It’s fear of another Holocaust that has driven Israel to bomb the crap out of the Palestinians in Gaza — at least, that’s if you believe what you read on the New York Times op ed page. (Never a good idea, of course, because as I’ve previously noted, when it comes to Israel and related fear-mongering, there simply is no hysteria deemed unworthy of the Times op ed page.)
Morris, a manic fellow at the best of times prone to intellectual mood swings — having laid bare the ethnic cleansing that created modern Israel, Morris then didn’t as much recant as complain that the problem was that Ben Gurion hadn’t finished the job. And since the 2000 debacle at Camp David, of course, he’s been a de facto editorial writer for Ehud Barak, the failed former Prime Minister nicknamed “Mr. Zig-Zag” while in office because of his inconsistency — and who, of course, is the author of the current operation in Gaza.
Barak, never shy about spewing utter rubbish when his audience is American and prone to be taken in by demagoguery, last weekend offered the priceless suggestion to Fox News that “expecting Israel to have a cease-fire with Hamas is like expecting you to have a cease-fire with al-Qaeda.” Presumably it would not occur to Fox’s anchors to ask why, then, had Barak maintained just such a cease-fire for the past six months? And why had he been seeking its renewal?
But when it comes to demagoguery, this crowd knows no shame. Here is Morris explaining what he wants us to believe is the current Israeli mindset:
“Many Israelis feel that the walls — and history — are closing in on their 60-year-old state, much as they felt in early June 1967, just before Israel launched the Six-Day War … the Egyptians had driven a United Nations peacekeeping force from the Sinai-Israel border, had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and air traffic and had deployed the equivalent of seven armored and infantry divisions on Israel’s doorstep… Arab radio stations blared messages about the coming destruction of Israel.
“Israelis, or rather, Israeli Jews, are beginning to feel much the way their parents did in those apocalyptic days. Israel is a much more powerful and prosperous state today. In 1967 there were only some 2 million Jews in the country — today there are about 5.5 million — and the military did not have nuclear weapons. But the bulk of the population looks to the future with deep foreboding.”
This “foreboding” says Morris is based on the fact that the Arab world has never truly accepted the legitimacy of Israel’s creation (well, duh! Israel’s creation for Arabs is inextricably linked to the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees from its territory; a process well documented by Morris himself) and continue to oppose its existence. (The fact that the Arab world has offered a comprehensive recognition and normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for it retreating to its 1967 borders seems to have passed the historian Morris by.)
Then, he says , there’s the fact that “public opinion in the West (and in democracies, governments can’t be far behind) is gradually reducing its support for Israel as the West looks askance at the Jewish state’s treatment of its Palestinian neighbors and wards. The Holocaust is increasingly becoming a faint and ineffectual memory and the Arab states are increasingly powerful and assertive.”
Well, actually, as Avrum Burg has said so eloquently in his new book The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes, it is precisely because of the Holocaust experience and the universal message of “Never Again” that the West today is engaged with human rights abuses everywhere, no matter who the victim and perpetrator — even when the perpetrators are Jewish. Again, though, the idea that Israel is being isolated in the West would seem preposterous to any objective observer; and the idea that the Holocaust is being forgotten even more so. (Clearly, historian Morris pays no attention to the Academy Awards.) This sort of silliness makes you onder if anyone actually edits the NYT’s op ed page. How can any editor even vaguely grounded in reality allow a sentence to pass that says “the Arab states are increasingly powerful and assertive.” Any examples you can provide to back this outlandish claim, Benny? Would the op ed page editors even think to ask? Benny Morris may be like your hysterical uncle making up his own facts to support unsustainable arguments, but he’s hardly the first to have done so on the NYT op ed page in the past year alone.
A little reality isn’t going to slow down Morris’ train of hysteria — Iran’s nuclear program and Ahmadinejad’s bluster about Israel disappearing “has Israel’s political and military leaders on tenterhooks,” he proclaims. Oh yeah? How come whenever they’re behind closed doors and not talking to gullible Americans, they let on that they know that even a nuclear-armed Iran represents no “existential threat” to Israel? If Israelis are on tenterhooks, it’s not the political and military leadership who understand the realities; it’s the public that has listened to its political leaders spin up an endless torrent of baseless hysteria about Iran under the absurd rubric of “1938 all over again”.
Morris’s menaces extend to Hizballah in the north with its rockets — which only seem to be fired on Israel when Lebanon is under attack by the Israelis — and then there is Hamas, armed to the teeth with rockets and ready to fight until every inch of Palestine “is under Islamic rule and law.” (Actually, Hamas has not even imposed Shariah law in that tiny patch of Palestine — Gaza — that it currently controls, so it seems to be making a poor start.)
You’d think that the 100-1 ratio of Palestinian to Israeli casualties of the first four days of the Gaza offensive would give the lie to the idea that Israel is threatened with annihilation by Hamas and its rockets.
And then there’s the “internal” menace, Israel’s Arab population, which identifies more with the Palestinians, which they essentially are, than with the Jewish population of a state that offers them a second-class citizenship. (Go figure, eh?) Morris concludes by warning that Israel is feeling closed in by these intolerable menaces, and that the Gaza bloodbath won’t be the last time it lashes out. Sounds ominously like a threat of new ethnic cleansing, actually. (Actually, the “internal” menace that Morris doesn’t mention is the fact that growing numbers of young Israelis don’t live in Morris’s echo chamber of existential threats everywhere they look; they’re evading military service in record numbers and are, increasingly, moving abroad, having seen through the fiction that the whole world is a cesspool of virulent antisemitism.)
Essentially, Morris would have us excuse the bloodbath in Gaza in light of the specter of a new Holocaust. That’s a little deranged, actually. Cynically wielding the Holocaust as a cudgel to intimidate critics into silence, as Burg points out in his book, is a well established trope of Israeli p.r. But when a vast military machine is being unleashed on a captive population under siege, whose most militant members are lightly armed and try to make up in suicidal courage for what they lack in materiel, the image most likely to spring to mind is that of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Robert Fisk, in his own analysis, does something rarely found in the columns of U.S. news outlets: He reminds us who the Gazans are:
How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.
That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don’t come from Gaza.
But watching the news shows, you’d think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.
Now, when it comes to understanding and responding to the crisis, we have the comments made by President-elect Barack Obama last July in Sderot, which were widely quote in response to the weekend’s strikes:
“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”
I suppose the question I’d like to ask Obama, in the very Jewish tradition of asking how I would experience that which I was about to do to another, is what he would do if someone had moved his grandparents out of their home and forced them into a refugee camp, where he and his daughters lived, caged in, and were now being slowly choked of any meaningful livelihood, denied access to medicines, elecricity, even basic foodstuffs sometimes. What, I wonder would he do then? (He needs to have a meaningful answer to that question if he’s to be anything other than an obstacle to progress in the Middle East, like Bush has been. He may want to take a lesson from “Mr. Zig-Zag” here: On the election campaign trail in 1999, Ehud Barak was asked what he’d have done if he’d been born Palestinian, and answered without hesitation, “Joined a fighting organization.” A moment of rare honesty, that.)
It will be up to Obama, more than any other world leader, to change the morbid dynamic between Israel and the Palestinians — because it is a U.S.-authored conceptual approach that undergirds the current travesty in Gaza. I wrote in the National last weekend, Israel’s attack on Gaza was closely paralleled with the murder in Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold:
It’s not that Israel wanted to attack Gaza; it would have us believe it had no choice.
Like the Vicario brothers in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterful novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold – who believed they were honour-bound to kill Santiago Nasar for sleeping with their sister, and told anyone who would listen of their intention in the unspoken hope that someone would stop them – Israel, too, had been yelling from the rooftops its intention to strike Gaza.
…Just as in the Marquez novel, what propelled the Gaza tragedy forward to its bloody conclusion was that neither the Israelis nor anyone they told of their plan were willing to confront the absurdity of the ‘rules’ that made them believe they were obliged to spill blood. Israel claimed that it had no choice but to launch a military campaign that has begun with air strikes but will probably escalate to some form of ground invasion.
The context of the renewed rocket launching, of course, was the breakdown of the ceasefire brokered by Egypt between Israel and Hamas in June, which expired last week. Israel set off the latest upsurge in rocket attacks by launching raids on Nov 5 which it said were necessary to stop Palestinians tunnelling under the boundary fence. But the ceasefire has not really worked for Hamas, because it had expected that in exchange for holding its fire, not only would Israel reciprocate but it would also begin to ease the crippling economic siege, the objective of which was the overthrow of the Hamas government. Israel insists that wasn’t what it agreed, saying it had offered only “calm for calm” – and that the same offer was still on the table.
But why would Hamas settle for a cease-fire that removed the threat of Israeli bombs, but did nothing to relax Israel’s chokehold on its economy?
…Israel has painted itself into a strategic corner – with the enthusiastic support of the Bush administration – by continuing its quest to reverse the choice of the Palestinian electorate in 2006. Even some in the Israeli security establishment recognise that the fundamental flaw in Israel’s policy over Gaza is its refusal to recognise political reality. “The state of Israel must understand that Hamas rule in Gaza is a fact, and it is with that government that we must reach a situation of calm,” Shmuel Zakai, former chief of the Israeli military’s Gaza division, told Israel Army Radio last week. Israel’s error, he said, was in failing to improve the economic situation in Gaza once the truce took hold, and instead maintaining a chokehold that worsened the situation.
…The US-Israeli strategy on Hamas in Gaza has been a spectacular failure because it is fatally flawed (by its inability to relinquish the goal of reversing the results of the 2006 Palestinian election by anti-democratic means). So when, in the coming days, you hear Israeli leaders claiming they “had no choice” but to go to war in Gaza, remember the Vicario brothers of Gabriel Garcia’s novel, who also believed they had no choice. And also remember that Marquez, in his book, blamed the whole town and its anachronistic codes for failing to stop a tragedy that unfolded in slow motion and in plain sight.
Many Israelis are questioning the old fictions about military action being able to solve Israel’s problems. The ever-excellent Tom Segev offers the following:
Israel is striking at the Palestinians to “teach them a lesson.” That is a basic assumption that has accompanied the Zionist enterprise since its inception: We are the representatives of progress and enlightenment, sophisticated rationality and morality, while the Arabs are a primitive, violent rabble, ignorant children who must be educated and taught wisdom – via, of course, the carrot-and-stick method, just as the drover does with his donkey.
The bombing of Gaza is also supposed to “liquidate the Hamas regime,” in line with another assumption that has accompanied the Zionist movement since its inception: that it is possible to impose a “moderate” leadership on the Palestinians, one that will abandon their national aspirations.
As a corollary, Israel has also always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proven wrong over and over.
All of Israel’s wars have been based on yet another assumption that has been with us from the start: that we are only defending ourselves. “Half a million Israelis are under fire,” screamed the banner headline of Sunday’s Yedioth Ahronoth – just as if the Gaza Strip had not been subjected to a lengthy siege that destroyed an entire generation’s chances of living lives worth living.
It is admittedly impossible to live with daily missile fire, even if virtually no place in the world today enjoys a situation of zero terror. But Hamas is not a terrorist organization holding Gaza residents hostage: It is a religious nationalist movement, and a majority of Gaza residents believe in its path. One can certainly attack it, and with Knesset elections in the offing, this attack might even produce some kind of cease-fire. But there is another historical truth worth recalling in this context: Since the dawn of the Zionist presence in the Land of Israel, no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians.
Indeed, soon enough, this bloody mess will end in another cease-fire, having hardly changed the political equation in Gaza at all — much to the chagrin of the Bush Administration, the Israeli government and the regimes in Cairo and Ramallah who are quietly cheering Israel’s assault in the hope that it fatally weakens Hamas. That cease-fire will end rocket fire on Israel, but will also likely require the opening of the border crossings into Gaza. If so, that’s an outcome that could have been achieved without the killing of close to 400 people. And my money says that this cynical show of force by Barak and Tzipi Livni won’t even stop Bibi Netanyahu from winning Israel’s February election. The killing in Gaza, in other words, even by the most cynical measure, has been utterly senseless.
“”It’s fear of another Holocaust that has driven Israel to bomb the crap out of the Palestinians in Gaza — at least, that’s if you believe what you read on the New York Times op ed page.”
Well, they are looking in the wrong place if it’s a holocaust they are afraid of….that’s becoming increasing more likely to happen right here in the USA if public opinion is anything to go by.
Israel and our Israeli occupied congress have shot their last wad as far as ordinary Americans on the street are concerned.
I have wonder what the proveribal last straw would be after Lebanon for our general public. I don’t know if this is it but if not it’s the next to last one.
Here’s the deliciously tragic irony. Israel and it’s supporters have so corrupted the US government on Israel that the US is too morally bankrupt to do what is necessary to broker a just peace in Isr-Pal. And without that just peace Israel will not survive.
A true Shakespearian ending to the Israeli saga.
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Well, I agree that the outcome is known to everyone. What I can’t understand is why, if that is the case, does Hamas fire the rockets to begin with?
What did they hope to achieve? The only answer I can see is that their own political interests within Gaza were more important to them than the actual people living there.
I have a long post about this on my blog – trying to figure out why they behave like they do.
Oh, and it took me a while to even figure out who this Morris you were talking about was. He’s so marginal in the Israeli arena – his views are his own and not really relevant to the Israeli position, IMO.
Israeli mom: Not quite; if the cease-fire ends on the terms I describe, then Hamas will have gained something — the opening of the crossings, which Israeli refused to do under the last cease-fire. Its goal in resuming the rocket fire was to improve the terms of the cease-fire for the Palestinians of Gaza — it may have assumed Israel wouldn’t retaliate as heavily as it has done, but Hamas has always been clear about its objective: an ending of Israeli attacks AND an opening of the crossings. I’d put it differently: If Israel knows it’s going to have to open the crossings eventually, why does it need to bomb and kill hundreds of people first. It could have had such an outcome without launching a military operation at all.
Since I agree with Tony’s analysis, I’ll address a slightly different topic. How Israel has used Hamas to kill the 2-state solution.
One can argue technically whether Israel helped create Hamas or encouraged its creation, but in a broader sense, today’s Hamas is the culmination of Israel’s 40-year policy/ It is both Israel’s nightmare and its dream. The nightmare part is obvious, so why the dream?
Israel’s favorite line has always been that they have no one to talk to. That was a tough line to argue while Arafat was around, and so Hamas was indeed encouraged to marginalize him. Israel pursued a divide-and-rule strategy that successfully split the Palestinian leadership into two parts: an ineffectual “quisling” structure in Ramallah; and a “scarecrow” structure in Gaza that all elites worldwide can safely hate.
All Arab leaders fear Hamas (except perhaps Syria). Its friends in the Middle East are the Arab Street and Shiites. Israel’s dream has come true. When both Mubarak and Abbas can be seen cheering the bombing of Gaza (imagine Nasser’s and Arafat’s reactions) then you truly realize how “successful” Israel’s divide-and-rule policy has been.
There’s only one little technical problem. This was suicidal policy. Divide-and-Rule can only work if each part created can then be subjugated, assimilated, or ethnically cleansed. It also helps if the regional support is not a bunch of aging, corrupt dictators one bullet away from regime change.
I have argued in detail elsewhere why the 2-state solution is not game-theoretically realistic for Israel unless the country was defeated at war or forced at gunpoint by the US. Israel’s Hamas policy ensures that even if it could muster the courage to implement a 2-state solution, it would bump right into the vacuum that it has created in the other camp. The only likely outcome is war.
On this cheerful note, Happy New Year to all!
what do they hope to achieve?(hamas)….to tell the isrealis and the world that they are still here and still fighting…jews should be the first to understand that that sentiment
Is this the “bigger Shoah” that Vilnai threatened Gaza with?
To Israeli Mom: One can piece together as many documents and scenarios as humanly possible but I doubt any of it will come close to pinpointing exactly why Hamas chooses to launch more rockets at Israel. We can go over and over but only the Hamas leaders can answer this for themselves and for the rest of us (which essentially they do: the rockets will stop once the occupation of Palestine is over. How easy is that to decipher?)
Now there are complexities and nuances over this but for an Israeli, I understand the “need” to understand why your proposed enemy does what they do. But also remember: you cannot fully comprehend why they do what they do. They are occupied and stateless. They are much more prone to desperate measures than actual reasoning and “moderation”. Perhaps a better look would be to study more on the colonised mind and how post-colonisation creates a bitter outlook for anyone involved, whether occupied or occupier.
Or we can pose this question another way: Hamas see themselves responsible for the welfare of Palestinians, both in Gaza (especially) and the West Bank. They are under fire and many would like to blame them for this (as if they inflicted an election win upon themselves). It may be tough for yourself to conclude but Hamas is providing a (small) deterrant to Israel much like Hezbollah did in the north. In fact, that could be the best example of why Hamas does fire rockets into Israel. Israel only concedes when they are pushed back (73, 2000) by horrendous violence. This is a lesson that is bitterly learned when every peace process fails and Hamas and Hezbollah still remains intact. When you compare these two organisations with the pitiful Fateh, you will soon see that “moderates” really are defunct when faced with the power of Israel.
You were correct: it’s political. What’s missing in all this is Hamas is only one faction (and definitely the strongest and most disciplined); what would you do when faced with the others such as the Islamic Jihad and the PFLP or the DFFLP who are much more militant in their rhetoric with Israel? Hamas is capable of keeping these other groups in line with a ceasefire but it remains to be seen if the others can do the same with Hamas. Also, Hamas has some balancing act to do: keep the civilians from dying a slow death, hold infrastructure together and try to create jobs and keep the economy from getting worse than ever and maintaining their resolve in the face of extremist factions that want to put the fight against Israel right now and have an all-out war. What Hamas was back in the 90s accusing Fateh of neutering the resistance, they are now in Fateh’s seat when they address ceasefires and are accused of “going soft” on Israel by the other groups.
Also, Hamas may have some measure of control of these groups, that doesn’t mean they are accountable for everything the other groups do or even some members of their own organisation. Have you ever seen a Qassam launch operation? It’s a two-cent mission that really has no central command. How are you going to severe something that has no direct order from anyone?
Are these scenarios you posit when you try to grasp why Hamas does what it does?
Does Hamas have a right to self-defense here? Any objective reader can attest that those closures only exacerbate tensions and create a melting pot for more militancy. Non-violence is utopian but as the West Bank Palestinians witness, is rather ineffectual. What is the alternative?
All the above arguments point to the fact that Isreal, unfortunately, is the aggressor and is in the wrong and must admit that it bungled. It also points to its great strategic mistake to kill the weak people.
Actually, Hamas has not even imposed Shariah law in that tiny patch of Palestine — Gaza — that it currently controls, so it seems to be making a poor start.
You’re selling them short:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1229868840606
You’re selling them short
No, he isn’t:
Hamas in Gaza: The Islamic Law That Wasn’t.
Although history cannot be reversed, surely, it is obvious to any thinking person that the creation of what cou7ld only be an exclusionary, expanionist “Jewish state” in historic Palestine predicated on the expulsion of its native Muslim and Christian inhabitants (see Herzl and other early Zionist writers), was the major geopolitical blunder of the post WWII era. Although unspeakably tragic, thankfully, for all us, including Jews, current events in the Gaza Strip attest to the fact that Zionism contains the seeds of its own destruction. The Crusaders occupied and controlled Palestine in whole or in part for 250 years. The Zionist occupation, utterly dependent on a now bankrupt and greatly over extended U.S., is entering its death throes.
These attacks were basically the hail mary of Avodah and Kadima, the two groups to the left of Netanyahu’s pro-settler Likud. So far, it appears to be working–the defense minister and Avodah leader Ehud Barak is gaining ground, and the Israeli leftist coalition has pulled even with the right-wing coalition in polls:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051641.html
Yes, this is highly cynical to wage war as a populist electoral scheme. But remember that before the war, the rightists set for a resounding victory, and the most dynamic faction in Israeli politics was led by Moshe Feiglin, an admirer of Hitler. If these trends had continued, or if they reappear in the future, 400 Palestinians dead would have been a good day.
Fortunately, the rate of deaths has decelerated after the initial carnage. Also, I am glad Israel has hit legitimate Hamas targets (although I doubt all targets were legitimate), because Hamas’ main military strategy is to commit flagrant war crimes. But now Barak should cut his losses, phase out the operation, and find some way to spin it as a victory on the campaign trail. Unfortunately, he probably has not learned the lessons of Lebanon (and Iraq, and Somalia, etc.), so he will find a way to blow it by getting too involved and staying in too long. War criminals on all sides will emerge the victors.
Also, I disagree with David that Israel would collapse without US support. Israel has many strengths that are autonomous of America, such as excellent school systems and innovations in high-tech. These strengths can and have been translated into military power–think drones, automated laser targeting, or what have you. So, I think the end result of this is not Israeli collapse, but total Israeli colonization accompanied by intense violence.
Excellent analysis, finally someone.
I’m afraid there is a big difference with the Lebanon war. Hizbollah was able to exact a much higher price with there missiles, shut down a third of the country and damage infrastructure. There was also the fear that Hizb might hit Tel Aviv which probably placed some limit on Israeli escalation. Ultimately those factors forced a ground invasion on terrain that favored Hizb.
Hamas’ missiles do much less damage. The Negev is more sparsely populated, and the missiles aren’t really killing many people. They can keep bombing and avoid a ground invasion.
The stakes are much higher this time.
1)Israel can not afford to be seen as having failed twice.
2)Their entire strategy depends on keeping in power Abbas as their Pierre Lavale.
3)They also can’t cut off Mubarak at the knees by agreeing to a ceasefire ***ESPECIALLY*** if it results in ending the blockade.
To whit, Israeli public opinion is strongly in favor of continued ‘warfare’ (this is more a ghetto uprising)
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051852.html
Internationally, there simply isn’t anywhere near the outrage I recalled following the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And that far greater outrage didn’t stop Israel then, so Hamas can’t count on it now.
I don’t know if a ground invasion will happen or how Hamas will perform. There is always a risk of ambush with multiple IDF casualties and that is probably what frightens the Americans most. Any sign that Hamas is fighting back stirs up Arab unrest-especially in Egypt-and puts Mubarak in the hot seat. The Americans will pressure Israel into a ceasefire if they feel Mubarak is at risk. That’s Hamas’ best bet right now.
I read, and watch and wait. I suffer for the Palestinians and stoke my hate of all things Israeli (My antipathy extends even to the Israeli girl who came to the dooor selling paintings.)
One day, its getting sooner all the time, the agressors will become the benificaries of the world’s venom. I will read, and watch with satisfaction. It is inevitable.
Wait–why the Israeli girl who sells paintings? Were they Zionistic paintings? Maybe she was anti-Zionist, and you just don’t know it! I have multiple Israeli friends who are anti-Zionist. Would you feel “antipathy” for them also?
Congratulations, Juno. You’ve become an anti-Semite. Good luck fighting injustice now. You know, when the Hutus started slaughtering Tutsis, they also thought they were fighting the “aggressors.”
Shlomo,
I read what you are saying, I understand and agree. I do not wish to be anti-Semitic and I am not now. Unfortunately the stark brutality suppresses by better judgement until someone like you reminds me. I was polite to the girl at the door, but supressed my inclination to buy a painting, even though some were quite good.
The problem is she did not paint of the paintings. It is as much a problem for her as for everyone else. Needless deceptions for an unnecesary cause. A waste of her time (& life) and yours, all for an unjust cause. . .
Now she has a new assignment.
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Shlomo, you’re absolutely right — and the points you make are even more important in response to the racist terrorist bile posted here by Jack Tomsen, who seems to see the current horrors in Gaza as legitimating a Nazi view of Jews.
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Uh…some of you guys are really freaking me out. Killing random people around the world isn’t really going to solve anything and I begin to worry when its suggested. I’m just going to assume its a brief moment of anger and frustration and your taking it out on the keyboard. When you think it through, surely good sense will return.
Jack, I see some right wing sites where nutters are having near orgasmic delight at the destruction of Gaza. Try not to sound like them.
I’m hardly a pacifist. I believe the Palestinians and Arabs will never get an equitable deal so long as they have no military option. I would never advise any party to disarm. Renunciation of violence must be bilateral. But power is meant to be a deterrent, not something to be used willy nilly.
And I don’t think the words “jewess,” or its sister, “negress” have been used since the 19th century.
Ouch. Not sure if the Nazi crap is someone’s idea of “humor,” but I find it nauseating.
This is one of the great blogs on the Internet, and it’d be really cool if people didn’t treat the comment section as some kind of moral urinal.
I am quite certain there are other places for that on the Internet.
Thank you.
Tony, you seem to imply that if Israel hadn’t blockaded Gaza, i.e. continued the occupation of Gaza by other means, then the Hamas government in power, which enjoys the absolutely overwhelming support of the vast majority of Gazans, would long since have been concentrating on developing the Israeli glasshouse infrastructure left behind into a thriving vegetable export business employing thousands of Gazans, on attracting investment and modern industry to Gaza to turn it into the Hong Kong of the Levant, on using Gulf Arab and international funding to build modern apartment complexes in place of neglected and rundown neighbourhoods inhabited by descendants of 1948 refugees from Ashkelon, and in developing sewerage and public park infrastructures to rapidly improve living conditions in Gaza. And all this while extending a hand of peace to Israel to ensure that the border remains open and virtual, to ensure freedom of movement between Gaza and the West Bank, and to ensure that huge numbers of unemployed Gazans could find a decent livelihood working in Israel.
Really?
@ # 28
I don’t think anybody was predicting a Mediterranian Switzerland. Be that as it may, everyone is entitled to access to food, water and medicine. It shouldn’t be contingent on meeting someone else’s political requirements.
**EVERYONE** is entitled to self defense, not just Israel. So while I understand Israel does not want weapons snuck into Gaza, its not entitled to starve people to prevent that outcome.
Tony, the fundamental question is whether or not it is legitimate for a sovereign Jewish state – within whatever borders – to impose itself by force of arms on a piece of land that the Arabs regard as their own inalienable patrimony – notwithstanding the legal figleaf provided by the 1947 UN decision to partition the British Mandated Territory of Palestine. This is the faultline: whether it is legitimate or not to maintain by force a Jewish State in South-Western Syria. The narratives on the opposing sides across this faultline are both incompatible and incommensurable. The arguments on both sides have always been full of ambiguity and prevarication, both sides have made many catastrophic mistakes in pursuing their respective objectives, and neither side has ever been strong enough to foist a final victory over the other. I agree with you that the Zionist solution to the problem of European Jewry was neither far-sighted nor particularly intelligent. Unfortunately however, we are well and truly stuck with it now, and the Jews of Israel are not going anywhere. The future is murky, to say the least. A Palestinian Arab state of Mafia-style clans and gangs is politically, economically and strategically utterly unviable, no matter how many figleafs are stuck on its private parts. A binational state is also completely unviable, because Israelis will never buy into it, apart from some colleagues of yours on what is called the far-left political fringe in Israel. On the other hand, Israel will sooner or later have to retreat back to the 1948 armistice lines, because a future American administration will force it to do so for reasons of American self-interest. However, this will by no means guarantee any kind of peace and quiet, but will only mark the start of the next round of the Palestinian Arab struggle against the “Zionist entity.” And there will still be the problem of a huge and rapidly increasing Palestinian Arab population in Northern Israel, and the problem of the descendants of the 1948 refugees, who keep multiplying like rabbits. Ultimately nothing good can come out of this explosive mix, The next stand in Masada is likely to be nuclear, bacterological and chemical, leaving the entire Middle East a lifeless moonscape from Teheran to Tripoli, and from Jerusalem to Mecca.
Here in the great US of A, one can only sit and watch in utter disgust the bloodbath unleashed by the Israeli government de jour upon their hapless neighbours who are guilty of “living-while-Palestinian”. Even more disgusting than this whole-sale bombing of the prisoners of Gaza, are the feeble apologists like Israeli mom and shlomo – perfect examples of what passes in that part of the woods for “Bleeding hearts” (ie, their own – never the others).
Tony takes exception with a blatantly hypocritical – and blood-curdlingly cruel – article by one Benny Morris to whom the venerable NYT’s deigned to give a platform. And rightly so that this Morris character should be taken to task. Israeli mom escapes injury to her immortal soul by suggesting that Morris is marginal in Israel. Meaning, one assumes, that not everyone there is as utterly heartless. But then, the ones with the “hearts” (a tad selective that those are) go on talking about a real-life massacre as if there was, in fact, a “war” going on. Nice try. By all means, let’s keep it up. Eventually though, even the thickest wook cannot hide the light from even the most near-sighted eyes.
“This sort of silliness makes you onder if anyone actually edits the NYT’s op ed page.”
I agreed with your entire article, but I found the irony of the misspelled ‘wonder’ to be delicious.
@ # 31
With respect, if you are stuck in a cage with a tiger, you don’t tweak its tail all the time and keep sticking pins into it.
Because if you do that, then – surprise!, surprise! – it is likely to maul you.
And never mind you bitterly complaining about it to “world opinion.”
It doesn’t matter how much you moan about it, it was you who caused yourself to get thoroughly mauled, and you are lucky to have escaped with your life.
But let’s suppose that “dana” is perfectly right in his or her righteous outrage and in every respect of what s/he is saying.
What, then, would “dana” propose that the Israelis do?
And after they did exactly what “dana” proposed, there would no doubt come a golden age of blessed peace and quiet on all the Holy Land fronts.
And the moon is made out of green cheese….
“But let’s suppose that “dana” is perfectly right in his or her righteous outrage and in every respect of what s/he is saying.
What, then, would “dana” propose that the Israelis do?”
That is the crux of it. Israel is, to put it bluntly, is an apartheid state based on ethnic cleansing. It now wishes that there be absolutely no consequence whatsoever to said apartheid and ethnic cleansing. It feels the world is obliged to shield it from all those consequences. If not, its overwhelming military power should do the trick most of the time.
It is like a criminal who, having committed one crime, must now commit many more to avoid capture for the first one.
After all, what do expect him to do?
So, in a sense, you are quite correct. There is nothing Israel can do except follow its current policy to its logical conclusion; either more ethnic cleansing….or quite possibly a more uhm, definitive solution.
I do not exaggerate. The more the world is silent, the more Israel feels it can get away with greater and greater crimes. The more Palestinians are dehumanized the less concern people will feel about there deaths in large numbers. Next time Israel will have to kill a thousand all at once for people to even notice. Comparing this to Germany 1943 is, I grant you, hyperbole. But Germany 1936? or ’37-38? The Holocaust didn’t just occur ex-nihilo.
Do not be fooled by the lack of gas chambers in Gaza. A massive outbreak of cholera or any number of diseases could rapidly kill 100s of thousands. Cold and pneumonia would kill off the elderly (it is winter, you know) Do you think this hasn’t crossed the minds of Livni, Netanyahu, Barak, et al? And the beauty of it is they can blame it all on Hamas and those rockets.
After all, they did poke the tiger, right?
Dana,
I’m sorry I strike you as “more disgusting than this whole-sale bombing” because I actually combine my ideals with some type of pragmatic perspective of Israeli politics. Perhaps it is a bit disorienting for you to encounter “bleeding hearts” who don’t think Israelis are pure evil–e.g., we are not so eager for the day war criminals in Hamas can carpet-bomb Tel Aviv. But you will soon learn that you and I are in fact allies, and I am hoping you figure this out before genocide is already under way.
@#34
Ziad said:
“That is the crux of it. Israel is, to put it bluntly, is an apartheid state based on ethnic cleansing. It now wishes that there be absolutely no consequence whatsoever to said apartheid and ethnic cleansing.”
I agree.
What you point to here is actually quite inevitable, given that Zionism mandates the imposition by force of a Jewish state in a piece of land that the Arabs consider to be part of their patrimony.
Zionism is a 19th century solution to a 19th century European problem that, from an Arab and a politically correct leftist point of view, inevitably leads to unacceptable consequences in the 21st century, unintended consequences and blowbacks as they might be from the Zionist and broadly based Jewish perspective.
It is furthermore unrealistic to expect that either the Arabs or the politically correct left will ever be prepared to put up with even the idea of a Jewish state.
That is why I think that the Zionist project has no future: it does not fit in any way into the context of a politically correct, post-colonial, post-Christian and post-nationalist world, where Zionism is seen as a fundamentally misbegotten ideology and there is every expectation that the nation building project it inspired is bound to fail sooner or later.
The only question is whether it is going to be a soft landing or a hard landing for the region.
Having said all of the above, I would like however to point out that I have no sense of moral outrage about Israel and the way it treats its enemies, as Tony and the overwhelming majority of his readers obviously have. On the contrary, I barrack for Israel and I am enthralled by the romance and heroism of building a state for the Jewish people.
And as Stalin famously pointed out: if you want to make an omlette, you have to break eggs.
The only thing is that from a purely pragmatic point of view, I think that in the long run Israel’s chances of getting its omlette done has about as much chance as a snowball in hell not melting.
Mike:
First of all, it was Lenin, not Stalin who said “If you want to make an omelette, you have to break eggs”.
Secondly, you point out how in today’s modern “post-Christian, post-Modern, post-Nationalism” world there is no place for Zionism, a Jewish state. How do you feel about Pakistan, a state created on ethnic-religious lines that ethnically cleansed and dispossed the native Hindu and Sikh populations, all in the name of a particular religion, and whose instability and nuclear weapons threaten the entire world?
YBD: Don’t know about these fellows, but I think Pakistan continues to prove just what a spectacularly bad idea it was/is. And could you provide a citation for Lenin saying that? I don’t think that quote is his, or Stalin’s for that matter, even if the reasoning is consistent with theirs.
@#37
1.
I didn’t say that “in today’s modern “post-Christian, post-Modern, post-Nationalism” world there is no place for Zionism, a Jewish state.” What I DID say was that “I think that the Zionist project has no future: it does not fit in any way into the context of a politically correct, post-colonial, post-Christian and post-nationalist world” – which is very different from what you attribute to me. And personally I wish very much that this was not the case, that contrary to what I claim, Israel could look forward to a secure and stable future, instead of a toxic and disastrous one.
2.
Re Pakistan. If Pakistan is the country that best compares with Israel,in the matter of “a state created on ethnic-religious lines that ethnically cleansed and dispossed the native […] populations, all in the name of a particular religion, and whose instability and nuclear weapons threaten the entire world,” then we are in a bad way indeed, with not a hope in hell of surviving in the longer run. Furthermore, as a huge Moslem state, Pakistan is far better placed to survive than tiny Israel, not least because it does not have to contend with anything remotely like the Jew-hatred in the ranks of the European left and on the Arab street. And with an almost 200 million population, even if Pakistan was to ultimately break up or get nuked, there would still remain plenty of Paki raghads to go around and reconstitute themselves. Thus, they can afford to be retarded and totally stoopid in everything they do, and to vacuously throw their weight around, because for them there are no certainly, their survival is certainly ot at stake. This is not,however the case for the Jews of Israel. Of course, it is also true, as Keynes pointed out, that “in the long run we are all dead.” So, as the Romans used to say: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi. And yes, it’s not fair – because if Pakistan is allowed to get away with it, then why isn’t Israel, you might say. Well, for starters, for Israel to be allowed to get away with it, Israel would first of all have to achieve the same kind of crushing victory over the entire Moslem world, as the Allies achieved over the Germans in WW2. Then all forced population exchanges and ethnic cleansings would suddenly become kosher and the defeated Moslems would be told to go suck on it and get themselves a life. So yes, it is not fair, because Israel is unfortunately not quite in the league, and never has been, to force its will on even a bunch of South-West Syrian Arab peasants and maffiosi, not to mention the entire Moslem Arab world.
3.
If you Google omelette and Stalin, you will find no attributions to Lenin. But actually, I first heard this saying from Shimon Peres, in Hebrew, many years ago.
@#39
Correction
Sorry, in the above entry, the following sentence got garbled:
Thus, they can afford to be retarded and totally stoopid in everything they do, and to vacuously throw their weight around, because for them there are no consequences, and their survival is certainly not at stake.
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Wasn’t it Orwell who said that only a potential egg is allowed to come up with that saying about an omelette and eggs ? Unfortunately it is generally the egg breakers who do so.
Shlomo said:
“Also, I disagree with David that Israel would collapse without US support. Israel has many strengths that are autonomous of America, such as excellent school systems and innovations in high-tech. These strengths can and have been translated into military power–think drones, automated laser targeting, or what have you.”
The South African apartheid state had these strengths as well. What it suffered from was a lack of moral legitimacy that ultimately led to a wide boycot it couldn’t live with. The ambiguous character of Zionism (an escape from racism based on racism) and the lingering respect for it has thus far shielded Israel from a similar fate. But the tide might be turning and the withdrawal of the US’s political support could be a crucial element in this.
There is no nuclear response to a world wide boycot.
What a l.o.s.@#40
It’s not rocket science, even I understand it.
If Hamas didn’t rocket Israel on 19th, this would not be happening and they wouldn’t be crying to everyone to stop the bombing. Simple as that.
honey badger
Please reassure me that you write this blog in your spare time or else I am going to have to boycott it along with the company you work for.
link.
Arie,
Everyone knew the Beijing regime’s brutality twenty years ago, when it mass-murdered peaceful student protesters. There was, seemingly, widening diplomatic isolation and a loss of moral legitimacy.
How’d that work out?
Sadly, i have to agree with Shlomo. There was much greater international outrage at Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and yet it didn’t matter. The Israelis shrugged it off and went into Beirut and placed the Phalangists in power. Since then, the international community has grown quite numb about these things.
And, yet, Israel is no longer in Lebanon. When it went in again in 2006, there was actually a great deal of **support** from the International community. And yet…they left again.
I do feel the balance of power is changing in the middle east, regardless of what happens in Gaza. Hizbollah is, of course, in no condition to invade Israel. But for the first time, they successfully contested Israel’s advance into Arab lands was repelled. They took advantage of Israel’s lack of strategic depth and it’s inability to maintain a long mobilization. Iran is gaining Nuclear know-how regardless of all efforts to stop it. The Mubarak regime is not long for this world. The post cold war American supremacy is coming to a gradual end. Oil isn’t going to be cheap forever.
As these changes become more apparent and more inevitable, you will likely see a shift in global perceptions. Total support for Israel’s maximalist positions will become more and more costly, and eventually, simply not worth the trouble.
Lastly, there is Israel’s “deterrence.” But to establish it, Israel is attacking the absolute weakest enemy it could find. That alone speaks for itself.
Shlomo
How can you boycot a country that contains about 20 % of humanity? It is much easier to do so with one that harbours only 0,1 %.
Tony! You wrote anything cynical just stupidly naive. I also not observing Jew formerly from USSR. I was beaten up and discriminated and went through hell and I know what is to be a Jew. I cherish Israel! Elections shmelections. Force eradicates terrorists because it is only way to eradicate them! Nazi Germany was defeated by force. Difference between Hamas and Hitler Germany just the size! My friends and relatives live all over in Israel and why they have to be scared every day by rockets ! Why you are and the world not sorry for your fellow Jews who are getting killed by the rockets and no one blames terrorists. What they have to do is to give up! and their civilians will be saved and humanitarian crisis will be over. Such a media as I watch in BBC interpretation encourages terrorists to fight and hide behind backs of so called civilians who fully supported Hamas hoping that international pressure wouldn’t let Israel to defend itself. I believe that media must share responsibility with terrorists for blood of innocents showing wounded fighters whom they call civilians and trying to create a propaganda from freedom of press. The way media behaves shows that Hitler kind of Antisemitism in Europe still thrives! What you may be right that if international pressure will press Israeli government hard enough and the operation wouldn’t end it by crash will create a ground for a new war later as it happens in Southern Lebanon with Hezbollah.
You naively believe that Hamas wants to get out of isolation. it is a propaganda for a last day or two in European media. Read chronology and you will see that every time when Israel opened gates Hamas was shooting at trucks because they make money getting goods illegally through tunnels. One Israeli immigrant from Moldova was killed at the fuel terminal while was opening it. You don’t have right information just keeping up with anti – Israeli propaganda.
I don’t understand so called Liberal Jews. Who you defend? Bandits? Terrorists? You look like jewsih police in Ghetto, honestly! Where would you escape in case of Holocaust if Israel wouldn’t exist? Your friends first betray you as it always was. Cosmopolitanism is a wish for some jews not a reality.
I believe we have to be united at least in time of crisis for common good.
“My friends and relatives live all over in Israel and why they have to be scared every day by rockets !”
The range of those rockets seems to have increased miraculously.
What can one say about the rest of that post? Blind tribalism and recourse to all the old spooks. And the Palestinians have to just give up (that is acquiesce in the theft of their land and being the permanent helots of Israel) and all will be fine.
Why did you bother Igor?
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You come from Russia but feel more entitled to the land than Palestinians?? Antisemitism is the only form of bigotry that matters to you?
I’m sorry you were beaten for being Jewish. I’m sorry you feel entitled to beat up others because they’re not.
Igor, The Russians occupied many countries, where they were the chosen people. Many of those occupiers were nominally Jewish, but thoroughly imbued with the Stalinist ideology. You Russians were and are, especially scornful of the Caucasus peoples. You probably discovered your “Jewishness” when the opportunity to emigrate to Israel arose. You brought your xenophobic, racist views along with you. You Russians were the “chosen people” in the Soviet Union, so why not in Israel? Lieberman, the head of the Russian Jews party in Israel, is one of the most virulent Palestinian haters in Israel, and that’s saying a lot.
If you were beaten, it wasn’t for being “jewish”. It was because you had the opporunity to emigrate, thanks to the US, while the average Russian was stuck with the deprivations of post 1989 Russia.