Christopher Pyne: Israel was right to protect its people in latest war with Hamas in Gaza

What happened in Gaza this month was tragic. It also wasn’t Israel’s fault. Hamas fired thousands of rockets with the intent of killing civilians.

A scorpion is sitting on one side of the River Jordan wanting to cross to the other side.

He calls out to a frog passing by and asks the frog to help him across. The frog responds by saying that it is too dangerous as the scorpion might sting her and she will drown.

The scorpion scoffs and says, “why would I do that, then we would both die”.

So, the frog agrees.

Half way across, the scorpion stings the frog. As they both die, the frog says, “why on earth would you do such a thing that would inevitably kill us both?”.

The scorpion figuratively shrugs its shoulders and responds, “it’s the Middle East”.

On Friday, Israel agreed to a ceasefire with Hamas and its smaller ally in the Gaza Strip, Islamic Jihad, brokered by Egypt.

It ended 11 days of conflict. In those 11 days, 232 Palestinians were killed and twelve Israelis.

As is often the case in this multi-decade conflict between the State of Israel and its enemies in some parts of the Arab world, but by no means all parts, many Western commentators rushed to blame Israel and attach a moral equivalence to the actions of both sides.

The truth is that Hamas fired 4300 rockets into Israel with the clear intention of killing and maiming civilians.

Israel responded, as any country would, by defending its people.

That included the deployment of “Iron Dome”, which is a counter-missile technology that succeeded in destroying about 90 per cent of the incoming rockets. It is an entirely self-defensive capability.

Israel's Iron Dome aerial defence system is launched to intercept a rocket launched from the Gaza Strip, above the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, on May 17, 2021. Picture: Ahmad Gharabli / AFP

It also included air strikes on targets in the Gaza Strip suspected of being launch sites for missiles, or factories, especially underground ones, for the manufacture of offensive weapons.

Tragically, there were many civilian deaths, none of them sought by the Israeli Defence Force, all of them regretful.

Sadly, Hamas ensures that their military capabilities are situated in places where if they are attacked, it will cause the killing of innocent Palestinians and so do Israel maximum damage in world opinion.

These statements aren’t supposition, they are well known to anyone who has followed the conflict for a period of decades, as I have.

The pretext for the latest imbroglio was Jews attempting to worship in areas near the al Aqsa Mosque regarded as sacred to Muslims; the resultant protests and violence between opposing mobs and the eviction of Palestinians from houses from which Jews had previously been evicted many decades ago.

None of those pretexts stand up to scrutiny as a cause for Hamas to fire 4300 rockets into Israel in order to kill civilians.

However, as the story above states, it is the Middle East.

Unfortunately, it remains a tinder box, even at the best of times.

Once again, a United States Secretary of State is being dispatched to the cities of Israel, Egypt, the West Bank and Gaza to broker a deal.

At least in dealing with the first three, Antony Blinken will be working with elected governments. Hamas, which rules Gaza, overthrew the Fatah Party’s rule from Ramallah in 2007 and has ruled within an iron first ever since.

Hamas is also a prescribed, internationally recognised terrorist organisation.

Palestinians inspect the rubble of their destroyed houses after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Picture: Fatima Shbair/Getty Images

A particularly disappointing aspect to this most recent outbreak of violence is that there have been signs of optimism in the past couple of years for the relationship between Israel and some of its Arab neighbours.

Israel has signed agreements for co-operation, especially economic, known as Abraham Accords with Morocco, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

It has long enjoyed peaceful relations with Jordan and Egypt.

The main Arab political party in Israel is in talks with Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition coalition to Prime Minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu, with a view to joining a new government.

That would be the first Arab party to be part of an Israeli government since the creation of the Israeli State in 1948.

The leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, had recently announced that elections would be held in the West Bank for the first time in a long time.

All of those positive developments have been set back by the actions of Hamas and the resultant response by Israel in the past two weeks.

It is a great pity.

The Israelis have no desire to attack Gaza.

The only organisation that gained from this recent break out of hostilities was Hamas.

While the death toll of Palestinians outweighed that of Israelis, this is of no concern to Hamas. The most important thing Hamas wanted to achieve was to show that they are still relevant. They achieved that.

But don’t buy into the false moral equivalence argument.

There is nothing morally equivalent to a sovereign state acting to protect its people and a terrorist organisation seeking to inflict death on innocent civilians.