Back from an Absence, and All About Borders

Please forgive my silence over the past month or so.  I was on holiday, first for two weeks in Greece, and then here in Israel, guiding friends visiting from Australia around.  About the latter, I have to say:  having friends visit you, and relying on them to need you to show them around, and having the time and energy to do so...is a sublime gift!  I find that when I show others sights that I've already seen - in some cases, multiple times - I always benefit from their different perspective, from what they take away from the trip.  So, if you find visitors from abroad or from far away to be burdensome, make sure you go out of your way to really show them around...you will be the beneficiary!

Now, about borders.  Sometimes, it's uncanny - perhaps even a little creepy - how certain controversies rock both the USA and Israel at the same time.  Iran's leaders used to refer to America as The Great Satan and Israel as The Little Satan.  I don't think there's anything essentially satanic about either country, but it does boggle the mind that both countries seem to face the same issues concurrently, again and again.

Last Friday, on the eve of Passover, our neighbors in Gaza - I'm talking about Hamas, who rule the Gaza Strip with an iron fist - organized a violent demonstration to expose the vulnerability of Israel's border.  

Israeli soldiers fire tear gas on 'Protesters' massed on the
Israel-Gaza border, Friday 30 March 2018

Let's back up for a second.  Hamas has been testing Israel's resolve to defend her border with Gaza since then-Prime Minister, the late Ariel Sharon's unilateral pull-out from Gaza in 2005.  Sharon's assumption was that, with no Israeli citizens living in the Strip, and with no Israeli forces deployed there, the Gazans would focus inward to build a civil society and address their own problems.  Of course, that's not exactly what happened.  Hamas, and their sometimes-unwitting allies of the Israel is Always in the Wrong Crowd, has asserted that despite the absence of any Israelis in their territory, Israel is still The Occupier, and has somehow turned the Gaza Strip into the world's biggest concentration camp with a cordon sanitaire to keep the inmates in and in privation.  Having made the assertion that it is the closure of Gaza's border with Israel - and not Israel's now-defunct presence on the Strip - that is the First Cause of Gaza's problems, Hamas has spent the 13 years since that pullout, trying to nullify that border.  First, with rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli towns close - and not-so-close - to Gaza.  When Israel developed the Iron Dome to shoot down those rockets, and also displayed a penchant for responding to rocket and mortar attacks with air and artillery strikes, Hamas turned to their allies in the 'International Peace Camp' to stage a 'Humanitarian Flotilla' of ships staging from Turkey, to test Israel's will to intercept the ships.  Of course Israel did, leading to the Mavi Marmara crisis in 2010.  The incident succeeded in causing a diplomatic parting of the ways between Israel and Turkey - although perhaps by 2010 that was already a fete accompli - but did not get the ships into Gaza.  Finally, Hamas has been constructing 'Terror Tunnels' under the border, in order to insert armed squads into Israeli territory and terrorize the residents of kibbutzim and towns close to the border.  Found in several of the tunnels that were breached by Israeli Defense Forces, were huge caches of stolen IDF uniforms and weapons of the types the IDF uses, for the presumed purpose of terror squads fanning out over the countryside in the guise of being IDF patrols.  Fortunately, the IDF quickly brought online technological means of detecting and destroying these tunnels, and they seem to have nullified, for now, this attempt to break through the border.

With all other means to date having failed, the latest tactic by Hamas was to 'encourage' thousands of civilians to participate in demonstrations at the border fence, demonstrations filled with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other organizations' operatives, for the purpose of breaching the fence in front of IDF units which would supposedly be hog-tied by Israel's distaste for inflicting civilian casualties, then sending waves of humanity, including terrorists, into the Israeli countryside.  This, too did not succeed, because Israel recognized the nature of the threat and set Rules of Engagement that would allow units on the border to respond with sufficient force to prevent the breakthrough.

Much of the world has reacted by criticizing Israel for responding to 'peaceful' demonstrations with 'excessive' force.  For Israel's part, any civilian casualties in an encounter with the IDF are to be regretted and will be thoroughly investigated internally.  Any noted breaches of strict protocols regarding use of lethal force, will no doubt be dealt with, as such breaches have been dealt with in the past.

But the reality is that there is a globalist ideology at work in much of the world, that says that borders are in and of themselves evil, so any enforcement of borders is, from the get-go, excessive and unnecessary.  We see the same ideology at work in the reactions to President Trump's determination to enforce and defend the US's southern border from illegal infiltration.

US-bound "Protest Caravan' of Hondurans, hops a Northbound
Freight Train with Mexican Complicity

A 'protest caravan' of 'refugees' from Honduras, has been making its way north through Mexico, with the intention of breaching the US southern border and inserting hundreds of individuals onto US soil.  It is claimed that these people are refugees from severe political oppression in Honduras, that they are valid refugees by the accepted definition, and for the US to refuse them entrance would be a breach of accepted international protocols as well as humanitarian needs.

President Trump has responded that he will prevent this group from crossing into the US, and that he will hold Mexico accountable if they reach our border.  The latter, because the international protocols require that, once those claiming refugee status have escaped the country of their oppression, it is the responsibility of the country to which they'd already fled, to detain them in their safe haven until their refugee status can be vetted.  Only then, does it become any country's responsibility to consider whether they would accept these refugees.  Mexico and presumably, Guatemala through which 'refugees' from Honduras would have had to pass en route to the US, are not behaving according to accepted protocols in allowing these people free transit to the US.  It's akin to Indonesia's complicity in allowing Australia-bound refugees from Central Asia to pass through and stage for boat trips across the Indian Ocean and Timor Sea to their intended destination.  Since those refugees are no longer in danger upon reaching Indonesia, it is that country's government's responsibility to shelter them until they can be vetted.

But Trump has an incentive for the Mexican government to stop the group from reaching the US.  In addition to announcing that he would enforce the border, he also announced that, should the group reach the border, he would consider suspending NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has been in effect for some 24 years.  Although candidates in the upcoming presidential election in Mexico have scored points with the electorate by declaring NAFTA unfair to Mexico, the reigning government clearly doesn't agree with that premise as it has, reportedly, stopped the US-bound caravan in its tracks.  Clearly, some 14 months into Trump's presidency, he has shown himself to be sufficiently firm and decisive in his dealing with other governments that Mexico is taking him seriously.

The lesson from this, I believe, is that borders matter.  Without defensible borders - and the will to defend them - a country loses its sovereignty.  And an additional similarity between the current administrations in the USA and Israel - apart from what I pointed out in my last post on this blog - is that both governments are determined to defend their borders...by military means, if that's what it takes.

The voices that are currently criticizing the governments of both the US and Israel - in a most shrill manner - for taking this responsibility seriously, apart from their prejudicial proclivities to criticize the two countries no matter what they do or don't do, clearly represent an ideological position that borders, and their enforcement, are wrong from the get-go.  At least, when that enforcement is done by certain countries...but that's another blog post, for another day...