Gaza: What gives Israel its courage to defy the world?

Once again, the Levant is on the verge of peace. I know what to say about how long this peace would last, but I wish to be more hopeful than prescient, even though I am a columnist. By many measures, Israel won this war.

- MANU JOSEPH

The peace is a consequence of the decimation of Hamas and the end of a famous myth that Iran is a military equal of Israel. The victor achieved this by being brutal. It appeared to consider Palestinian and even Iranian civilian casualties collateral damage. This removed Hamas’s most effective shield, Palestinian civilians. Israel also rendered ineffective another Hamas shield—international opinion. The country went ahead with its objective of finishing off Hamas with no regard for what the world had to say, and most of the world had only one thing to say—that it had to stop. With only the US on its side, Israel was responsible, by its own admission, for the death of at least hundreds of Palestinians who were not armed threats.

Where did Israel find the moral courage to do this? There is a popular view that Israel, as a Jewish state, is so aggressive because Jews have been historically persecuted in Europe, and that gives it the privilege to consider itself specially placed to defend itself by any means at its disposal.

I don’t think that is what is going on. There may be a more interesting aspect of human nature at work.

There is this implication about people who have gone through suffering, oppression or bias that they are bitter and deal with the world with bitterness or meanness or cruelty. Some groups of people have a reputation for being relatively nasty, and they are sometimes presumed to be so because they were or are persecuted.