That's French for the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Hamas attacked Israel with rockets for days before Israel retaliated with bombs. Naturally, international opinion harshly condemns Israel's "disproportionate use of force" in areas populated by civilians. Left-wing commentators decry the fact that Israel refuses to deal equitably with the "democratically elected" leadership of Gaza. And so it goes.
It never seems to dawn on the people who side reflexively with the ostensibly oppressed ethnic Palestinians that the Palestinians bear the lion's share of responsibility for their own predicament. They refused to accept the UN-mandated establishment of Israel in 1948. They've embraced terrorism against the Israeli population, sending their own children into cafes and bars and discos and wedding parties, strapped with explosives, to randomly kill and mutilate their religiously mandated enemy. The one thing they never do is engage in a lasting peace.
The Palestinians could've had their own state for a decade if Yasser Arafat hadn't obstinately refused to accept the deal brokered by the Clinton administration in the late nineties. They had 98% of what they ostensibly wanted, but they refused to accept it, and years of slowly escalating terrorism were the result. The Israelis have resisted all-out war against the Palestinians. They vacated the Gaza Strip in a futile effort to give the Palestinians a chance at governing themselves, hoping that they might actually have the wisdom and foresight to try a different approach for a change.
Subsequently that action has been proven to be wildly optimistic. Instead of establishing a meaningful economy that provides some degree of self-reliance, the Gazans elected the terrorist group Hamas to govern them. The West Bank, under the slightly less heinous terrorist group Fatah, has remained relatively peaceful since it split with Hamas. The Gaza Strip, on the other hand, has become a launching pad for largely ineffective terrorist rocket launches against the nearby Israelis.
Hamas couldn't wait to start shelling and rocketing southern Israel again once the cease-fire came to an end. And after weeks of taking it on the chin, Israel finally decided to strike back.
The Palestinians of Gaza have only themselves to blame (though, of course, they blame no one but Israel for every bad thing that happens to them). They voted Hamas into office; they failed to prevent Hamas from launching rockets from civilian neighborhoods; they actively cosset the terrorists, elevating them to the status of martyrs even when they accidentally blow themselves up in their suicide belt factories.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost Hamas may have been democratically elected, but that doesn't mean that they deserve to be treated as moral equals. The Nazis were democratically elected, for God's sakes, and the nations of Europe went through successive rounds of appeasement to no avail. Eventually the Nazis were emboldened by the weakness of their adversaries to strike out in all directions. If Hitler hadn't attacked Russia, Fortress Europa might still exist. You cannot kowtow to terrorists. You can't appease them.
A terrorist "nation" like Gaza deserves nothing but the fate it earns for itself at the hands of its victims. The hand-wringers who draw moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians have lost sight of a simple human truth. The people who attack you when you're doing your best to live in peace with them don't deserve to be given an endless supply of second chances to be good. The fact that the aggressor in this case is relatively weak compared to the defender is utterly immaterial. A bite from a rabid chihuahua can still kill you.
One of the ugly lessons of war in the modern age is that the enemy will continue to fight as long as they believe they have a chance of obtaining their strategic goal. The Palestinians cannot be so foolish as to think their ridiculous Qassam rockets will achieve the elimination of Israel. Their strategic goal is to humiliate Israel in the eyes of the international community.
To undermine support for Israel by the western superpowers. To do this, they have perfected the art of becoming victims to a high degree. The terrorists provoke; Israel eventually responds; the obliging photographers and stringers in Gaza take photos of the sad results, invariably involving civilians who are somehow always in the line of fire; Israel's support in the West is undermined. Israel cannot fully prosecute the war and smash their enemies because their enemies are literally hiding behind innocent men, women, and children.
The fact that Hamas targets civilians and Israel tries very hard to target combatants is never mentioned. The fact that Hamas operates from densely populated civilian areas in order to maximize collateral damage in case of retaliation is conveniently omitted. Hamas explicitly and repeatedly states that they will never stop fighting until Israel is destroyed, and still, somehow, the dupes in the West parrot the specious claim that Israel is responsible for the so-called cycle of violence. (You know; the "cycle" that somehow always happens to start back up when an Islamist terrorist carries out a successful attack.)
At some point, the Palestinians in Gaza might learn the other great and terrible lesson of modern war: that lasting peace between intractable enemies is only achieved when one side or the other is crushed and humiliated. I would like to hope that they will somehow avoid that fate, because it will happen, if it happens, at enormous cost to them.
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