After reading his reasoning, I have to say it makes sense.
David Goldman has rendered us an inestimable service by conjuring the ghost of a famed seventeenth century French statesman, Cardinal Richelieu.The Palestinians, at least those within Gaza and other refuges around the Middle East, have been stuck in what we now call a ‘doom loop’. Gaza has been a source and refuge for Islamic fundamentalist militants like Hamas for generations. The more power the militants gain the worse it gets for the the residents in Gaza.
Considering the strange things that are happening in the world today, getting a ghost’s opinion does not seem completely out of line.
Richelieu’s theory seems original. At the least, it is uncommon. It wants us to be aware of the danger posed by dying cultures. When your culture is dying, when your language is becoming useless, when you are about to be absorbed in a larger, more successful culture, you might think that you have little choice but to go to war.
Since war is the ultimate form of competition, a failing culture might resort to it in order to assert its putative greatness.
Was the purpose of Hamas’ attack to inflict damage on Israel as part of a larger war, or was it a means of generating a lot of casualties in Israel and Gaza, the Gaza casualties to be used solely for solely for propaganda purposes? Seeing how previous Hamas propaganda has used staged scenes, old photos of previous actions as ‘new evidence’ of Israel’s inhumanity, or employed Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals ploy of blaming Israel for acts Hamas in fact committed.
As for Palestine, Richelieu remarks that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It was invented recently to cover up the simple fact that the Arabs who were displaced in the founding of the state of Israel were rejected by their fellow Arab states.Ironically, Arabs who remained in Israel after its founding in 1948 and became Israelis have done quite well, as well as any other Israeli citizen. I have no idea if they have any respect for their refugee relations, but if their reaction is like that of Arabs in the other Middle Eastern and northern African nations, the answer is likely that they do not. Are the attacks by Hamas a “last gasp” action of a dying culture, a culture that cannot survive without the support of other terrorist states?
When Jews were expelled from Middle Eastern Muslim countries, Israel accepted them. When Arabs chose to leave the Jewish state after its founding in 1948, they were not accepted by other Arab states. Many of them ended up in camps.
If this refugee population cannot settle in Israel, it will need to find homes in other Arab states. And, according to Richelieu, the Arab states still do not want them.
Only time will tell.