Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Administration, an international welfare office dedicated to preserving the refugee status of all Palestinians, living, dead, and fictional, quickly establishes new camps in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. (The king of Jordan refuses to offer Palestinians even temporary shelter.)

Armed with funds supplied by the same Western governments that ignored the Palestinians’ slaughter, UNRWA returns to its traditional policy of providing generously for its clientele, even to the point of publishing new textbooks demonstrating the continuing diabolical culpability of “the Zionist enterprise,” replete with caricatures of hook-nosed predatory Jews. These become standard in Palestinian schools.

Faced with the electoral clout of a flood of Muslim immigrants, most European democracies undertake what comes to be known as a policy of “progressive balance” with regard to the new reality of the Middle East. The sclerotic French left, ever opportunistic, presents the recent conflict as a war of self-defense by the five Islamic attackers, who struck first on evidence of Israel’s plans to attack them . To this upside-down version of the truth, a spoonful of anti-Americanism sweetens the pot: it is clear the US and Israel colluded in an anti-Muslim war. A new term, islamicide , becomes the rage among European leftists, and some in America as well. On university campuses, it is considered a fact that massive numbers of US troops were engaged on the ground on behalf of Washington’s neo-colonialist junior partner.

The Muslim governments of the Middle East play a double game. While continuing the Islamic propaganda campaign against Israel, they are careful about doing no more than making noise at the UN. With Israeli nuclear devices hidden in their own countries, a return to war is unthinkable. Nor may they raise the price of oil.

Depressed energy prices affect Russia as well. With little to sell but diamonds and petrochemicals, Russia’s economy is now shriveled to below that of the Communist era: churning out unexportable automobiles and nesting babushka dolls is hardly a solution. Russia remains a leading manufacturer of arms, but this trade is limited to those countries that have seen their weaponry destroyed or captured by Israel, and these are no longer bottomless pits of hard currency. In the short term, dumping diamonds on the world market might bring revenue, but eventually oversupply would undermine the price of gem-quality stones. At giveaway prices for crude oil and natural gas, The Economist notes, “Moscow has nothing to sell but rubles, and thus has nothing to sell.” As a result, Russia pulls back from attempts to disrupt the new international order.

Big oil is unfazed by the drop in petroleum prices. Able to sustain profitability at any price, the American petrochemical industry not only continues solidly in the black, but for the first time in decades benefits from an outpouring of public goodwill. Share prices for big oil rise to historic highs. At the same time, Detroit, so recently emasculated by its inability to offer cars economical on gas, roars back with a new generation of big-engine mega-mobiles, some with fins. The price of oil is so reasonable electric cars become a standing joke on late-night television. Not only is there a V8 in every American garage, V12s make their appearance as the standard of luxury. At these prices, Americans have oil to burn, and do.

As the price drops for industrial power and commercial transport, industrial America rebounds to such an extent that Wal-Mart, once almost exclusively the retail agent for 90% of Chinese consumer exports, moves to buy only American. As a result, the US develops a labor shortage: there are too few workers to man the new machinery. Congress acts quickly, creating a new visa classification under the Guest Labor Act—critics in organized labor call it the Gomez Labor Act. With the US-Mexican border open to a flood of documented obreros huespedes , American manufacturers abandon China en masse to establish factories in Mexico, as well as new facilities close enough to the border for documented day laborers to cross through turnstiles activated by electronic visa-card readers. Seemingly overnight, the US Border Patrol morphs from a police force to an employment agency.

Considering the almost universal benefits of low-cost energy, the rise in anti-Israel sentiment becomes a kind of litmus paper of illogic, but anti-semitism was never dictated by reason.

Once again missiles (this time supplied by Russia) begin raining down on Israel from Palestinian bases in Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, yet world public opinion persists in seeing Israel as the imperialist, if not racist, villain of the peace.

CONSIDERING THE HUMILIATING DEFEAT of the Islamic Liberation Force, surprisingly few heads roll.

General Niroomad is convicted of treason in a Tehran show trial in which a group of Iranian Jews are compelled to testify that the architect of the Muslim invasion was all along in the employ of the Mossad. The mullahs make sure the world sees in televised close-up that the faces of Niroomad’s Jewish co-conspirators show no signs of violence. Not shown are their families, who are promised a horrible fate if the accused Jews do not cooperate. When Niroomad is hanged in Tehran’s Azadi Square, these so-called “partners in treason” swing with him, each convinced he is giving his life to save his wife, his children, and his parents. The next day, the families of these martyrs, men, women, and children, even infants, are discreetly liquidated at a military base near Isfahan.

But Iran is exceptional.

In all the Arab nations taking part in the attack, the military high commands are forcibly retired, but in every case permitted to live out their lives in luxury as comfortably pensioned senior officers. As opposed to theocratic Iran, which considers failure in jihad a sin requiring capital punishment, the Arab reaction to failure within its ruling class is by tradition tolerant. Anything less would bring the existing power structure crashing down.

The search for scapegoats extends even to Israel, but is more subtle.

Because the government responsible for the intelligence failures leading to the near-termination of the State of Israel was itself terminated—there is no one to vote out of office; they are all dead—the country’s citizenry turns obscenely on the very individual who saved them. One columnist compares Yigal Lev to Churchill, noting that the British prime minister was recalled by his own traumatized nation after World War II, like Israel a nation yearning for better times. As with Churchill in Britain, the fickle Israeli electorate associates the name of Yigal Lev not with salvation but with hardship.

Ever hopeful for an idyllic rapprochement with the Jewish State’s eternal enemies, the resiliently optimistic Israeli left crafts a campaign that ruthlessly works both sides of a particularly nasty political street. One plank in its platform is meant to appeal to those for whom the thought of endless war is intolerable: in order to negotiate a lasting peace, Yigal Lev must go, because the Arab nations will never sign a peace treaty with the man responsible for their shameful defeat. The opposition’s other argument appeals to the emotional instability of the average Israeli: the discipline imposed on Ghetto Tel Aviv is angrily decried to have been needlessly authoritarian. In televised debates, Yigal is labeled to his face a Jewish fascist whose storm troopers went so far as to beat a man for urinating in the street.

Yigal’s measured response militates against him. He stresses the need for discipline in time of war, a principled defense but not one that arouses sympathy for the man compelled to make such decisions. Likewise, he is accused of seizing power from the lawful government at gunpoint. A business executive and not a politician, his response is as dry as it might be in describing the dismissal of an incompetent manager: “I learned early in business that the general good means more than the protection of some fool’s resume.”