No More Safe Haven

The Israeli strike against a terrorist training camp in Syria has just raised the cost of the diplomatic game that France, Germany and much of the Arab world have been playing. In essence, that diplomatic arrangement provided for the continuation of the intifada against Israel as a perpetual theatrical scapegoating of the Jews to provide the psychodrama so beloved by the Western Left and middle eastern dictatorships. Israel alone could provide the Left with the illusion of righteousness, however twisted, with which they wanted to invest themselves. But the ritual slaughter of Jewry required that immunity be conferred on Yasser Arafat, the continued subsidy of the Palestinian Authority and its subordinate creatures, Hamas and Al-Aqsa by the European Union; and the willful blindness  by the Security Council toward the Syrian occupation of Lebanon and its proxy war against Israel via Hezbollah.

The price of the ritual slaughter has just gotten a tad too high.

By striking the terrorist training camps in Syria, Israel is forcing the Palestinian Authority's international backers to assume the costs of its campaign against the Jews. 'We will widen the war', Sharon seems to say. The explosions will no longer be confined to Israel. Now they will be felt in downtown Damascus and will echo in the Champs de Elysee. The Western Left will not be able to continue their riskless game of Jew-bashing unless without feeling the effects in their pocketbooks. For the reality is that Europe, more than anyone else, is dependent on Middle Eastern petroluem. Now that the torchings and window smashings can no longer be confined to the global ghetto and threaten to spread unchecked to the oil supplies on which their holidays depend, the spectacle of mutilated Jewish children will no longer be very funny to the Leftist European.

Now the real consequences of French miscalculation will be felt. The Quai d'Orsay's anti-American campaign has riven the Security Council, which can no longer be counted on to push the Israeli flood back between the dikes. Since Europe is powerless to restrain Israel from striking its Arab clients, only America can rein in Israel and France is in no position to ask George Bush to act on its behalf. The only course left to Syria and the Quai d'Orsay is to sponsor a Security Council resolution condemning Israel, in the hope that America will be pressured into forcing Sharon back so that the psycho-dramatic massacre of Jews can continue. Yet even here the bats will be flapping back to roost. America and Israel have been so demonized by France and the Arab capitals that one more invective will literally count for nothing. One more pie in the face is irrelevant to a man covered in spit and crowned in thorns. Israel has grown insensible to insults and America too weary of Arafat's shenanigans to make more than a token attempt to appease domestic Leftist opinion.

The truth is that the Left has prepared its own bed of nails. Now it must be prepared to lie upon it.