Israel

Liberals often assert that Evangelical support for Israel is based on Evangelical theology, specifically those aspects having to do with the Second Coming of Christ. This assertion is generally made in a manner which is contemptuous of both Israel and of the Evangelicals, and is intended to portray the opinions of the latter as irrelevant to those who do not share their particular religious beliefs.

I’m sure some Evangelicals support Israel for theological reasons. But I don’t think that theology is the primary factor at work here.

The truth is, most Americans instinctively tend to support Israel. Where hostility to Israel exists in this country, it usually arises from leftist politics and worldviews–and these, in turn, are closely connected to the universities.

Evangelicals are largely outside the force field of attitudes centered on the academy. I suspect it is this, rather than any specific theological factors, which account for the high support for Israel among this group of Americans.

I’d hypothesize that people who come from the same social groups as the Evangelicals, but who are themselves atheists or agnostics, tend to share Evangelical attitudes toward Israel.

By continuing to fire rockets into Israel, Hezbollah insures that Israeli public opinion will force the Israeli government to keep fighting until Hezbollah is crushed. Israelis aren’t going to tolerate any outcome that allows the Hez at will to force hundreds of thousands of them into bomb shelters for days at a time. This consideration trumps the Israeli political establishment’s great fear of a Lebanese quagmire and the enormous costs of mobilizing for a long war.

The Hez may be getting desperate. It appears the rocket attacks on Israel are becoming less effective, which suggests that the remaining launchers are being pushed back from the border and/or that the most-skilled Hez crews have been put out of action. But since the Hez are still firing salvos (albeit less-accurate ones) of short-range rockets as well as occasional larger, long-range rockets, the Israeli public will keep up the political pressure until the rockets stop coming or Hezbollah is destroyed as an effective force.

(See this post, and especially this article, for more on Israeli public opinion’s crucial role in this war.)

Captain Ed observes, about the proportionality canard:

To use a crude analogy, if someone is stupid enought to bring a knife to a gunfight, it doesn’t mean that those holding the guns have a moral obligation to fight with knives instead. Proportionality demands exactly that, and it leads to nothing but longer and more destructive wars.

As I argued before, those who argue for a “proportional” response argue for an ineffective and essentially symbolic response that changes nothing. I find such arguments morally suspect. Given that any military operation will result in some civilian deaths, we should only launch such an operation when we honestly think that doing so will result in a significant positive change.

I can think of few things more vile than advocating for the deaths of innocents for what amounts to a very large and expensive piece of performance art.

[Note: The Captain’s Quarters blog suddenly became unreachable while I was writing this post. The above links may not work.]

This is very well done:

. . . The people fighting Israel now say, shamelessly, that their goal is the destruction of Israel, and you know, in their cups, they would avow they would love to see every last Jew dead. That is who they are. And wanting some place with a wall around it and plenty of guns to protect yourself from such people is a mistake?

If I ever would have thought it was, the smoking hole in Manhattan filled with human ashes convinced me otherwise. Israel was and is a collective act of self-defense by the Jewish people , perhaps the most well justified act of self-defense in the history of the planet, which Europe, in an untoward moment of decency, somehow let slip by. But if it was a mistake, it was of the best kind, and Europe and the Arabs should now have to live with it. If the existence of Israel bothers the Arab nations so much, they can distract themselves by trying to build even one country that is not a pit of tyranny and medieval barbarism. But of course, now the idea seems to be that the whole rest of the world should be brought down to that level, one planeful full of innocents at a time. Richard Cohen and the rest of us need to face it — we are all Israelis now.

Worth reading in full.

October 28, 1955

Ariel Sharon (standing 2nd left) and colleagues. Also notable: Meir Har-Tzion (standing left), Moshe Dayan (standing 3rd left) and Rafael Eitan (crouching right). (For additional perspectives on Eitan, see this obituary and this recent interview with his widow.)

The above photo, captioned “Israel’s legendary soldiers”, is taken from this gallery at the Jerusalem Post’s website. It’s worth a look, though it’s necessary to slog through a lot of relatively dull recent photos in order to see more-interesting material from the 1950s through 1980s.