Thank God for Israel.

Not in a biblical sense — although for multitudes that too — but just for being. For enduring.

Even when it must be denounced for disproportionate use of lethal violence against civilian demonstrators, regardless of how calculatingly provoked and existentially threatening.

Israelis have yet to absorb the harsh strategic lessons learned by occupying NATO and American military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq: That they are responsible, despite rules of engagement, not only for casualties resulting from their own operations but also for civilian casualties inflicted, devoid of any duty to protect, by militants.

Killing of the innocent doesn’t matter to the Taliban, as it didn’t matter to Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Luring civilians to violent clashes at the Gaza-Israel fence — busing women and children to the no-go zone of 1,000 feet from the barrier — was deliberately tactical, victims exploited as martyrs and of course for Israel-vilifying international media coverage.

Touché to Hamas, organizers of dozens of suicide bombings in Israeli restaurants, hotels and buses over their three-decade history. They’ve bought themselves, with the blood of desperate Gazans living in a sewer strip of no-exit colony, a tick of boastful prestige. Collateral damage is insignificant.

Still. Israel is a sliver of democracy amidst a vast expanse of tyranny, theocracy, ham-fisted monarchy and endless squabble.

Always held to a higher standard, of course, morally and otherwise, endlessly the target of United Nations resolutions (45 at last count) since Israel was created in 1948 — by the United Nations.

The same UN that has beggared Palestinians by entrenching their chronic displaced and impoverished status, hanging on pathetically to iron house keys, passed down through generations, for homes they and their descendants will never see again. Because a two-state solution, as has become increasingly obvious, is a cruel pipe-dream. The opiate of magical thinking.

History is littered with lost civilizations, the vanquished and the assimilated. The exceptional integrity of the Palestinian diaspora is a 20th-century invention. Just as Jews were scattered to the four corners of the world — beyond the pale — relentlessly persecuted and pogromed and gassed into near-extinction before Israel emerged from the ashes of the Second World War.

The country’s 70th anniversary was marked in Toronto on Sunday, with the 49th annual UJA Federation’s Walk — the world’s largest single-day Israel solidarity walk, according to organizers.

A year ago, Hamas dropped the destruction of Israel from its manifesto. Yet its loathing of the Jewish state hasn’t changed, nor its attacks on Israel and Jews.

Last week, the “modest” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas released a photograph of himself in a Ramallah hospital — the 83-year-old Fatah leader rumoured to be in declining health — reading a Palestinian newspaper prominently featuring an ugly anti-Semitic cartoon depicting a soldier snatching a baby’s bottle and feeding it poison.

This the same incompetent Abbas who a month ago delivered a rambling speech that suggested the root cause of the Holocaust was not so much Nazi genocidal hatred of Jews but the Jews themselves, specifically their “social behaviour,” adding he meant “their social function related to banks and interest.” So, baby-killers and, you know, controllers of the world’s finances — both age-old anti-Semitic canards.

A country that still hasn’t been permitted to declare its own internationally recognized capital as Jerusalem. Every American president since the Jerusalem Embassy Act was passed by Congress in 1995 has paid lip service to the Holy City as Israel’s capital. “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided,” President Barack Obama said in 2008. Yet every American president, every six months, has signed a waiver to keep the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, citing national security reasons.

That is, until President Donald Trump, who delivered on a campaign promise directed at his Christian evangelical base and moved the embassy to Jerusalem. Images of its triumphal opening on May 14 were horrifically juxtaposed with chaos at the Gaza-Israel fence — choking fumes from tear gas, Gazans cut down by sniper from Israel Defense Forces sniper fire, the siren wail of ambulances, triage at the wall.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. And Trump got his one right, if for the wrong reasons and despite the global condemnation. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the U.S. Senate, called the move “long overdue.”

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That monumental shift may have amplified the rage behind May’s bloody protests at the Gaza-Israel border. But it did not trigger them. Those demonstrations had been long in the planning and shepherding by Hamas, Gaza’s discredited and internationally isolated radical Islamist ruling regime. Nothing spontaneous about it.

What began with grassroots origins via activist posts on Facebook calling for people to demonstrate on the 70th anniversary of Israel’s birth — known to Palestinians as Nakba (catastrophe) — the Hamas-orchestrated protests led predictably to dying, some 150 civilians killed and thousands wounded over seven weeks, as Hamas envisioned it would. Deadliest mayhem in years. Sixty-two slain on the precise anniversary, May 14.

It is to Israel’s disrepute that all Gazans are viewed as being Hamas, women and children included, hence the country’s forces lashing out — firing — at the mishmash assembly of purported demarcation encroachers, with the exculpating argument advanced (as always since Hamas’ forcible takeover of Gaza in 2007) that Israel must use whatever means necessary to protect itself against security breaches at the fence and a potential o’er the ramparts mass infiltration. The media estimate is that 40,000 Gazans participated in the peak May 14 demonstrations, burning tires, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails across the fence. Not quite the “picnic” as some Gazans had described what they were expecting on that day. Patently absurd.

But why take your precious children to a protest everyone knew was reaching its climax, with immense casualties likely?

Removed as martyr, at least for the moment, is the eight-month-old baby girl who died on May 14, allegedly a tear gas victim. “The Israelis killed her!” the child’s mother wailed to AFP. Until a Gazan doctor told Associated Press the baby may have died because of a pre-existing condition (a heart defect present at birth).

That death intensified global revulsion with Israel. But the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health now says it’s awaiting autopsy results.

Interestingly, Hamas has also been all over the map with assertions about how many of the May 14 “martyrs” were actually Hamas militants and operatives, at first claiming 10 as their own, but a Hamas official later claiming 50. The IDF has identified two dozen as having terrorist affiliations.

In any event, the UN Human Rights Council has voted 29-2 to send an “international war crimes” probe into Gaza to investigate the border fence violence and what is now being called the “May 14 Massacre.” Of course it is. Israel condemned that resolution, pointing to the council’s historical bias against Israel.

Keep this in mind: There were similar accusations of a massacre in 2002, when Israeli forces entered the Jenin refugee camp as part of a West Bank offensive, following a suicide bombing by Hamas that killed 29 people at a Passover seder in the seaside Israeli town of Netanya.

The UN, with access denied by Israel, launched an investigation, relying heavily on reports from human-rights groups notoriously hostile to Israel. To the dismay of many, perhaps the UN itself, the final report dismissed as unsubstantiated claims that soldiers had killed 500 Palestinians. In fact, 52 militants had been killed in the five-day pitched battle at the camp, and 23 Israeli soldiers. It was militants who’d booby-trapped many of the buildings that soldiers entered, causing casualties to soldiers and civilians alike.

There was no massacre in Jenin. But it remains the stuff of anti-Israel lore, mythic.

Duelling narratives, then as now.

Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno

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