I can perfectly understand the world’s alarm at the mounting death toll and carnage in Gaza. How could a human being not follow the daily news reports without feeling anguish and despair? The rockets that, according to Israel, started this conflict may have been launched from Gaza. But the real damage is being inflicted by Israel. And therefore it is to Israel that the world turns with its plea to stop the bloodshed.

What I find more difficult to fathom is the number of people who seem fixated on Israel’s culpability without addressing the larger issue: that while the Israeli electorate would accept a two-state solution, the government of Gaza is led by a virulently anti-Semitic, Islamist party that will never make peace with Israel. It’s an issue that was raised by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in the New York Times yesterday:

Periodically, advocates of negotiation suggest that the hostility toward Jews expressed by Hamas is somehow mutable. But in years of listening, I haven’t heard much to suggest that its anti-Semitism is insincere. Like Hezbollah, Hamas believes that God is opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine. Both groups are rhetorically pitiless, though, again, Hamas sometimes appears to follow the lead of Hezbollah.

I once asked [the former Hamas leader] Abdel Aziz Rantisi where he learned what he called “the truth” of the Holocaust — that it didn’t happen — and he referred me to books published by Hezbollah. Hamas and Hezbollah also share the view that the solution for Palestine lies in Europe. A spokesman for Hezbollah, Hassan Izzedine, once told me that the Jews who survive the Muslim “liberation” of Palestine “can go back to Germany, or wherever they came from.” He went on to argue that the Jews are a “curse to anyone who lives near them.”

[A senior Hamas leader] Nizar Rayyan expressed much the same sentiment the night we spoke in 2006. We had been discussing a passage of the Koran that suggests that God turns a group of impious Jews into apes and pigs. The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, among others, has deployed this passage in his speeches. Once, at a rally in Beirut, he said: “We shout in the face of the killers of prophets and the descendants of the apes and pigs: We hope we will not see you next year. The shout remains, ‘Death to Israel!’”

Mr. Rayyan said that, technically, Mr. Nasrallah was mistaken. “Allah changed disobedient Jews into apes and pigs, it is true, but he specifically said these apes and pigs did not have the ability to reproduce,” Mr. Rayyan said. “So it is not literally true that Jews today are descended from pigs and apes, but it is true that some of the ancestors of Jews were transformed into pigs and apes, and it is true that Allah continually makes the Jews pay for their crimes in many different ways. They are a cursed people.”

I asked him the question I always ask of Hamas leaders: Could you agree to anything more than a tactical cease-fire with Israel? I felt slightly ridiculous asking: A man who believes that God every now and again transforms Jews into pigs and apes might not be the most obvious candidate for peace talks at Camp David. Mr. Rayyan answered the question as I thought he would, saying that a long-term cease-fire would be unnecessary, because it will not take long for the forces of Islam to eradicate Israel.

So what chance for peace? According to Goldberg:

The only small chance for peace today is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar Rayyan.

in other words, the invasion of Gaza achieves nothing. Which begs the question, why continue this madness? Especially when it seems to be further weakening Fatah.

Why Israel Can’t Make Peace With Hamas (NYT)

There is a very interesting story in the New York Times this morning about how the war in Gaza is being portrayed in Israel. We have a European friend who is married to an Israeli and currently living in Tel Aviv. I understand via Sofie that she is quite disenchanted with the Israeli media’s portrayal of the war (which, according to recent polls, is supported by up to 90 percent of the Israeli population).

It’s hard for me to disentangle my own views, as a Jew living in America, about the entire situation. Listening to the BBC World Service in the morning I am appalled by what is going on. Yet scanning the New York Times a little later I see numerous justifications for Israel’s actions. And after a couple of days reading the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, though regretful about civilian suffering and death, I am firmly behind the Jewish state.

Here’s an excerpt from today’s New York Times about the Israeli point of view:

Israelis deeply believe, rightly or wrongly, that their military works harder than most to spare civilians, holding their fire in many more cases than using it.

Because Hamas booby-traps schools, apartment buildings and the zoo, and its fighters hide among civilians, it is Hamas that is viewed here as responsible for the civilian toll. Hamas is committed to Israel’s destruction and gets help and inspiration from Iran, so that what looks to the world like a disproportionate war of choice is seen by many here as an obligatory war for existence.

“This is a just war and we don’t feel guilty when civilians we don’t intend to hurt get hurt, because we feel Hamas uses these civilians as human shields,” said Elliot Jager, editorial page editor of The Jerusalem Post, who happened to answer his phone for an interview while in Ashkelon, an Israeli city about 10 miles from Gaza, standing in front of a house that had been hit two hours earlier by a Hamas rocket.

“We do feel bad about it, but we don’t feel guilty,” Mr. Jager added. “The most ethical moral imperative is for Israel to prevail in this conflict over an immoral Islamist philosophy. It is a zero sum conflict. That is what is not understood outside this country.”

More to the point, while I have heard on the BBC and read in international newspapers that Hamas’ rockets are fired at “Israeli settlements” the truth of the matter is that they are fired at towns and cities deep inside Israel. And every year their range increases. As A.B. Yehoshua, an Israeli author who sympathizes with the Palestinians, tells the Times:

“ ‘Imagine,’ I tell a French reporter, ‘that every two days a missile falls in the Champs-Élysées and only the glass windows of the shops break and five people suffer from shock,’ ” Mr. Yehoshua told a reporter from Yediot Aharonot, a Tel Aviv newspaper. “ ‘What would you say? Wouldn’t you be angry? Wouldn’t you send missiles at Belgium if it were responsible for missiles on your grand boulevard?’ ”

The obvious response to this question is that while a country has every right to retaliate, Israel’s actions in recent weeks have been grossly disproportionate (never mind the endless arguments over who started it). The view from most of the world is that once again mighty Israel is smashing down on the powerless Palestinians of Gaza.

But again, the perception here is at odds with the way Israelis, and many Jews, feel about Israel’s position in the Middle East. As Moshe Halbertal, a “left-leaning” professor at the Hebrew university, tells the Times:

“Rockets from Hamas could eventually reach all of Israel,” he said. “This is not a fantasy. It is a real problem. So there is a gap between actual images on the screen and the geopolitical situation.

“You have Al Jazeera standing at Shifa Hospital and the wounded are coming in,” he continued, referring to an Arab news outlet. “So you have this great Goliath crushing these poor people, and they are perceived as victims. But from the Israeli perspective, Hamas and Hezbollah are really the spearhead of a whole larger threat that is invisible. Israelis feel like the tiny David faced with an immense Muslim Goliath. The question is: who is the David here?”

Israelis United on Gaza War as Censure Rises Abroad (NYT)