Dan Fleshler here cites a savage insight by a leading American rabbi who was outraged by the conduct of the 1982 Lebanon war: that American Jewish leaders were "used like cows" to promote Israel's initiative here, and even milked like cows, as Israel behaved in a brutal manner. Then Fleshler writes:
At the outset of the Gaza war, I–like thousands of other American
Jews with ties to Israel–received a flurry of email messages, bulletins
and reports of conference calls with Israeli diplomats. I was assured
that the goal of Israel’s massive bombardment of Gaza was to protect
the people of southern Israel from rocket fire. I was told that Israel
was simply trying to destroy the Hamas infrastructure that supported
the rocket fire. The goal seemed to be limited.
But the declared goals kept changing, as I noted in a furious post a few days after the war started. Eventually, it became clear that I was being asked to defend an operation whose real goal
was to send a message, to show Hamas and the Palestinians under its
rule that the Israelis would not hesitate to behave like unpredictable
madmen if the rocket fire on southern Israel continued. As Ethan Bronner
put it, “The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in
a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the
past weeks: `baal habayit hishtageya,‘ or `the boss has lost it.’”
The price of this feigned madness was the death of hundreds of
innocent people and the maiming of many more, all in the name of the
abstract and murky goal of “deterrence.”
Moo…
