Moral Clarity, Excerpts (I wanted to highlight everything, but...):
...If simple land and the idea of a self-governed West Bank nation were the primary points of contention then the dispute would have been settled long ago through reasoned negotiations. Israel, after all, for the first third of its 60-year struggle had nothing to do with those on the West Bank; and for the last four decades has offered them independence in exchange for recognition, peace, and normalization.
The history of the region should bring moral clarity as well.
Wars #1-3 were fought not over Palestine — but for the elimination of the Jewish state itself. For two decades Arab countries hated Israel not because the West Bank peoples suffered under Jordanian control, but only because there were any Jews at all in the new state of Israel. Unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon did not bring praise from Hamas and Hezbollah, but contempt. Offers to turn back up to 97 percent of the West Bank were seen as foolish when an intifada could get 100 percent — or more. Iraqi guided missiles raining down on Tel Aviv disappointed cheering Palestinians only because they were not laced with germs or nerve gas. All this the world ignores, as it seeks in vain to fabricate a holocaust in Jenin.
For these reasons and more, the current prejudices of the United Nations and the equivocation of the Europeans, who should know better, are nauseating — and in the end simply shameful. In the latter case, the sanctimonious hedging indeed finally becomes too much and is abjectly reprehensible: ... Europe, then, because of its own culpability in the extermination, will always have a unique moral responsibility to ensure that once more we do not see Jewish women, children, and old men machine-gunned in sealed buses or blown apart on the street because they are Jewish.
Various reasons explain this moral lapse, which — along with the world's past misguided tolerance for and appeasement of Stalin's Soviet Union and its murderous satellites in Europe and Asia — constitutes one of the great ethical failings of the last century in the West.
Oil ... Fear ... demography and Proximity ...
So here we have it: fear and profit, the one leading the other all argue for appeasing the Palestinian terrorists. Nothing other than principle and the burdens of history urge support for Israel in its dire hour of need. So far the Europeans have flunked the test with flying colors — and as a morality tale to guide us we should remember that abject lapse in all the future questions that involve the Middle East.