White Flags Over Brooklyn
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The authorities don’t know yet who replaced the American flags that usually fly atop the Brooklyn Bridge with white flags of surrender. Maybe it was the Federal Aviation Administration, which instructed American airlines this week to halt flights to Israel owing to the “potentially hazardous situation created by the armed conflict in Israel and Gaza.” Israel insists it’s safe to fly in and out of its airport, where service hasn’t been interrupted for war since 1991. Were there any doubts, though, they should have come from, and only from, Israel’s own authorities. For President Obama to permit the FAA to make such a move in such circumstances can only be seen as an all-too-typical rebuke.
All the heartier the congratulations to Mayor Bloomberg, the ex-mayor of New York City, for announcing he’d fly to Tel Aviv on El Al airlines in a show of support for the Jewish state. It’s a rebuke to the administration from, in Mr. Bloomberg, an experienced pilot who’s so compulsive about safety that he won’t even smoke cigarettes. He understands that closing the airport at Tel Aviv is “a victory of sorts” for Hamas, which has been rocketing Israel in an attempt to kill civilians. The Times notes that what interrupted flights to Tel Aviv the last time was Saddam Hussein’s launching of Scud missiles (eventually the long arm of justice sent him on a direct, non-stop, one-way flight to Hell).
John Podhoretz, writing in the New York Post this morning, points out that even though the interruption of commercial flights to Tel Aviv is a tactical victory for Hamas it sets the stage for a strategic defeat. We have just seen, at Ukraine, the horror of what it looks like to destroy a civilian airliner in flight. So at the end of the day the decision of Hamas to land a rocket anywhere near Tel Aviv airport underscores the folly of a ceasefire and the importance of dismantling the arsenal of Hamas in Gaza. It’s hard to tell from a distance how long that will take and how many lives might be lost. It’s ever easier, though, to grasp the prospect that a failure to defeat Hamas would mean more lives would be lost in the long run.
