Bernard Avishai at TPM says that the Israeli press has become lapdog as the country swerves right…
I’ve had four or five conversations over the past couple of weeks in which people volunteered, without prompting, that they feel they now know what it was like to live in countries on the verge of fascism during the 1930s. You ask them why and they talk about touch-points, not great events: an education ministry that mandates a history curriculum in which the Oslo Agreements are effaced, a high school mock election in which Lieberman triumphs, the mayor of Jerusalem threatening to displace Arabs to build a Jewish tourist park, a Sami Smooha poll that shows a precipitous decline in Israeli Arab faith in Israel as a democracy "for Arab citizens as well" (from 63.1 percent in 2003 to 50.5 percent today) while the minority that supports using "all means, including violence" to achieve political ends is growing (5.4 percent to 13.9 percent)…
In the case of the flotilla, the press defaulted to an almost automatic willingness to depict the Gaza blockade as an preemption of terror, a matter of life and death (though hardly a word was spoken in criticism when Netanyahu began lifting it under American pressure); in this context, the commandos landing on the deck of the ship were subject to a "lynch," and the deaths of nine Turkish citizens justified. One would be hard pressed to think of an event that so underlined the pathos of Israeli attitudes: the apocalyptic thinking that even justifies undermining relations with Turkey; the cheapness of enemy life; the idea that strategy boils down to never showing weakness; the interlocking historical narratives that depict any criticism, except for tactical criticism, of Israeli policy as Jew hatred or ultra-leftism, or both.
At the end, Avishai expresses the liberal hope that "Obama will eventually force the issue." And yet he wrote a piece in the Nation opposing BDS. This is what I don’t get about the liberal Zionists who oppose BDS– they are so top-down in their thinking. They believe that polticians must act, great men. And so they rationalize the passivity of people who actually care and have power to do something. And of course Obama will do nothing without pressure.
