Israel Air Strikes

Everybody accepts the right of Israel to defend itself from attack. The question on the international mind today is whether these recent strikes really were born out of an actual or developing threat that was new, or where they were set up to show Obama that Israel does not have to listen to him?

One of the complexities of the conflict between Israel and her neighbours is the linkage in the Israeli psyche of the historic destiny and rights of the Jewish people according to their religious beliefs in a faith which is a way of living and the actuality of modern statehood and the limitations it must impose. In other words the Jewish faith is not indivisible form the Jewish State. The faith is a matter of belief. The State is a matter of fact. Its boundaries cannot be arbitarily altered or expanded because the devout have scrolls to say it should be so. Many boundaries of many nations have changed over many centuries. Israel has no rights as a State outside its legally agreed and internationally recognised borders.

It needs also to understand that  until it halts the building of illegal settlements on other people’s land, it will be prone to attack by bombers, rockets and whatever else the people it has dispossessed can think up. This is what Obama is telling them. No matter how energetic its world wide lobbies, this fact of reality will not go away. Neither will its heavy handed military be able to neutralise the threat.