On the anniversary of its establishment, Israel has been attacked on four fronts: Gaza, the Golan Heights, Lebanon, and Jerusalem.

To the Arabs, it is “Nakba (catastrophe) Day”, which they regularly mark with violence against Israeli targets. Yet Israel was strangely unprepared for the attacks, or at least for the intensity of them. Did the Israeli government not expect that Arab leaders and rulers, threatened with overthrow, might try to divert the anger of their maltreated masses on to Israel?

DebkaFile reports:

The coalition organizing the exceptionally violent events of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) Day Sunday, marking the founding of Israeli in 1948, first tested the water in the morning: An Israeli Arab drove his truck at high speed through a Tel Aviv thoroughfare, slamming into more than a dozen vehicles and running over pedestrians. He had killed one civilian and injured 17 over a 2-kilometer stretch of road before he was overpowered and apprehended.

When Israel’s police chiefs declined to designate the attack an act of terror and insisted it could have been a traffic accident, Damascus, Hizballah and Hamas felt they were safe in letting their master plan go forward: There was no risk of a tough Israeli response. And indeed, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu later admitted that local commanders and police chiefs were directed to deal with all fronts “with maximum restraint while defending Israel’s borders and sovereignty.” …

Because of this directive, Israelis were shocked to discover at 13:30 that hundreds of Syrians, Palestinians and a Hizballah group had crossed the border and hoisted Syrian and Palestinian flags in the main square of the Israel Golan village of Majd al Shams. They had already been there for four hours and no one was stopping them crossing the border back and forth during that time. Throughout the day, only a small squad of soldiers had been left to guard this border because nothing untoward had been expected there.

It was only at 17:00 hours that tanks and reinforcements arrived.

The invaders had every reason to march around the village declaring they had recaptured the territory Syria had lost 44 years ago while attacking Israel.

By then, military spokesmen had got their act together. It was fortunate that we undermanned the Syrian border, they said, otherwise the incident would have ended with hundreds of dead. …

The Syrian interlopers were finally driven back across the border – not by Israeli troops – but by local Druze chiefs. Israel still does not know how many left and if any remained.

It is to be regretted that the IDF did not meet its fundamental duty to defend Israel’s Golan border by bringing up large reinforcements to surround Majdal Shams, seal the Syrian border and shoot trespassers. The Syrians should not have been released but held until Damascus forced the Hamas to free the Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit.

Former Shin Bet director Israel Hasson … commented later Sunday that Israel must make it crystal clear to Damascus, Hizballah and Hamas that they will not be allowed to toss their internal problems into the Israeli court or violate Israeli sovereignty. …

Israel will pay a heavy price for its flaccid response and misplaced “maximum restraint.” Syrian President Bashar Assad can be counted on not to miss the chance of sending over to the Golan the Syrian and Palestinian terrorist teams he has held in reserve for more than a year for the right opportunity. That opportunity is clearly now at hand.

The Majd al-Shams invasion followed by violence by masked Palestinians in Jerusalem and a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. It was synchronized with mass incursions from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. This round is not over. It will not be stopped by military restraint.

Are these comparatively small waves, partly caused by Arab unrest washing against Israel’s shores, and will they soon subside?

Or are they the first signs of a political tsunami?

Post Script: According to Ynet News, some of the Palestinians who crossed the Golan border from Syria into Majd al-Shams on the Israeli side, were seeking asylum.

An apparent appetite among Arab peoples, especially the young, for cell phones, iPods, lap-top computers, and all that Facebook and Google could do for them – including organizing a revolution – encouraged the hope in the West (we were tempted by it ourselves) that they wanted to enter the 21st century and leave the 7th century, which gave birth to Islam, behind them forever. This was the way the thinking went: If  they understand the political conditions that produce the technological marvels – democracy, freedom, secularism, tolerance, universal literacy and the emancipation of women – they will strive to make them the conditions of their own countries; form parties that stand for them as principles; vote those parties into power; and so transform their backward polities to match the American model. Perhaps in the very long term that might happen, but it is not happening now. The “revolutions” in the North African Muslim states are likely to bring puritan Islamic parties into power. There will be no democracy, no freedom, no secularism, no tolerance, women will remain subjugated and predominantly illliterate. The 7th century is where the revolutionaries feel comfortable. They are still keenly pursuing the old Islamic mission, “kill the infidel”, kill every Christian, every Jew, with even greater passion and ever swelling clamor.

What then of the marvelous electronic gadgets and their apps that come from America? What of Facebook and Google?

Well, they’re using Facebook to organize massive demonstrations at which they’re renewing their commitment to the old barbaric 7th century aims, first and foremost to kill the infidel, every Christian, every Jew.

Barry Rubin writes:

Repeatedly we were told about the alleged absence of anti-Israel rhetoric and signs in Tahrir square during the revolution. I don’t think it was true then. I certainly don’t think it is true now.

So check out the massive anti-Israel demonstrations in Cairo today. …

Supposedly the rally was to protest sectarian violence within Egypt but it turned into one favoring more sectarian violence next door. The main focus became supporting the Hamas-Fatah coalition agreement and calling for Israel’s extinction…

Remember all of those articles and statements about how the revolution was good for Israel if only those silly Israelis woke up and understand reality as understood in Berkeley and the Upper West Side of Manhattan?

Oh, and guess how the demonstration was largely organized. Ready? On Facebook! Hahaha. Those youthful hip twittering moderate young people!

Also notice how this is all happening before elections install a radical, nationalist, anti-Israel, anti-American president and a parliament dominated by revolutionary Islamist anti-American antisemites.

If the 21st century – aka the United States – would seriously engage 7th century Islam with all the intellectual, economic, and military strength it has, the menace could easily be defeated. But the US will not do it. Not now, anyway, because the present US government, shockingly led by Barack Obama, likes Islam and wants to it to triumph. The pretense is that Islam is a force for good. Muslims that are too obviously indefensible – such as Osama bin Laden – can be sacrificed to American public opinion since they’re “not truly representative of Islam”.

So when Obama is replaced by a leader who is pro-America, will the necessary action be taken?

The alarming reply must be “probably not”.

Post Script: On the theme of 7th century barbarians using 21st century technology, see this article titled Taliban Uses Social Media to Usher In a New Era of Jihad.

This past weekend there has been, and there continues to be, a blood-bath in Syria, as its Alawite dictator, Bashar Assad, slaughters the people his family has been oppressing for decades.

There is little about it in the news media in America.

This is what’s happening there:

Bashar Assad has launched all-out war on his people. Tanks firing artillery, APCs [Armored Personnel Carriers], infantry units, commandoes and snipers were deployed for the first time at daybreak Monday, April 25 in cities across Syria for the most brutal assault on any Arab anti-government protest in the four-month uprising.

In the first few hours, hundreds are estimated to have been massacred (over and above the 350 shot dead in the last three days) and thousands injured. Denied medical attention, they are left in the streets to die. …

Cities with populations of 2-3 million have been stormed by Syrian troops backed by tanks firing automatic 120-mm guns at random, commandoes dropped by helicopter and snipers.

The military offensive to break the back of the uprising is led by [dictator Bashar Assad’s] younger brother Maher Assad at the head of the Republican Guard and the 4th Division which is made up mostly of the Assad’s Alawite clan. Its first target Sunday night was the southern town of Deraa where the protest movement began and the Mediterranean coastal town of Jableh.

Monday, Syria shut its land borders to Jordan to conceal the scale of the carnage inflicted on the border town of Deraa from outside eyes. Foreign correspondents have been banned from the country since the uprising began.

Monday, indiscriminate fire was also reported in Duma, a dissident suburb of the capital Damascus. By Monday afternoon, thousands of soldiers had spread out across the North, South and Center of the country, apparently preparing to storm the large cities and protest centers of Hama, Homs, Latakiya and the Kurdish north. …

April 23 saw the constantly mounting uprising against the Assad regime finally reaching the Syrian capital Damascus where  300,000 – 15 percent of the city’s dwellers – took the streets shouting: “Bashar Assad you are a traitor!” That day too the Syrian ruler unleashed his security forces for the harshest crackdown yet in order to break the back of the five-week civil uprising. The result: 350 dead, tripling the number of Friday’s bloodbath and thousands of injured.

Early Sunday, secret service thugs hauled thousands of protesters out of their homes. They broke down doors in the Harasta and Ghouta districts of Damascus, dragged their victims out and dumped them on covered trucks which drove off to unknown destinations. ….

The growing number of injured are condemned to being treated privately or not at all. The authorities have commandeered ambulances to prevent them reaching hospital and hospital wards are raided by security agents who either kill the wounded or arrest them.

PajamasMedia has videos of the protests and the killing. SEE THEM HERE.

Roger L. Simon comments:

In more proof, if any were needed, that liberals are the reactionaries of our time, it was only weeks ago that Hillary Clinton was calling Bashar al-Assad a “reformer” and Vogue magazine was proclaiming his wife a “rose in the desert.”

As we know, and the horrific videos from Syria on PJM show conclusively …  the ophthalmologist is as much a reformer as Josef Mengele and Asma as much a rose as Eva Braun.

Since his father Hafez brutally imposed his will over Syria in the Hama massacre, the Assads have been a family of secular fascist torturers and murderers in league with religious fascist torturers and murderers in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Gaza (Hamas), and Iran (the mullahs) … They assassinate democratically elected foreign leaders (Hariri), encourage and facilitate global terrorism, and shoot as many of their own people as necessary to maintain power while exploiting the best of their country’s resources for personal gain. In other words, pure evil.

Nothing new there — yet, for some reason, our liberal leadership and their media allies were never able to acknowledge fully something so obvious. Always — as Obama did with Ahmadinejad while the Iranian democracy demonstrators were being shot in their streets and tortured in prison cells — they sought to reason with despotism. Or, more likely, pretended to do so because it was all game for the aggrandizement of the self, for image. The policy itself never made sense.

When the Middle East street started to rebel, our government had no plan. They didn’t know what to do about Egypt and then went into Libya willy-nilly when things started to look bad. So now we are left with the odd situation where Gaddafi — clearly also a murderous sociopathic dictator — is despot number one, with NATO intervening and the U.S. providing Predators, while Assad, demonstrably a much more active and dangerous enemy of the U.S. and its allies, is merely verbally chastised by our president and secretary of State. …

Because of the moral confusion at the heart of our administration, the USA and by extension the West have their priorities screwed up. The downfall of Assad would mean big trouble for the mullahs, Hezbollah, and Hamas — good things for the region and the world. The downfall of Gaddafi would mean what exactly? Nobody knows. An al-Qaeda regime? The Muslim Brotherhood? Some oil contracts for the French? …

But during all this, there is no question that the foreign policy of the United States is simply ad hoc. It doesn’t exist. The secretary of State was in cloud-cuckoo-land when she called Assad a reformer, the same totalitarian-loving cloud she inhabited when she bussed Suha Arafat.

The president himself has no real values, only vague notions received from lamebrain post-modernist professors …

We don’t think that America should intervene in Syria. We also don’t think that America should have diplomatic relations with tyrannies like Assad’s, and we’d like to see the ambassador whom Obama foolishly sent there withdrawn. We don’t think America should interfere in an Arab country whether to give it money, or “protect” its civilians, or unseat its tyrants. We’d rather America was drilling for its own oil than buying it from Arab countries. We’re not dismayed by rebellion, civil war, or revolution in the Arab or wider Islamic world – whichever side wins in any Islamic state, the victory will go to Islam. But we observe the inconsistencies and sheer incoherence of Obama’s foreign policy with trepidation. How long will it take for America to recover its leadership role in the world after Obama is gone? American hegemony, which Obama has deliberately sabotaged, is essential. The world needs a power that stands for liberty and has the military might to support it. By forcing America to abdicate its responsibility as the world’s only superpower, Obama – far from causing rising seas to subside, as he claimed he could and would – has stirred up tumult in the oceans of human discontent. The result is a manmade disaster as the heat of war and blood spreads over the earth.