A reader writes of the troubles in Gaza:

Without a dissenting voice on the left – the answer is always to turn the other cheek. And that’s fine in the West because generally once the political objective is obtained, Westerners feel that the need to continue terror is over (as in Ireland).

What if the objective is not freedom and independence, but to destroy the West? As long as the West survives it existence is oppression to the jihadists – according to their ideology.

It’s quite true that terror organizations take on a life of their own and will often keep manufacturing trouble in order to keep themselves in power. And it’s also quite true that nation states helmed by fools will often cooperate with the terrorist by, oh, say, invading countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 and turning them into swarming hives full of al-Quaeda where hitherto they had no toehold. Indeed, one might even suspect that starving and strangling a ghetto/reservation full of women and children for a couple of years and then slaughtering lots of civilians in brutal, reckless and disproportionate reprisals for the fact that the thugs in charge of the ghetto are shooting missiles at you is not really the smartest way to deal with the problem.

Here’s the thing: Gaza is not going to destroy the West. They really aren’t. They are a miserable, desperate population of people who have been crapped on by Israelis *and* by fellow Muslims for decades. They are not part of some monolithic world conquering force. Hamas (which does not equal “the men, women and children of Gaza”) do a bang up job of doing was Bosses do: they piss off Israelis with their evil terrorist tactics and they tell the people who are walled into the ghetto and getting the crap blown out of them by Israelis that it’s the Zionists who are killing and starving their kids. When your kids all die while they are sitting in geography class because an Israel shell blew the flesh off their bones, that’s a fairly plausible take on things. So Palestinians rally round Hamas. What conceivable reason have they to trust Israelis?

My correspondent writes, “Without a dissenting voice on the left – the answer is always to turn the other cheek.” There are several ironies here. The first is that this is, after all, a command from our Lord, not mere leftism. The second is that it was given by a man who came of a people who were hard pressed by Roman occupation. It is followed by the injunction to go with somebody two miles if you were ordered to go with him one. That was an image take from life: a Roman soldier could press a Jew into pack horse service when he wished. It was heard by His hearers as an outrageous self-abasement before an oppressor.

Now, however, it is the Israelis who are, by any measure, the overwhelmingly superior force in Gaza. The counsel to turn the other cheek and go the extra mile applies to everybody, especially the Gazans. So (of course) the missile attacks are evil and must stop. So (of course) the people who are ordering them are thugs unworthy of the power they weild. But here’s the thing: systems do what we design them to do, not what we want them to do. The Israeli method of rolling in and pounding the crap out of a densely packed urban area, coupled with simultaneous claims that they are “carefully targeting” and with apologetics from warmongers that the Just War criterion of “proportionality” is a bunch of crap we can safely ignore because War is Hell blah blah is virtually guaranteed to strengthen Hamas’ hand. Coupling that with delusional claims that Gazans are exempt from considerations of mercy because they pose some threat to “destroy the West” sounds rather detached from reality.

I have no answers for what is happening. But I can at least do my bit to minimize talk that is out of touch with reality. My prayer is Benedict’s:

“I implore the end of this violence, which is to be condemned in every way in all its manifestations. I implore the re-establishment of the ceasefire in the Gaza strip. I ask for a strong sign of humanity and wisdom from all those who have responsibilities at all levels in that situation. I ask the international community to try every possible way to help Israelis and Palestinians to come out from the dead-end street and to not give up.”