By Antonio C. Abaya

The entire world breathed a collective sigh of relief last week when Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire in and withdrawal of tanks and troops from Gaza, followed by a declaration the next day by Hamas that their militants will stop firing their rockets into Israel for the next seven days. It is a modest but necessary beginning for some serious negotiations towards a more lasting peace in the Middle East.

Will the ceasefire/truce last for more than seven days? That remains to be seen. But based on numerous ceasefires and truces in the past, the future does not look the least bit encouraging. But, still, the effort has to be made.

As the Gazans pick up the broken pieces of their homes and their lives, attention will be focused on the fact that of the recorded 1,300+ Palestinians killed, one-fourth,  one-third, one-half, or more than one-half?depending on who is doing the counting?were civilians, meaning women, children and non-combatant men.

On the Israeli side, too, four of the 13 dead?or one-third of the total? were civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, when the Hamas? Qassam rockets slammed into their neighborhoods.

Civilians always make up many or most of the casualties in all or most wars.

Those familiar with the history of World War II know that most of the estimated 20 million people who were killed in the conflict were civilians: women, children and non-combatant men.

From 1943 onwards, German cities were pulverized in Thousand Bomber raids, in retaliation for earlier German bombing of British cities, including London. During the day, a thousand American bombers?B-17s and B-24s?dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs on German cities. At night, a thousand British bombers?Lancasters, Wellingtons and Halifaxes?dropped additional tens of thousands of tons of bombs on the same or other cities. Inevitably, most of the casualties were civilians: women, children and non-combatant men.

In the most devastating raid of all, the northern German city of Hamburg was bombed so severely by British bombers in July 1943, probably with the use of phosphorous incendiary bombs, that a firestorm was generated that consumed all the oxygen in entire neighborhoods, asphyxiating to death thousands of German women, children and non-combatant men who were hiding in their cellars and air-raid shelters. An estimated 50,000 Germans, mostly civilians, were killed in that three-day raid.

And, of course, there is Hiroshima and there is Nagasaki. In one flash, 66,000 Japanese in the first city, and 39,000 in the second, were killed instantly, and additional tens of thousands died weeks, months, years later from their injuries or from radiation sickness. Most of them women, children and non-combatant men.

Those liberal moralists who wag their accusing fingers at the Americans for using the Ultimate Weapon should know that the Germans and the Japanese were also racing to build their own atomic bombs. The Americans just beat them to it, ironically with the help of Jewish physicists who had managed to escape extermination by the Nazis in Germany and Occupied Europe.

There should be no doubt in anyone?s mind that if the Germans and/or the Japanese had perfected their atomic bombs ahead of the Americans, they would not have hesitated to drop them on London, New York and/or Los Angeles, and would have killed hundreds of thousands of American and/or British women, children and non-combatant men.

As early as 1943, or perhaps even earlier, the Japanese were thinking of ways to bring the war to the American mainland, in retaliation for the raid of Gen. James Doolittle?s carrier-launched B-25 bombers on Tokyo in 1942.

The Japanese actually launched weather balloons carrying incendiary bombs from surfaced submarines off the US West Coast, with the intention of causing fires in American cities. But they managed to kill only a party of five civilians who were having a picnic on some park in Oregon, and the plan was abandoned.

Five American civilians dead in Oregon, versus 105,000 instantly dead Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (plus additional thousands of Japanese civilians dead later from injuries and radiation sickness). Wasn?t there a ?lack of proportionality? in the casualties inflicted by one side on the other?

Paraphrasing Mao Zedung, war?like revolution?is not a picnic. Those who start one by attacking another country?s anchored fleet, or by lobbing hundreds of admittedly crude and inaccurate rockets into their neighbors? backyards, should be prepared to accept the consequences of their actions. They, of course, can gamble that they may win. But there would always be the chance that they may lose.  

In his cover story in Time Magazine?s Jan. 19 issue, titled Why Israel Can?t Win, Tim McGirk correctly argues that there is a ?likelihood that Arabs will vastly outnumber Jews in the land stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean is a catastrophic prospect for a nation that defines itself by its faith??

McGirk cites ominous statistics: there are in 2008 5.5 million Arabs and 5.4 million Jews in Israel and adjoining territories, meaning Gaza and the West Bank. Because most Arabs do not practice birth control (and most Jews do), by 2020, there will be 8.5 million Arabs, compared to 6.4 million Jews. A ticking demographic time bomb, McGirk calls it.

In my article of July 23, 2006 titled Hezbollah?s Secret Weapon (archived in www.tapatt.org) I pointed to the presence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the pro-Western Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, displaced from the West Bank as a result of the Six-Day War. .

In 2006, northern Israel was pummeled by rockets fired by the Hezbollah from southern Lebanon. In 2008-09, southern Israel was hit by rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza. But in both conflicts, the Katyusha rockets and Iranian-supplied Fajr missiles could reach only 40-45 kms into Israel, keeping Tel Aviv and Jerusalem out of range.

I wrote in my July 2006 article that if the Jordanian monarchy were overthrown and the Hezbollah and Hamas jihadists were suddenly let loose among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, this would be Israel?s worst nightmare.

Jordan is as few as 46 kms from the Mediterranean Sea. This would put the whole of Israel, including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, within range of Katyusha rockets and Fajr missiles, rendering Israel militarily indefensible against a jihadist army massed in Jordan, and making the nuclear option irresistible to the Israelis. And this could happen before McGirk?s 2020 demographic time bomb.

Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail.com. Other articles in acabaya.blogspot.com. Tony on YouTube in www.tapatt.org.