I went to Thanksgiving yesterday in my wife’s childhood community of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, (affluent, gentile) and was struck by the criticisms of Israel over the Gaza assault. “Those poor people can’t escape anywhere,” said a middle-aged woman, speaking of Gazans. While a relative said the imbalance of forces between Israel and Hamas reminded her of a schoolyard bully. “Or let’s say you see your neighbor mercilessly beating his dog. And he says to you, Well he snarled at me. That’s not an excuse. Really it’s a David and Goliath situation.”
But who is Goliath? Today in the New York Times, Israelis say they are developing a missile defense system called “David’s Sling” to stop missiles that travel more than 50 miles to reach their targets. So in Israel’s view, Palestinian militants in Gaza could be Goliath, or Hezbollah could be Goliath… In that article, Israeli ambassador Michael Oren likens the Iran-Gaza axis to the Soviet Union and Cuba in the 60s; but is that analogy accurate? Weren’t the U.S. and the Soviet Union on a par with one another? Iran doesn’t have nukes, and international bodies have not found that it is seeking them. Israel has hundreds.
I remembered running into Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld in Sderot last week, as he calmly, icily described the threat posed by Hamas to Israeli towns and cities and spoke of an Israeli military response that would be sweeping, crushing. In his neat uniform and measured speech, standing on a salient, he might have been an Allied colonel describing a pincer movement aimed at the Germany army. But we were overlooking little Gaza, 140 square miles, less than half the size of New York City. It felt grotesquely wrong.
I know, Jews are scarred by the Holocaust and by persecution in Europe. They tried to wipe us out. But that does not excuse this noncomprehension in Israel, this belief in endless overwhelming enemies, when sometimes it is just scary shadows on the wall.
It has been clear for a very long time who is Goliath. A clear case of the oppressed become the brutal oppressors. People are starting to get it..the MSM is opening up a bit. But the situation on the ground has gotten only worse for the Palestinians. You are well aware of that.
Israel is deluded. 35 years of Likud and the more or less Likudisation of the Israeli masses and 800,000 settlers and the 4th largest army of the world and they have painted themselves into a corner. 90%+ of Israeli Jews supported the slaughter.
90%+ were WRONG
Perhaps Philip Stephens below is a bit rosy eyed on the 2ss but it’s worth a read…
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6d83ec1e-33ec-11e2-9ce7-00144feabdc0.html
The effect of Israeli attacks on Gaza has been to underpin Hamas’s legitimacy across the Arab world and to weaken Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority. Not so long ago the Israeli government was talking, albeit through the Egyptians, to Ahmed Al-Jabari, the head of Hamas’s military organisation. By killing Mr Al-Jabari, it created another martyr to Palestinian radicalism. Mr Abbas, sidelined by Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, struggles to seem relevant.
This is of a piece with the reactionary world view of the Israeli prime minister. Almost everything has changed in the Middle East; Mr Netanyahu has not. He lives in the shadow of a war hero brother, who perished during the Israeli rescue of hostages at Entebbe, and a father who believed Arabs would never make peace with Jews. As long as Hamas can be cast as terrorists, Mr Netanyahu can refuse to talk peace. The unspoken delusion is that Israel’s security can be forever underwritten by military victories.
Even before the Arab uprisings the strategy had run out of road. Ehud Olmert, Mr Netanyahu’s predecessor, also waged war on Hamas in an effort to show it would pay a heavy price for terror attacks. Mr Olmert, however, had also begun to understand that military might was not enough. He concluded that durable security depended on facing up to the decision Israel had long avoided: a negotiated withdrawal from the Palestinian territories. “The time has come to say these things,” Mr Olmert remarked during the dying months of his premiership.
Mr Netanyahu is creating facts on the ground intended to defy this strategic logic. His settlement policy has left the West Bank resembling nothing so much as a Bantustan from South Africa’s apartheid era. You hear his supporters say that it will soon be impossible for any Israeli leader to hand back the land.
All the while, Israel is running out of friends. Hamas hails from the same Islamist family as Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Not so long ago the US shunned contact with the Brotherhood. This week Mr Obama praised Mr Morsi for his leadership in brokering the Gaza ceasefire.
Turkey, once a close partner, is as hostile to the present government as is any Arab state. The leaders across Europe who this week affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself did so through gritted teeth. Even Tony Blair, who as an international envoy to the region has never strayed far from Mr Netanyahu, seems to think it is time to talk to Hamas.
Mr Netanyahu draws a link between Palestine and Iran’s nuclear programme. He says Israel can consider peace only when the US has dealt with the threat from an Iranian bomb. Logic runs in the opposite direction. International pressure cannot properly be mobilised against Tehran until the west shakes off the charge of double standards.
During his first term Mr Obama blinked in the face of Mr Netanyahu’s intransigence. He took advice from officials who said that the US could never challenge Israel.
What is required now is American leadership – a decision by the White House to set out the parameters for a settlement and to seek broad regional and international support for them. The elements are familiar enough: a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders with agreed land swaps; unbreakable security guarantees for Israel and its recognition across the Arab world; and a shared capital in Jerusalem. Past Israeli leaders have accepted this as a fair template. If Mr Netanyahu rejects it, he must explain why.
The time has also come for Europeans to leave the sidelines. Instead of whispering behind their hands, they should say publicly what they agree privately. After all, they need do no more than take Mr Olmert’s script: Israel’s security and democracy cannot indefinitely survive the subjugation of Palestinians. One way to start would be to offer European backing for Palestinian statehood at the UN. If there is a single lesson from the tumultuous events of the past few years, it is that the era of the armed reactionary is coming to a close.
Michael Oren was laying down official hasbara to Piers Morgan re Breaking News Gaza two days ago. When Morgan pointed out the disparate death and wounded toll, Morgan kept after him about the disproportionality, that the respective harm caused reflected the severe imbalance of power. Oren kept avoiding how those facts conflicted with what he had been saying. Oren seemed astonished Morgan was actually pursing this matter; finally he came up with a poll taken recently which showed most Americans supported Israel. Oren in effect concluded his smack down of uppity Morgan by inferring, Why are you pestering me when Americans agree it’s OK to be oh-hum about any number of Palestinian dead and wounded?
Seems Morgan agreed as he dropped the matter.
“us”? geez louise. One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from Israel Shahak who responded to a young man asking him why he criticizes Israel knowing “they tried to wipe us out” – his response: Did you just say “us”?
East Jerusalem, Israel’s “eternal” possession, is as eternally Israeli as hasbara control of the narrative.
What Operation Shoot oneself in the foot repeatedly showed was that hasbara is malfunctioning. Even if Israelis refuse to look at pictures of dead Gazans the world won’t any longer. The Zionist narrative- that Palestinians are more or less worthless vermin – no longer works* on mass OECD audiences (* except perhaps south of the Mason Dixie line and in certain religious communities)