IF ISRAEL WERE EVER TO LOSE A WAR WITH ITS ARAB AND MUSLIM ENEMIES

The daily hatred generated against Jews in the Muslim world ever since the founding of Israel 65 years ago would result in the massacre of captured Israeli soldiers and a vengeful blood lust against Israel’s civilian Jewish population

Here are some excerpts from an op-ed by Alan Dershowitz that was published Tuesday by Newsmax:

The hatred directed against Jews in general and Israel in particular by Israel’s enemies is far more malignant than the animosity between Sunni and Shia Muslims or between Muslim and Christian Arabs. It is taught in schools, preached in mosques and repeated in the media. There would be no mercy shown. Israeli armies would not be allowed to surrender and be repatriated, as the Egyptian army was when it was trapped in Sinai at the end of the 1973 war.

Israeli civilians would be targeted as they already have been by Hamas and Hezbollah rockets fired in the direction of large population centers. The goal of the first war against Israel was expressed by one of its leaders, who proclaimed: “this will be a war of extermination.” The desire for revenge has only grown over the course of further warfare and more defeats. Babies, women, the elderly and everyone else will become targets of the vengeful blood lust.

Every Israeli lives under the grim shadow of this reality. Nor do they count on timely outside intervention to prevent massacres. Remember, this is a nation built on the memory of the Holocaust, during which the world — including the United States, Great Britain and Canada — shut their gates on those seeking to escape genocide.

That is why Israel will never surrender and will always fight to the end. That is why Israel needs a nuclear deterrent, unsatisfactory as it may be in a part of the world where suicide in the name of Islam is a virtue to so many of Israel’s enemies. That is why Israel must always maintain a preventive option, whereby it attacks the enemy military that is poised to attack Israeli civilians. That is why Israel must always maintain qualitative military superiority over the combined resources of its enemies.

This is also why Israel should make every reasonable effort to make peace with the Palestinians, as it has with the Egyptians and the Jordanians, but without sacrificing its security and its ability to successfully resist attack.

The first duty of every democracy is to protect its civilians against enemy attack. Thus far, Israel, though vastly outnumbered, has done a good job. The changes now occurring in the Arab and Muslim world make Israel’s future somewhat less certain, as does Iran’s movement toward nuclear weaponry capable of inflicting a second Holocaust on Israel’s six million Jews and one million Arabs.

Yet so many in the international community seem unsympathetic to Israel’s situation. Whenever it seeks to defend its civilians, by attacking military targets, though inadvertently killing some civilians on occasion, there is a disproportional outcry against the Jewish state. Selective boycotts, divestment and other sanctions are directed only at Israel by people ranging from Alice Walker to Steven Hawking.

Israel must not allow these immorally selective threats of delegitimation to deter it from protecting its citizens against the threat of massacres.

Editor’s Note: What makes Dershowitz think that making peace with the Palestinians would keep them from exacting a vengeful blood lust against the Jewish population of Israel, given the opportunity?