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Stan Goodenough is an experienced journalist who has written about politics in South Africa and the Middle East for such organizations as The Daily Dispatch of East London, South Africa, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, The Jerusalem Post, and the Virtual HolyLand website. He has been a South African gentile resident in Israel for 12 years. Stan is editor of and .
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By Stan Goodenough
September 21, 2007
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On Wednesday this week Ehud Olmert's government voted to declare Hamas-controlled Gaza an enemy entity, and pledged to curb energy supplies to the 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs living there if terrorism from the Strip continues.
Were the outcome of this resolution not certain to be tragic, it would be laughable.
But sadly, unlike some of its earlier generations, today's Israel lacks the moral fiber to implement even decisions of this kind.
It would have been better to have done nothing than to make threats and issue warnings they will not carry through.
As inevitable as the cries of rage and resentment that will soon swell the throats of so-called human rights groups, governments -- and, of course, the Palestinians -- are the effects this outcry will have on the country.
The international indignation will work quickly to dissipate whatever "resolve" and "courage" may have been generated between like-minded members of the Security Cabinet.
No concerned observer of Israel?s drastically-eroded deterrence can anticipate anything other than the government's total capitulation in the face of the global outrage this vote is certain to excite.
Watch the Palestinians -- past masters at this game -- provoke an Israeli response by attempting to carry out a particularly heinous terrorist attack.
As they know full well, Prime Minister Olmert will have to implement the cabinet's decision, cutting the power or closing the water mains and subjecting all those men, women and children, to darkness, cold and thirst.
The outrage will explode immediately -- directed not at the terrorists whose murderous actions are to blame for the suffering of their own people, but at those heartless Israeli lawmakers who chose to employ this kind of "inhuman" collective punishment.
A condemnation in the United Nations, a phone call from the White House, and Israel will back down.
Israel always backs down.
And the Arab side will chalk up yet another victory against the "sons of pigs and monkeys" in Jerusalem, while singing with even more conviction than ever the praises of their "god who is greater than any other."
Of course, the trouble with trying to police a war, rather than fight it, is that these are the best kinds of responses hobbled governments can come up with.
And Israel's government is hobbled -- hobbled by the United States and by every other nation and international body that backs the fraudulent Arab claim to these Jewish lands and insists that Israel treat terrorists with kid gloves.
We must pray for Israel's government: For backbone for the prime minister and his cabinet, for courageous leadership that will put the well-being of Israel's citizens at the top of the list and push concerns about how loud the Arabs will scream, or how insistent the world will be that Israel act differently, to the bottom.
And we should pray confusion and failure on Israel's enemies: May no weapon they have formed against Israel prosper; may they be trapped in their own snares; may the arrows they fire at the Jews fall back on their own heads and pierce them.
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