IMMODEST PROPOSAL
CANADA, FRANCE AND THE UK HAVE A FEW DEMANDS. I’VE GOT A FEW OF MY OWN.
Canada, France, and the UK last month issued a groundbreaking joint statement against Israel. On May 19, the three governments demanded that Israel stop military operations in Gaza, calling them “wholly disproportionate.” They commanded that Israel immediately allow full humanitarian aid and that Israel cooperate with the UN to ensure a proper humanitarian response to the disaster in Gaza. As a cherry, the three countries added that Israel needs to stop the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.
The statement warned of “concrete actions” — spooky, unspecified consequences — if Israel didn’t comply with their arbitrary demands.
The last demand (about settlements) is the one that shines a light on the ridiculousness of the joint statement — because people building stuff is obviously the real problem there.
But the audacity of the other demands is what should really jar the world’s sense of duplicity.
Imagine If ostensible allies had issued a public joint statement against Churchill and De Gaulle, declaring the Battle of Britain “wholly disproportionate.” Imagine if neutral democracies, sitting safely on the sidelines as the Allies neared victory over the Nazis, demanded that they cease the fight and instead focus on the humanitarian needs of German civilians.
It would have been madness.
That’s what the tripartite joint statement is. Absolute madness.
Today, we saw what those “concrete actions” might be.
Apparently in New York next week there is a UN-backed conference on the two-state solution. Canada, France and the United Kingdom have crawled out of their diplomatic foxholes again (according to Saudi reporting shared by the English-language Times of Israel this a.m.). They have set out parameters for Palestine to be recognized as a state.
In a way, the joint statement is the second shoe to drop. Having made demands on Israel, certainly it is fair to place demands on the Palestinians.
They call for political reform within the Palestinian Authority, strengthening governance, transparency, and accountability; the disarmament of Hamas in Gaza; and the release of the Israeli hostages.
But the idea that it is fair to place demands on Palestinians if they are going to place demands on Israel is a comparison that doesn’t work. Even considering rewarding the Palestinians with self-determination at this moment — even with these criteria — is an unimaginable moral atrocity.
First of all, the demand that Hamas in Gaza be disarmed sounds lovely. But it’s not enough. Hamas needs to be entirely eliminated — and that’s what Israel is doing. The entire Western world should be behind Israel’s war as powerfully as (or even more than) we are standing with Ukraine.
The idea that we should be talking about Palestinian statehood at this moment is like a cop going into a domestic violence situation where the wife has valiantly fought back and demanding that the husband’s concerns be addressed immediately.
A ceasefire? No. Israel must fight to total victory, finally, so we do not have wars every two or three years as we have had since 2005.
Young Israelis are giving their lives to save their country (and our civilization) and Western democracies are standing on the sidelines jeering them and second-guessing their military leaders.
The world says Israel needs to calm down.
No.
Israel needs to quit pulling its punches. The Palestinians (and their Arab and Iranian enablers) need to be finally and thoroughly defeated so the war that began in 1948 (at the latest) is finally conclusively ended.
We can talk about what happens later — later. We do not need a Yalta conference on Palestine now. We need to get behind Israel in the war they are fighting not only for their own survival — but to stanch the advance of religious fundamentalist terror of which they are the frontline.
I’m not saying that Canada, France, the UK and every other democracy on the planet should shut up. On the contrary.
They should do the precise opposite of what they are doing.
The obvious question at this point is: Who the hell do I think I am?
Who does this Sunday morning commentator whose only advanced degree is in journalism, not international relations, think he is setting out demands to solve the Middle East crisis?
Well somebody has got to say it, FFS. The morons who run France, the UK and Canada don’t seem to understand fundamental human morality or that the conflict Israel faces is not of its own making. Resolving the conflict demands that we support Israel until total victory — if not because we give a damn about Israel then because our entire fricken civilization depends on it. Roll your eyes now — it will be good practice for the lolling when the jihadis scythe off your head.
I can’t believe it takes some over-caffeinated provocateur at the Pacific fringe of North America to point out what should be blatantly obvious to anyone with a sense of right and wrong. But here goes …
Rather than lobbing diplomatic bombs, Western leaders should be offering Israel every form of assistance — diplomatic, economic, military — even more enthusiastically than they have done for Ukraine (while taking nothing away from Ukraine’s fight, of course).
They should be railing against Hamas in every international and multilateral forum. They should be freezing every penny of funding to UNRWA until every hostage is freed and Hamas has no access to any international resources.
They should be sanctioning the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International and every other NGO that has abetted Hamas or failed to live up to their mandate by walking a middle line between jihadi terrorists and the democratic Jewish state.
They should be punishing and isolating foreign governments and entities that fund Hamas, like Qatar and (obviously) Iran, including secondary sanctions on their banks, charities, and citizens.
Any country that has not yet designated Hamas a terror entity should themselves be sanctioned. (The European Union, the Organization of American States, the European Court of Justice and 12 individual countries have declared Hamas a terror entity. In a world with almost 200 countries, this is a disgrace to humankind.)
Western countries should block the financial channels and cryptocurrency wallets that Hamas has turned to, and cut off digital funding streams more aggressively.
Instead of demanding Israel throw open the borders and allow unlimited “aid” (which will be diverted by Hamas for its war effort) and anything else to pass effectively unmolested into Gaza, the world should put their money where their mouth is and ensure that aid gets to Palestinian civilians — and shut down any source of funding or aid that could even remotely strengthen Hamas and its murderous aims.
After Israel wins the war, the world must prosecute the remaining Hamas leadership in the International Criminal Court (or, if that antisemitically politicized body is deemed too contaminated, in an ad hoc process like the Nuremberg Trials).
Palestine must undergo a complete de-Hamas-ification. But it needs to be wider than this. The entirety of Palestinian society needs to be reimagined as Germany and Japan were reimagined after the Second World War.
The Palestinian education system is the place to start. The society needs to be figuratively razed (as we keep hearing Gaza has been literally razed) and rebuilt from the ground up. Nothing else really matters, in the end. If Palestinian society is not prepared to live in peace beside its Jewish neighbors, there is no point in seeking peace now, because it will always end in war as long as Palestinians raise their children to kill and be killed, as they have done for eight decades.
Then we need to turn our heads closer to home. Hamas sympathizers need to be eradicated from Western universities and NGOs. How do we do that? Not my section. Figure it out. We wouldn’t allow Nazis to espouse their ideas freely on our campuses or in our civil society. Why do we allow their ideological descendants?
Clean up the UN. Again: How? Gawdknows. Topic for another day. But what was imagined as a world parliament has turned into a world politburo for dictators. Surely, with the will, it couldn’t be impossible to fire overt antisemites like Francesca Albanese and work downward from there.
I know the Middle East is full of oil that we need, but let’s put humanity ahead of energy for once and pressure Israel’s neighbors to stop fueling war. Encourage normalization with Israel and punish those who resist.
Every Western country should increase bilateral trade, including defense deals, with Israel — and make it unmistakably clear that Israel is our ally in the region. How is this even something that needs to be said?
Offer Israeli companies preferential access to markets and government contracts. Cut off contracts and business ties with any company or government that works against our (that is, Israel’s) interests.
Enhance intelligence sharing with Israel — this is an entirely self-interested objective. We should be doing everything we can to help Israel’s intelligence work — but we need them a lot more than they need us.
Conduct joint military exercises with Israel. Sell or co-develop defense technologies (like drones, cyber capabilities, missile defense). But if the world plays the next few years right, we might actually neutralize the threats that require these sorts of investments.
The least we can do — the very least — is always, publicly and forcefully endorse and encourage Israel’s self-defense after attacks. Not only should Western democracies not be condemning Israel. We should be lauding and thanking them for fighting our battles for us.
I suppose the crazies (like those in the upper echelons of foreign ministries in Canada, France and the UK) would see my laundry list of demands as the mad ravings of a zealot.
That’s what they get exactly wrong. They are the zealots and their joint statements are the mad ravings.
The screed you have just patiently processed is literally the least that Western governments should be doing right now.
The idea that anyone would find my laundry list the slightest bit unreasonable is a sign of a civilization sliding off the rails.
So Britain, Canada and France want Hamas to disarm, do they? Who, other than the IDF, do these governments figure will compel Hamas to do that? It's not as though 2006's UNSC Resolution 1701 which required Hezbollah and "other forces" to retreat to north of the Litani River and not rearm was ever enforced by UNIFIL.
It's also not as though these three countries haven't continued to fund UN agencies operating in Gaza that have been rather spectacularly unsuccessful of ensuring that Hamas doesn't use UN premises as bases of operation or prevent the theft of massive amounts of humanitarian aid by Hamas which is how Hamas has managed to carry on financing its war and also provides the leverage Hamas uses to control Gazans. I get why these governments have been concerned about civilians suffering under truly grim conditions, but if they want the IDF to withdraw, someone needs to send in troops to prevent Hamas from retaining its grip on Gaza. As retired British Paratroop Major (Ret) Andrew Fox wrote in his most recent Substack newsletter, Hamas still maintains control over a substantial amount of Gaza's civilian infrastructure, keeping Gazans dependent on the terrorist group for pretty much all their needs.
And yes, the "disproportionate" argument is one of the biggest BS arguments thrown around at the IDF's conduct of war, not just because of the extreme difficulty of fighting an enemy as ruthless as Hama has been in embedding itself among civilians, but also because the IDF has run low on more precision bombs and these same countries have placed embargoes of sorts on supplying the IDF with munitions.
And announcing the intent to investigate dual Israeli Canadian reservists for war crimes is another classy move from Canada, which once upon a time used to send in peacekeepers. Don't misunderstand me. War crimes do demand prosecution, but what capabilities and powers do Canadian investigators have to carry out a bona fide investigation on their own or is this announced action what David Frum posits is the typical Liberal Party move to appease the more left leaning members of its caucus so that they will support fiscal constraints that the Carney government is very likely to introduce in order to put the country's finances in order?
Agree 💯. This is exactly what should happen. Unfortunately it never will. Not as long as there are politicians like Anita Anand, who on her first day as the new foreign minister falsely accused Israel of “aggression against the Palestinians” and of using food as a political tool the very day Israel restored aid deliveries. This calumny was followed less than a week later by the reprehensible Joint Statement with the UK and France.
Not only are these “leaders” vilifying and threatening Israel unjustly, but they are also endangering the Jewish communities in their own countries. To add insult to injury, Carney told a Muslim audience that the values of Islam are Canadian values!