If Israel did anything about the Syrian situation -- did anything at all -- the whole world would ask itself: What are those Israelis up to now? What are their devious designs?
Who could be so naà ¯ve as to expect a country that has an Avigdor Lieberman as Foreign Minister and an Ehud Barak at Defense, not to mention a Binyamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister, to do anything altruistic?
So let's forget about the whole idea.
YET HOW can I sit idly by while less than 300 kilometers from my home -- closer than Eilat -- awful things are happening?
This is not a question for an Israeli only. It is a question for every human being around the world.
Whether Israeli or Norwegian, Brazilian or Pakistani, we -- citizens of this world - are sitting before our TV screens and looking with horror at the pictures coming out of Homs and asking ourselves with growing despair: Are we totally impotent? Is the world totally impotent?
Seventy years ago we accused the world of not lifting a finger when millions of Jews, Roma and others were killed by Einsatzgruppen and in the gas chambers. But that was in the middle of a terrible Word War, when the West and the Soviet Union were facing the ruthlessly efficient Nazi military machine, headed by one of history's great tyrants.
Yet here we are today, facing a tin-pot dictator in a little country, who is slaughtering his own people, and still unable to stop it.
THIS GOES far beyond the terrible events in Syria.
The helplessness of the world community, euphemistically called "the family of nations," to do anything in such a situation cries out to high heaven.
The simple truth is that at the beginning of the third millennium, in the age of economic globalization and the world-wide net of instant communication, the international political system is still lagging centuries behind.
After the terrible First World War, the League of Nations was created. But the hubris of the victors and their vengefulness against the vanquished caused them to set up a faulty structure that broke down at the first real test.
After the even more terrible Second World War, the victors tried to be much more realistic. But the structure they created -- the United Nations Organization -- has other faults. The Syrian crisis shows them up in the most glaring light.
The worst feature of the UN is the veto. It regularly condemns the organization to utter impotence.
It is vain to accuse Russia and China of unabashed cynicism. They are no different from other great powers. The US has used the veto far more times, especially to protect Israel. Russia and China serve their perceived short-term interests, and to hell with the victims. Ugly, disgusting, but commonplace. History is full of examples. The Munich agreement and the Hitler-Stalin pact spring readily to mind.
But does the ugly Russian veto against a toothless resolution in the Security Council really serve any real Russian interest? I think that Moscow should know better. Their arms sales to Syria are a minor consideration. So is the Russian naval base in Tarsis. It looks to me more like a conditioned reflex: If something is supported by the USA, it must be bad. After all, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a Russian.
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