by Daniel Greenfield, New American Prophet, ©2024
(May 28, 2024) — Rafah isn’t just the last stand for Hamas, but for an entire foreign policy establishment.
The desperate effort to keep Israeli soldiers from going into the last Gaza stronghold of the Islamic terrorist organization is about more than the sum of the geopolitical parts.
After nation building failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and everywhere else it’s been tried, the radioactive ‘Palestinian’ nation building experiment from over 30 years ago is its last hope.
Long before George W. Bush tackled nation building after 9/11, his father began the era of turning Muslim terrorist groups into countries with the project to give the PLO a state. Where the first Bush failed, Bill Clinton succeeded with the Oslo accords and a Nobel prize for Arafat.
The PLO state failed long before Iran took over Iraq and the Taliban took over Afghanistan. There had never been anything peaceful, democratic or aspirational about Arafat and the PLO. By the time that Hamas had captured Gaza after winning democratic elections, it had long been clear to everyone outside of D.C. that rather than ending terrorism, statehood had incarnated it.
Any ‘Palestinian’ state was doomed to be a terrorist state. The only question is who would run it. And the answer was that the biggest and deadliest terrorists would command popular support.
When Iraq and Afghanistan went bad, America could just leave; Israelis did not have that luxury. Sharon forcibly expelled the Jews living in Gaza to the other side of a border wall, but despite all the sob stories that the terrorists were living in an “open air concentration camp” with five-star hotels and mansions, walls weren’t that hard to get through even before Oct 7.
Israel has been stuck living next door to a failed thirty year nation-building experiment gone bad. And everyone in the international community is worried that the Oct 7 war will see it taken apart.
Lately the nation building experts have taken to warning that Israel is doing it the wrong way. Former CIA Director David Petraeus, who also oversaw American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been arguing that Israel needs to pivot to a “counterinsurgency” model. And then we’re back to “winning hearts and minds” instead of actually trying to win a war.
The Biden administration has never stopped insisting that Israel needs a “day after” plan for rebuilding Gaza under a PLO government and some “moderate” terrorists from Hamas. Three generations after it became the norm, fighting a war without nation building as an endgame is so impossible that warfare experts can’t even understand what they’re seeing in Israel.
But among all the other problems with nation building is that it doesn’t work. And the Israelis who have been living next to the original chernobyl of nation building know it better than anyone.
Nation building has failed in every single Muslim country it’s been tried, not just by the United States after 9/11, but by the British between WWI and WWII. The entire Middle East is one long great nation building disaster shaped by primeval nation building experiments such as the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Hashemite monarchies and finally the recession of colonialism.
Read the rest here.
As long as there are Muslims, there will never be peace.
Any pipe-dream ideas of co-existence are a symptom of the onslaught of some kind of dementia, of which there are too numerous to list in this comment section, Trump Derangement Syndrome is just one.
If the irrational hatred by, well, we all know the drill.
They never got the message of the GOLDEN RULE.
And here’s the thing: they never will. Their DNA content won’t allow it.
And as long as the rest of us understand at least that much, that’s a hopeful sign.