A counter-factual is an historical what-if, such as what would the course of history have been if Hitler had not invaded the Soviet Union or if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War? Counter-factuals make for fascinating speculation but are ultimately self-defeating. Reality always has a habit of intruding in the end.
What, then, is one to call Binyamin Netanyahu’s ominous “it is 1938, Iran is Germany and it is arming itself with nuclear weapons?” Future non-factual, perhaps? Or under-the-counter factual? Whatever we call it, it was very far from being factual, either as an historical analogy or as a prediction with a reasonable basis for accuracy. Bibi may know how to move crowds but his grasp on reality is tenuous.
What’s interesting about the 1938 analogy is not that Netanyahu chose to use it – after all, what better bogeyman is there for an Israeli politician wanting to spread anxiety and fear than Hitler? – but what is says about Netanyahu himself and the contempt with which he treats the intelligence of his audience, American Jews and Israelis alike.
Why, for instance, did he choose the year 1938? He could have chosen 1937, say, or 1939, when the plight of the Jews in Europe was just as precarious as in 1938, if not more so. But he chose 1938, a year which has gone down in history as the year of Munich; the year in which Chamberlain and the other “appeasers” betrayed Czechoslovakia.
There’s a clear, if subliminal, message in that. Israel is Czechoslovakia, Bibi is telling us, and the UN, the EU and all the rest (with the exception, one assumes, of Bush’s America) are the appeasers. They’re hell bent on selling Israel out to the new Hitler.
Except, of course, that Czechoslovakia's army was no match for Hitler's in 1938 and most of its heavy industry and land defenses were in the Sudetenland, which had been ceded to Germany anyway. It was unable to defend itself after the sell-out, which is patently not the case with Israel, despite the pathetic performance in Lebanon recently. And Czechoslovakia had played no role in the crisis in Europe, whereas most Western politicians outside Washington believe that Israel has directly contributed to the instability in the whole of the Middle East. Czechoslovakia was a pawn, Israel is a participant.
So Israel, in the Netanyahu world view, is both Czechoslovakia and the pre-war Jews. Both a country on the verge of being betrayed and the defenseless innocents bound for the slaughter.
Iran is Germany, Netanyahu said. Is it? There’s no doubting the fact that Iran is run by a pernicious regime and its president is a particularly unappealing character. By perpetuating the ‘Holocaust is a myth’ line, Iran has put itself on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of decency. All that is a given. Iran is likely to continue to be a major irritant to the Western liberal democracies, not to mention to Israel.
But that doesn’t make it analogous to Germany in 1938, the strongest land power in Europe and a highly militarized society bent on territorial aggrandizement and racial domination. Iran's military power is unproven (by some accounts it has yet to fully recover from its war with Iraq in the Eighties) and it has shown little appetite for territorial acquisition or Shi’ite regional hegemony, other than its support of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran’s ambitions probably don’t extend much further than some sort of hegemony over the Iraqi Shia and the hunger of the perennially weak for recognition and respect.
None of that is of any importance, Netanyahu seems to be saying, because Iran is arming itself with nuclear weapons – the implication being that a nuclear Iran will run amok, with Israel as its first target. Not being a prophet, I can’t say categorically that it won’t; just as Netanyahu can’t know for sure that it will (unless prophecy is amongst the talents that this modest and unassuming man has hidden from the public.) But, if history is anything to go by, the chances are that it won’t.
For over a generation during the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union, both nuclear armed to the teeth, faced each other down without ever pushing the nuclear button. They fought dozens of proxy wars in Vietnam, Angola and elsewhere, but neither opted for the nuclear option. The reason was Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD.) the certainty that any resort to nuclear weapons would bring down both their houses. More recently, India and Pakistan have proved the same principle; despite their ongoing dispute over Kashmir, relations between the two long-time enemies have grown warmer since they both joined the nuclear fraternity. The possession of nuclear weapons tends to focus the mind.
A nuclear Iran, face to face (or warhead to warhead) with a nuclear Israel, is likely to show similar restraint. No doubt it will continue meddling in Lebanon and Iraq and its anti-Israel rhetoric is likely to be as vituperative as ever, but even Ahmadinejad is smart enough to understand that any nuclear strike on Israel will mean the end of Iran as we know it today.
If anything, the threat of Iran with nuclear weapons may be what is needed to persuade Israel’s leaders that stasis is not a viable diplomatic option in the long term.
Bibi got it wrong. Israel, despite it’s ‘we won’t be the first to introduce nuclear weapons’ camouflage, is a nuclear power, not the hapless Czechoslovakia of 1938 nor the defenseless Jewish communities of Europe before World War II. If Europe and perhaps even the US (with the assistance of James Baker) do begin to pressure Israel to finally negotiate with the Palestinians, it will not be because they want to throw a bone to Iran, a la Czechoslovakia and Germany, but because they have concluded correctly that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is at the heart of the anarchy and despair that characterize the Middle East today.
Nuclear weapons are a blight on our so-called civilization and their possession by any country is regrettable. But if Netanyahu wants to do something useful for Israel and the region, he should stop his scare-mongering and start making peace. Only at peace will Israel be secure.
Showing posts with label Essays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Essays. Show all posts
Monday, November 20, 2006
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Remembering Robert
Much has been written about Robert Rosenberg in the few days since he died and Robert, I suspect, would have been gratified but a little embarrassed by the superlatives. Beneath his larger-than-life persona and his penchant for self-aggrandizement, Robert was a private person and he took himself, along with much else, with liberal pinches of salt. Robert was not one to be taken in by hyperbole.
Not that what has been said and written about him is hyperbole; far from it. Robert was an accomplished writer and journalist, with an almost clairvoyant understanding of the possibilities of technology in the Information Age and a keen nose for the ridiculous and pretentious in our daily lives. He richly deserved all the praise that has come his way.
How many of us, after all, have written a bunch of novels, been a blogger before the term even existed, single-handedly run a Web site with an international audience for over 10 years and provided the production backbone for a daily national newspaper, as Ha’aretz editor David Landau wrote this week? The answer is very, very few. Robert was one of a kind.
But Robert’s myriad accomplishments tell only part of the story. And the public Robert, tall and dashing with a cavalry mustache and a mouth that moved faster than the speed of light, is also only part of the story. Like all consummate personalities, Robert was a complex individual and his true beauty lay in the quieter, more subtle recesses of his nature.
Robert was a good person; “good” in the majestic, almost religious sense of the word, though religious is not a quality that I would readily associate with him. (Silvie, his wife, assures me, however, that he could hold his own when it came to knocking off a bracha. That was a side of him I never knew.) He was a virtuous person. He knew instinctively the difference between right and wrong and his life was a constant quest after right. In his politics, as in his personal relationships, Robert embodied an innate humanity and kindness.
Others have written that they never heard him say a bad word about anyone and I can testify to the truth of that. Despite the strength of his opinions – and Robert was never lacking in the opinion department – he had a genteel, almost old-fashioned sense of propriety. Coarseness was alien to him. He was an island, a beacon, in this increasingly crass and boorish society. He was that rarest of all things, a truly gentle soul (which may come as a surprise to those who only knew his bluff, sometimes intimidating exterior.)
Above all, Robert was an optimist, another rare quality in today’s depressed world. He not only was good, he believed in good, and he believed that good would prevail. I can’t recall ever having seen him really down, even when he had every reason to be so. Despite the knocks he took, and there were many, Robert was always ready with another idea, another goal. He never let the present distort the promise of the future.
Not even cancer could hold Robert down. There were many times during his illness when he was the most positive, the most optimistic, person in the room. The same self-confidence that sometimes put him over the top when he was healthy was his great strength when he was ill. In the first year or so of his illness he was full of plans for the future and he was writing a novel when he died. Three weeks before he finally succumbed to his cancer, we were discussing how Ariga, his Web site, could be continued without him. Weak and in great pain, he nevertheless jumped up with typical Robert impetuosity and began knocking out a new site layout on his laptop, his mind working and his mouth going a mile a minute. He was Robert until the end and in his last days he had more life in him than most of us have in a lifetime.
I happened to have an operation and was off work for several weeks just when Robert began his final descent towards death. We would sit around – no longer with a couple of bottles between us; his health no longer permitted liquid indulgence – and talk about things for hours. We spoke about current affairs and books (one of the last things he did was receive a new consignment of books from Amazon, though by then he was unable to read much) and we laughed a lot. I laughed more and spoke more utter nonsense with Robert than with anyone else. There was very little nostalgia, which is surprising for middle-aged people whose lives are mostly behind them. But that was Robert; he rarely looked back.
Robert may have died, but a big part of him remains – and her name is Silvie. Robert and Silvie were more than lovers, more than just another married couple. They were symbiotic, virtually one unit. They exemplified a mutuality of love, caring and respect. I don’t think I have ever had a friendship with a couple in which there wasn’t an imbalance, a natural leaning on my part towards one of the partners. But Rob and Silvie were different. It was impossible to love one without loving the other.
I have a final image of Robert lying in his hospital bed in the week before he died and Sylvie leaning over him, her long blonde hair splayed over his emaciated chest. She was caressing his drawn, jaundiced cheek and whispering in his ear. What she said remains between them. But it was lovely to see.
Not that what has been said and written about him is hyperbole; far from it. Robert was an accomplished writer and journalist, with an almost clairvoyant understanding of the possibilities of technology in the Information Age and a keen nose for the ridiculous and pretentious in our daily lives. He richly deserved all the praise that has come his way.
How many of us, after all, have written a bunch of novels, been a blogger before the term even existed, single-handedly run a Web site with an international audience for over 10 years and provided the production backbone for a daily national newspaper, as Ha’aretz editor David Landau wrote this week? The answer is very, very few. Robert was one of a kind.
But Robert’s myriad accomplishments tell only part of the story. And the public Robert, tall and dashing with a cavalry mustache and a mouth that moved faster than the speed of light, is also only part of the story. Like all consummate personalities, Robert was a complex individual and his true beauty lay in the quieter, more subtle recesses of his nature.
Robert was a good person; “good” in the majestic, almost religious sense of the word, though religious is not a quality that I would readily associate with him. (Silvie, his wife, assures me, however, that he could hold his own when it came to knocking off a bracha. That was a side of him I never knew.) He was a virtuous person. He knew instinctively the difference between right and wrong and his life was a constant quest after right. In his politics, as in his personal relationships, Robert embodied an innate humanity and kindness.
Others have written that they never heard him say a bad word about anyone and I can testify to the truth of that. Despite the strength of his opinions – and Robert was never lacking in the opinion department – he had a genteel, almost old-fashioned sense of propriety. Coarseness was alien to him. He was an island, a beacon, in this increasingly crass and boorish society. He was that rarest of all things, a truly gentle soul (which may come as a surprise to those who only knew his bluff, sometimes intimidating exterior.)
Above all, Robert was an optimist, another rare quality in today’s depressed world. He not only was good, he believed in good, and he believed that good would prevail. I can’t recall ever having seen him really down, even when he had every reason to be so. Despite the knocks he took, and there were many, Robert was always ready with another idea, another goal. He never let the present distort the promise of the future.
Not even cancer could hold Robert down. There were many times during his illness when he was the most positive, the most optimistic, person in the room. The same self-confidence that sometimes put him over the top when he was healthy was his great strength when he was ill. In the first year or so of his illness he was full of plans for the future and he was writing a novel when he died. Three weeks before he finally succumbed to his cancer, we were discussing how Ariga, his Web site, could be continued without him. Weak and in great pain, he nevertheless jumped up with typical Robert impetuosity and began knocking out a new site layout on his laptop, his mind working and his mouth going a mile a minute. He was Robert until the end and in his last days he had more life in him than most of us have in a lifetime.
I happened to have an operation and was off work for several weeks just when Robert began his final descent towards death. We would sit around – no longer with a couple of bottles between us; his health no longer permitted liquid indulgence – and talk about things for hours. We spoke about current affairs and books (one of the last things he did was receive a new consignment of books from Amazon, though by then he was unable to read much) and we laughed a lot. I laughed more and spoke more utter nonsense with Robert than with anyone else. There was very little nostalgia, which is surprising for middle-aged people whose lives are mostly behind them. But that was Robert; he rarely looked back.
Robert may have died, but a big part of him remains – and her name is Silvie. Robert and Silvie were more than lovers, more than just another married couple. They were symbiotic, virtually one unit. They exemplified a mutuality of love, caring and respect. I don’t think I have ever had a friendship with a couple in which there wasn’t an imbalance, a natural leaning on my part towards one of the partners. But Rob and Silvie were different. It was impossible to love one without loving the other.
I have a final image of Robert lying in his hospital bed in the week before he died and Sylvie leaning over him, her long blonde hair splayed over his emaciated chest. She was caressing his drawn, jaundiced cheek and whispering in his ear. What she said remains between them. But it was lovely to see.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Logic and Illogic
Back in Israel after a three-week family vacation in South Africa. Before leaving, I said facetiously to friends at work that they had three weeks to sort out the mess in Lebanon. I figured I was on safe ground, but it turns out that I was wrong.
The war is still raging - though limping is probably a better way of putting it. I have spent the time since my return immersing myself in the Israeli media. Unlike my 22-year-old daughter, for whom war news is an unwelcome distraction from the really important things in Tel Aviv life, I can’t bear to have major events unfolding around me without knowing the minutiae. Wars are made for news junkies like myself.
This is what I’ve found:
Israel is reverting to fractious form. The initial national consensus in favor of the war is fragmenting – at least as portrayed in the media. According to a poll in Ha’aretz today, a minority of Israelis now believes that the war will end well for Israel. Other reports portray government ministers as being at loggerheads with each other (Prime Minister Olmert and his Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, for example) and sharp differences between the political and military echelons. Some things never change, apparently.
Not that the war is universally unpopular, of course. The TV is full of interviews with wounded soldiers lying in hospital beds who, to a man, seem to be itching to get back to the fray. I even heard a prominent TV commentator describe it as “a war of survival,” which surprised me somewhat. Clearly, a reasonably convincing argument can be made that Israel had to respond in force to the initial Hizbollah attack, but to describe the threat posed to Israel by Hizbollah as existential seems to me to be stretching things a bit.
It wasn’t too long ago that Hizbollah was treated with disdain by Israeli officials and the media. But the fundamentalist militia seems to have benefited from some elastic arithmetic as the fighting has ground on and Israeli military losses have mounted. I could swear that Israeli intelligence sources credited them with far fewer men and missiles at the start of the hostilities than they do today. Hizbollah seems to be a unique form of fighting force; its numbers increase as its men are killed and its missiles multiply as launchers are destroyed. We should all be so lucky.
Not being a betting man, I have no intention of predicting how all this is going to play out eventually. But it’s a safe guess that the wisdom of going to war will come under close scrutiny, along with the manner in which the war has been waged. Olmert’s initial bravado, intelligence estimates about Hizbollah strength and preparedness, the early reliance on air strikes only – all are already being questioned in the media. In all likelihood, yet another Israeli judge will soon be giving his name to yet another commission of inquiry.
The question that irks me is how a country with so many ostensibly smart people can behave so stupidly. When Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said in the first days of the campaign that Israel was bombing the Lebanese so that they would turn against Hizbollah, surely there was someone in his immediate circle who could have pointed out the ludicrousness of such thinking? (It’s too much to expect that the a man who feels only a slight shudder of the wing when dropping a bomb on civilians would be able to figure it out for himself.)
Surely, when Defense Minister Amir Peretz gave the go-ahead for the destruction of Lebanese bridges, refineries and other infrastructure he did not actually believe that it would endear Israel to the Lebanese and instill in them a belated understanding of their true self-interest?
Did the leaders of Israel honestly believe that the civilized world (with the exception of George Bush and his Downing Street puppet) would regard the bombing of Beirut and the killing of hundreds of civilians as a proportionate reaction to the killing of one Israeli soldier and the capture of another two?
Difficult as it may be to believe, I suspect that the answer to all these questions is that Israel’s leaders and generals did actually believe their own perverted logic, I say that because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate: that our neophyte prime minister and his military masters launched a war under false pretences and with scant preparation, at the price of dozens of fatalities and hundreds of wounded, the collapse of normal life in the entire north of the country and the opprobrium of the civilized world.
And that leads us to the deeper question: what is it about the Israeli reality that distorts our judgment to such a degree? We have some of the world’s smartest scientists, businessmen and academics, but confront us with the existential questions of war, peace and relations with the Arabs and our reason deserts us. Our vision is suddenly channeled through a prism that turns white into black and wrong into right. We act and react in a manner that is usually counter to our own self-interest.
I have a work colleague of messianic bent who would probably say that it is in fact Israel which sees the true dimensions of the Islamic threat and it is the rest of the so-called civilized world which is suffers from reduced vision. (in fact, he would attribute clarity to only a small minority of Israelis, namely those living in the occupied territories. He’s no fan of the government.)
I don’t buy that. There’s no doubt that fundamentalist Islam is a malignant force with which Israel and the rest of the world need to contend. But Israel’s myopia began long before Bin Laden entered the picture and the intractable conflict in the Middle East has only added fuel to the fundamentalist fire. Terrorism is a consequence of the inability to reach peace between Israel and its neighbors, not its cause.
The illogic of Israeli logic comes from different places entirely. It has to do with the legacy of the Holocaust and our compulsion to apply the lessons of the Nazi genocide to our modern day lives in the Middle East, which is an historical absurdity. It comes from the centuries of Jewish suffering prior to the Holocaust and the “poor Samson” complex that has resulted from the contradiction between past weakness and current strength. It comes from too many years of conflict and loss which have amputated our ability to see the suffering of others. It comes from almost 40 years of occupation of Palestinian land and people, which has engendered in us a baleful hard-heartedness and anti-Arab racism.
Most of all, it comes from the seductive power of military might and the blinkered world view of men and women whose formative experiences occur in the military environment. Armies are dangerous things, not only to those against whom they are wielded but to those who wield them as well. They can foster leadership and initiative in young people but only within a tightly restricted frame of reference. Armies do not, as a rule, expand horizons. Israel would be a lot better off living in peace with its neighbors in a small and modest state than as the regional super-power in constant conflict.
The war is still raging - though limping is probably a better way of putting it. I have spent the time since my return immersing myself in the Israeli media. Unlike my 22-year-old daughter, for whom war news is an unwelcome distraction from the really important things in Tel Aviv life, I can’t bear to have major events unfolding around me without knowing the minutiae. Wars are made for news junkies like myself.
This is what I’ve found:
Israel is reverting to fractious form. The initial national consensus in favor of the war is fragmenting – at least as portrayed in the media. According to a poll in Ha’aretz today, a minority of Israelis now believes that the war will end well for Israel. Other reports portray government ministers as being at loggerheads with each other (Prime Minister Olmert and his Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, for example) and sharp differences between the political and military echelons. Some things never change, apparently.
Not that the war is universally unpopular, of course. The TV is full of interviews with wounded soldiers lying in hospital beds who, to a man, seem to be itching to get back to the fray. I even heard a prominent TV commentator describe it as “a war of survival,” which surprised me somewhat. Clearly, a reasonably convincing argument can be made that Israel had to respond in force to the initial Hizbollah attack, but to describe the threat posed to Israel by Hizbollah as existential seems to me to be stretching things a bit.
It wasn’t too long ago that Hizbollah was treated with disdain by Israeli officials and the media. But the fundamentalist militia seems to have benefited from some elastic arithmetic as the fighting has ground on and Israeli military losses have mounted. I could swear that Israeli intelligence sources credited them with far fewer men and missiles at the start of the hostilities than they do today. Hizbollah seems to be a unique form of fighting force; its numbers increase as its men are killed and its missiles multiply as launchers are destroyed. We should all be so lucky.
Not being a betting man, I have no intention of predicting how all this is going to play out eventually. But it’s a safe guess that the wisdom of going to war will come under close scrutiny, along with the manner in which the war has been waged. Olmert’s initial bravado, intelligence estimates about Hizbollah strength and preparedness, the early reliance on air strikes only – all are already being questioned in the media. In all likelihood, yet another Israeli judge will soon be giving his name to yet another commission of inquiry.
The question that irks me is how a country with so many ostensibly smart people can behave so stupidly. When Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said in the first days of the campaign that Israel was bombing the Lebanese so that they would turn against Hizbollah, surely there was someone in his immediate circle who could have pointed out the ludicrousness of such thinking? (It’s too much to expect that the a man who feels only a slight shudder of the wing when dropping a bomb on civilians would be able to figure it out for himself.)
Surely, when Defense Minister Amir Peretz gave the go-ahead for the destruction of Lebanese bridges, refineries and other infrastructure he did not actually believe that it would endear Israel to the Lebanese and instill in them a belated understanding of their true self-interest?
Did the leaders of Israel honestly believe that the civilized world (with the exception of George Bush and his Downing Street puppet) would regard the bombing of Beirut and the killing of hundreds of civilians as a proportionate reaction to the killing of one Israeli soldier and the capture of another two?
Difficult as it may be to believe, I suspect that the answer to all these questions is that Israel’s leaders and generals did actually believe their own perverted logic, I say that because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate: that our neophyte prime minister and his military masters launched a war under false pretences and with scant preparation, at the price of dozens of fatalities and hundreds of wounded, the collapse of normal life in the entire north of the country and the opprobrium of the civilized world.
And that leads us to the deeper question: what is it about the Israeli reality that distorts our judgment to such a degree? We have some of the world’s smartest scientists, businessmen and academics, but confront us with the existential questions of war, peace and relations with the Arabs and our reason deserts us. Our vision is suddenly channeled through a prism that turns white into black and wrong into right. We act and react in a manner that is usually counter to our own self-interest.
I have a work colleague of messianic bent who would probably say that it is in fact Israel which sees the true dimensions of the Islamic threat and it is the rest of the so-called civilized world which is suffers from reduced vision. (in fact, he would attribute clarity to only a small minority of Israelis, namely those living in the occupied territories. He’s no fan of the government.)
I don’t buy that. There’s no doubt that fundamentalist Islam is a malignant force with which Israel and the rest of the world need to contend. But Israel’s myopia began long before Bin Laden entered the picture and the intractable conflict in the Middle East has only added fuel to the fundamentalist fire. Terrorism is a consequence of the inability to reach peace between Israel and its neighbors, not its cause.
The illogic of Israeli logic comes from different places entirely. It has to do with the legacy of the Holocaust and our compulsion to apply the lessons of the Nazi genocide to our modern day lives in the Middle East, which is an historical absurdity. It comes from the centuries of Jewish suffering prior to the Holocaust and the “poor Samson” complex that has resulted from the contradiction between past weakness and current strength. It comes from too many years of conflict and loss which have amputated our ability to see the suffering of others. It comes from almost 40 years of occupation of Palestinian land and people, which has engendered in us a baleful hard-heartedness and anti-Arab racism.
Most of all, it comes from the seductive power of military might and the blinkered world view of men and women whose formative experiences occur in the military environment. Armies are dangerous things, not only to those against whom they are wielded but to those who wield them as well. They can foster leadership and initiative in young people but only within a tightly restricted frame of reference. Armies do not, as a rule, expand horizons. Israel would be a lot better off living in peace with its neighbors in a small and modest state than as the regional super-power in constant conflict.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Boxed In
This week’s grim events, capped by the air force bombing of Gaza on Thursday night, substantiate the suspicion that the Israeli descent into irrational, medieval nihilism is getting perilously close to its nadir. Far from being the sober, measured response of a responsible democracy, Israel’s knee-jerk rebound into overkill (air and artillery bombardments, mass arrests of lawmakers, escalatory flights over Damascus) testifies only to the impoverishment of military-political thinking in the country. Decades of feudal contempt for the Palestinians and tit-for-tat responses to violence have stultified our strategic judgment. We have no options, other than greater force.
That’s the good news. The other alternative is that the capture of an Israeli soldier is being deliberately exploited by the country’s leadership to demolish any semblance of Palestinian statehood and thus neutralize the danger of a political settlement, which, even according to the prime minister, would entail substantial withdrawal from the occupied territories.
Whatever the ultimate fate of the unfortunate Gilad Shalit, it is undeniable that the events of the past week have further curtailed the already slim prospects for peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians and elevated the entire region to a new plateau of distrust and hatred. At a time when the majority of Israelis seem to have internalized the need for the occupation to end, the country’s leaders show every sign of willfully plunging the region into a new spasm of bloodletting, precisely in order to preempt any such accommodation.
In the first place, there is essentially no difference between the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian fighters during a raid on a military outpost and the almost nightly detentions of Palestinians carried out by the Israeli army in Palestinian territory. To describe, as we do, one as an abduction and the other as an arrest – one as a terrorist action (pigua) and the other as a military action – is to deliberately distort the reality of the ongoing struggle between the two sides.
It is tendentious for the government to argue that, following the withdrawal from Gaza, there is no longer any justification for Palestinian resistance emanating from that benighted spot and that every action is therefore, by definition, terrorism. As if they acknowledged the justification for resistance before the withdrawal. The fight for an independent Palestine is indivisible, even if the land itself is fractured. So long as the occupation over all the Palestinian territories persists and a solution to the national aspirations of the Palestinian people is not found, Gaza will continue to be a launching pad for offensive operations.
Israel has no grounds for its arrogant presumption that the capture of an Israeli soldier is of any greater import than the detention of tens of thousands of Palestinians, never mind that it justifies the wholesale abrogation of Palestinian sovereignty (such as it is) that has occurred in recent days.
And even if a forceful response was justified, it wasn’t smart. Knee-jerk reactions seldom are. Laying siege to a civilian population and firing artillery shells into residential areas have the inevitable effect of creating martyrs and solidifying hatred. Even if the military action does bring about the release of Gilad Shalit (which is unclear at the time of writing,) the repercussions of the onslaught on Gaza will haunt us for a long time to come.
Acknowledgement of the necessity to end the occupation (something which Prime Minister Olmert does with such facility when conferring with Bush, Blair and Chirac) and negotiating in good faith for the release of prisoners could have provided the necessary human dimension for the start of dialogue. But neither Olmert nor his generals are capable of such suppleness. Too many years at the political or military helm have atrophied their mental agility. Talking to Bush about talking with the Palestinians is one thing; actually talking with the Palestinians is another thing entirely. Israeli officials are unable to relate to Palestinians who do not assume the bended-knee posture of the vassal.
Israelis, and foremost amongst them the media, would do well to drop the language of terrorism, terror attacks and kidnappings. Such language is both smug and self-deluding. Like a baby’s pacifier, it gives the illusion of contentment and keeps the harsh world at bay. The sooner we acknowledge that the occupation and its attendant disdain for the Palestinians is at the heart of the conflict, the sooner we will begin to realize the options for its solution.
Opting for the use of force is the fool’s solution. Unfortunately, it has become the Israeli norm. We have boxed ourselves into a corner.
That’s the good news. The other alternative is that the capture of an Israeli soldier is being deliberately exploited by the country’s leadership to demolish any semblance of Palestinian statehood and thus neutralize the danger of a political settlement, which, even according to the prime minister, would entail substantial withdrawal from the occupied territories.
Whatever the ultimate fate of the unfortunate Gilad Shalit, it is undeniable that the events of the past week have further curtailed the already slim prospects for peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians and elevated the entire region to a new plateau of distrust and hatred. At a time when the majority of Israelis seem to have internalized the need for the occupation to end, the country’s leaders show every sign of willfully plunging the region into a new spasm of bloodletting, precisely in order to preempt any such accommodation.
In the first place, there is essentially no difference between the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian fighters during a raid on a military outpost and the almost nightly detentions of Palestinians carried out by the Israeli army in Palestinian territory. To describe, as we do, one as an abduction and the other as an arrest – one as a terrorist action (pigua) and the other as a military action – is to deliberately distort the reality of the ongoing struggle between the two sides.
It is tendentious for the government to argue that, following the withdrawal from Gaza, there is no longer any justification for Palestinian resistance emanating from that benighted spot and that every action is therefore, by definition, terrorism. As if they acknowledged the justification for resistance before the withdrawal. The fight for an independent Palestine is indivisible, even if the land itself is fractured. So long as the occupation over all the Palestinian territories persists and a solution to the national aspirations of the Palestinian people is not found, Gaza will continue to be a launching pad for offensive operations.
Israel has no grounds for its arrogant presumption that the capture of an Israeli soldier is of any greater import than the detention of tens of thousands of Palestinians, never mind that it justifies the wholesale abrogation of Palestinian sovereignty (such as it is) that has occurred in recent days.
And even if a forceful response was justified, it wasn’t smart. Knee-jerk reactions seldom are. Laying siege to a civilian population and firing artillery shells into residential areas have the inevitable effect of creating martyrs and solidifying hatred. Even if the military action does bring about the release of Gilad Shalit (which is unclear at the time of writing,) the repercussions of the onslaught on Gaza will haunt us for a long time to come.
Acknowledgement of the necessity to end the occupation (something which Prime Minister Olmert does with such facility when conferring with Bush, Blair and Chirac) and negotiating in good faith for the release of prisoners could have provided the necessary human dimension for the start of dialogue. But neither Olmert nor his generals are capable of such suppleness. Too many years at the political or military helm have atrophied their mental agility. Talking to Bush about talking with the Palestinians is one thing; actually talking with the Palestinians is another thing entirely. Israeli officials are unable to relate to Palestinians who do not assume the bended-knee posture of the vassal.
Israelis, and foremost amongst them the media, would do well to drop the language of terrorism, terror attacks and kidnappings. Such language is both smug and self-deluding. Like a baby’s pacifier, it gives the illusion of contentment and keeps the harsh world at bay. The sooner we acknowledge that the occupation and its attendant disdain for the Palestinians is at the heart of the conflict, the sooner we will begin to realize the options for its solution.
Opting for the use of force is the fool’s solution. Unfortunately, it has become the Israeli norm. We have boxed ourselves into a corner.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
