Give Peace a Chance

My doctoral dissertation is about the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.  When I was writing it, in the summer of 1976, my advisers suggested that it was an important topic as the tension in the middle east then was high.

The tension in the Middle East has been high at least since 1948.  My research was about the 73 Yom Kippur war. From 1948 through 1973, a mere twenty five years there had been four wars. There was a war in 48, 56, 67--the six day war-- and the 1973 war. Twenty five years, four wars.    

Now in 2012, nearly forty years later there is another war in the middle east. And since 1973 the region has had very little rest from bloody war.  I was in graduate school in 1973 and I can remember a poster pasted to a wall in the Student Center at the University of Buffalo.  "Every test Israel takes, is a final."

President Obama and Secretary Clinton have asserted that Israel has the right to defend itself and this, to me, seems so self evident that it troubles me that anyone needs to assert this.  It troubles me that some will ask why is Israel involved in yet another war.

Here is why in a nutshell.  In the charter of militant groups is the objective to destroy the state of Israel.

Imagine this: You move into a community and a neighbor immediately informs you and all the other neighbors that they have as a goal to kill you.  So, tell me, how do you react when they try to do so.

If Hamas wants peace, they ought to give peace a chance. You don't give peace a chance when in your charter you declare that you want to destroy your neighbor.  If at Thanksgiving someone sighs and asks, why are the Israelis, always at war, please stand up and ask how the inquirer would feel if someone was disrupting the calm of your meal by bashing on your doors and screaming through the windows that a primary objective was for you to die.