatred and geopolitical anarchy. 

The Palestinians brought Israel's campaign of destruction on themselves, and they deserved every bit of it.  They have been the aggressor, the enemy, the implacable geopolitical hater for decades; and now, finally they have been shown as the irresponsible, murderous, sham of a political party they have always been. 

With Trump's decisive bombing of Iran and his ultimatum to Hamas that they were next, he has sent a strong message to Hezbollah and the Houthis.  As long as I am in office, watch out. 

In a short nine months Trump has unveiled, defrocked, and exposed progressive cant.  Everything woke has been stripped and paraded under the harsh lights of reality - it never was the panacea promised by the Left and in fact was a twisted, deformation. 

The whole idea of diversity, equity, and inclusivity under which banner the southern border was opened has been shown to be a preposterous political sham.  Environmental sacramentalism was debunked, the private sector championed not reviled.

And so it is with the joke of Palestinian statehood.  There is no more cover for the progressives who bowed down at the Palestinian altar.  Free Palestine?  Trump did it.  Now the Palestinian people have a legitimate chance to be civilly ruled and to take steps to join the commonwealth of nations.