Is Goldstone the tipping point?

by Adam Horowitz on October 15, 2009 · 52 comments

Ari Shavit has an interesting article in Haaretz that echoes a theme that is amazingly gaining currency – the legitimacy of the Jewish state is in danger. Shavit echoes the sentiments that Phil posted on yesterday from Ron Ben-Yishai, and succinctly presents the challenge facing Israel and Zionism - "A national movement that began as ‘legitimacy without an entity’ is becoming ‘an entity without legitimacy’ before our very eyes."

I say amazing because, as Shavit points out, Israel has never been stronger or more dominant than it is today. And yet despite Israel’s overwhelming military superiority, this strength is just a house of cards if they don’t have the legitimacy to use it. While Israel was once able to deploy this strategic advantage with near impunity, their greatest strength is in danger of being rendered useless following the carnage of the Gaza war (and I would add the 2006 war in Lebanon). The Goldstone report, and the growing BDS movement, is holding Israel accountable in a way that has not happened before. Combined with the shifting discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where similarities to apartheid South Africa are being raised more and more often, Israel is now increasingly finding itself trying to justify using overwhelming force to prop up a status quo that people find inexcusable. Shavit shares Ben-Yishai’s recommendation that Israel needs a diplomatic counter attack:

On one hand, there is an urgent need for a creative, daring diplomatic initiative that would prove that Israel is truly and genuinely striving to end the occupation. Without such an initiative, the world will not listen to Israeli justice, which today remains a concept largely invisible to the world. On the other hand, there is a need to enlist Israeli and Jewish elites in the struggle to once again strengthen the foundations of Israel’s legitimacy.

This diplomatic and moral effort is no less important than the struggles that produced the Balfour Declaration and the UN partition resolution. If such an effort is not launched immediately, and does not soon succeed, Israel will become an international pariah.

Shavit is right that the idea of "Israeli justice" is increasingly viewed as an oxymoron, and of course legitimacy will not be found through only a "daring diplomatic initiative." It will take a change in policy that shows the world that Israel is more interested in equality over exclusivity, and coexistence over domination. Until that happens, the trend will continue.

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{ 52 comments }

1 MRW October 15, 2009 at 12:00 pm

A policy that shows the world that Israel is more interested in equality over exclusivity, and coexistence over domination.

Israel wants to be a nation. It’s like that phrase that says when I became a man I threw away childish things. Israel hasn’t stopped thinking of itself as a besieged shtetl with a godfather banker sitting overseas that it can call upon for help. The Boys from Bialystock who formed and ran that country from inception never really thought about the future they wanted for Israel, so the national values are like warring Bialystock itself: one year it belongs to Poland, then next year Russia, then some other country I forget. It was always constant high drama in Bialystock, and battles, Zero Mostel’s memory of it notwithstanding. One group always fighting with another, security ever paramount. This is the heritage brought to, and inculcated in, Israel. Ben Gurion understood statesmanship, but that was about it.

2 otto October 15, 2009 at 12:00 pm

South African justice!

3 Rehmat October 15, 2009 at 12:16 pm

Zionism is not Judaism – and Israel is NOT a ‘Jewish State’. In fact it’s a Racist Marxist State as Jack Bernstein found out four decades ago.

The Zionist entity is based on several myths – the biggest one is the Holocaust – which has become not only a ‘Holy Cow’ but modern times greatest ‘Cash Cow’.

The “Holocaust” – Myths and Facts
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/the-holocaust-myths-and-facts/

4 GalenSword October 16, 2009 at 2:24 pm: While some Zionist thinkers tried to combine Marxism and ethnic fundamentalism, on the whole Zionist Ashkenazim and Marxist Ashkenazim have been hostile to one another even if there has been at times a great deal of transition from one group to the other.

5 Citizen October 15, 2009 at 12:39 pm

It takes real effort not to see that the world powers gave Israel a disproportionate share of another people’s landland
via the Balfour Declaration and the UN Partition, and that in return Israel has never stopped grabbing for the balance of that land by every hook or crook.

6 Call Me Ishmael October 15, 2009 at 2:01 pm

“… Israel will become an international pariah.”

Israel has been an international pariah for years now. I suppose they are just now waking up to the fact. Raising hasbara to a new level will not succeed in plastering Israel with a veneer of moral legitimacy.

On another thread, former coMMenter provided a link to a fascinating Counterpunch article by Michael Neumann:

http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann10142009.html

In the article, Neumann dashed any hope that Israel might have for continued international acceptance of the claim of an exclusive state for the Jewish “people”, a claim made by no other “people” or state since Nazi Germany. As Prof. Neumann points out, the notion is based on thoroughly discredited concepts of “ethnic nationalism” and civil rights for “peoples” rather than individuals – political concepts he traces back to Woodrow Wilson’s idealism and Hitler’s exploitative cynicism in “Mein Kampf”.

Political Zionism is incompatible with modern international norms for nation states. There is no way Israel can sugar-coat that unpleasant truth.

7 potsherd October 15, 2009 at 3:07 pm

Bradley Burston reads the Goldstone Report, compares to golem and colonoscopy. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1121054.html

[the attack on Gaza] was rooted in the belief that the only way to counter and deter Hamas, and, optimally, bring about its downfall, was a show of force of devastating proportion. It was rooted in the belief that after the poorly planned, poorly managed debacle of the Second Lebanon War, and 12,000 rockets and mortar shells pumped into the Negev from Gaza over eight years, an angry Israeli public, feeling abandoned by the world and inconsequential to their own leaders, would tolerate only a minute number of IDF casualties when war came, even if that meant a nearly unlimited number of Palestinian civilian losses.

It was also rooted in the belief – oddly un-Israeli, more an outgrowth of the Polish shtetl than the Palmach – that a fair hearing for Israel in international bodies of justice was so inconceivable, that the best defense was no defense at all.

Israel’s decision not to cooperate with the Goldstone Mission, and, in many respects, to actively hamper its work, was calamitous. In revealing correspondence pointedly reproduced in the report, Justice Goldstone all but gets down on hands and knees to beg Israel to allow it to balance the report with on-site visits to rocket-torn Sderot, extensive direct testimony from victims of Qassam attacks, and first-person accounts and explanations of soldiers accused of violations of international law. Israel says no. Benjamin Netanyahu won’t even go so far as to answer Goldstone’s letter.

Now the report is out, alive and ticking, and Israel – in its desperation to deflect the monster, no matter the consequences – has already managed to hand it as a stick to Hamas, to beat and perhaps eventually defeat Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Palestinian Authority.

8 Call Me Ishmael October 15, 2009 at 4:51 pm

All the internal evidence from Israel indicates that Israel was not out to destroy Hamas in Operation Cast Lead. The goal was to weaken it by inflicting massive collective punishment on the Gazan people.

Israel needs to retain Hamas as the Designated Enemy. Operation Cast Lead was planned out in detail in the summer of 2008 before the six-month cease fire had even begun. The “enemy”, Hamas, serves as the specious device by which Israel prevents the political unification of the Palestinians. This allows Israel to argue that there is no competent “negotiating partner” to represent the Palestinians.

The Americans buy it so it must sell pretty well.

9 US_Objector October 15, 2009 at 9:58 pm: Slight correction. The Bush Administration bought this. In advance of the Gaza massacre the U.S. military shipped nearly 1,000 containers of high-tech weapons, including white phosphorous. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13149

Ishmael is absolutely spot-on — this was collective punishment, planned months in advance, and conveniently timed to conclude hours before Obama’s swearing-in ceremony, so the rest of the goyim world would be too transfixed by what Michelle O was wearing at the Inauguration to pay attention to the human atrocities committed in Gaza.

Um, wrong.

10 America First October 15, 2009 at 3:08 pm

On one hand, there is an urgent need for a creative, daring diplomatic initiative that would prove that Israel is truly and genuinely striving to end the occupation.

How creative does the occupying power need to get to end its occupation?

11 syvanen October 15, 2009 at 5:46 pm: Like the Marine general in Korea said: hell we arn’t retreating, we are just attacking in another direction.

Now that was a creative way to describe their ‘withdrawal’.

12 Chu October 15, 2009 at 3:37 pm

I am glad Ari Shavit can see the writing on the wall. That iceberg is continuing to grow and it’s a benefit to human justice.

13 GalenSword October 15, 2009 at 3:52 pm

The Goldstone Report is Zionist in its own way. I am not sure Goldstone intended for it to act as it did.

If Israel had accepted the Report, admitted mistakes and then focused on actions Goldstone avers incorrectly were war crimes, the ultimate effect might have been quite different.

14 potsherd October 15, 2009 at 6:03 pm

I really wonder how Goldstone feels about Israel now that he’s been made the scapegoat for all their collective sins.