Writing from Jerusalem on Tuesday as rioting left dozens injured, Bradley Burston said:
Hamas has designated this day, in this place, its Day of Rage. Why, then, the smiles on the faces of Mahmoud Zahar and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
Perhaps it’s because after more than 22 years of costly trial and error, Hamas has finally come upon the secret of how to bring down the Jewish state:
Let the ship sink itself.
This month, down here in the engine room of the Titanic, a single coherent order continues to sound from the officers shrouded in fog on the bridge: “More power!”
To the delight of Mahmoud Zahar and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel’s homemade weapons of mass destruction – pro-settlement bureaucrats with conflicts of financial and ideological interest – have done in one meeting what Israel’s foes have sought for generations: driving a stake through the heart of Israel’s relationship with the White House.
We should have known. But in the swamp of anomaly and impossibility that is Jerusalem, you can easily lose sight of, and belief in, the basics:
One of the curses of endless war, is the tendency to become one’s own worst enemy – in every sense.
A self-conception grounded in the notion that one is an object of enmity, whether this be within the self-identity of an individual or a nation, is no basis upon which a constructive relationship with the world can be formed. The world is seen as otherness and engagement with such a world becomes equated with annihilation. This is indeed the definition of a nihilistic outlook.
This is a cross-post from Woodward’s site, War in Context.
Yossi Verter in today’s Ha’aretz relates some chilling words from the father of Prime Minster Netanyahu at a celebration for the the elder’s 100th birthday. One hopes that the Obama Administration knows what they are dealing with when it comes to the Israeli Prime Minister.
Verter writes that a person who had attended the event remarked:
"Knowing the relationship between Bibi and his father, knowing the influence the father has on the son, and after having heard the prime minister’s emotional words about his father’s ability to foresee the future – I felt as though I was listening to an operational order from Benzion. As though the die had already been cast, at least within the Netanyahu family."
Under the title, "The father, the son and the threat," Verter reported on the speeches from the two Netanyahus.
The 100th birthday celebration for Prof. Benzion Netanyahu at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem this week was an extraordinary event. The most moving speech of the evening was delivered by the prime minister, who spoke with a kind of admiration, love and respect that not many sons feel for their fathers. "This was one of the few times I believed every word he said," one person in attendance commented.
In 1937, related Netanyahu, in an article about Theodor Herzl, his father predicted the Holocaust that would befall the Jewish people in Europe. "This same prescience," said the prime minister, "led my father to say decades ago that the threat to world peace would come from those parts of the Muslim world where oil, terror and nuclear energy mix. It also led him to say to me, in the early 1990s, that Muslim extremists would try to bring down the twin towers in New York – a prediction I included in one of my books."
After the tributes, the evening’s honoree stepped up to the podium. In contrast to others blessed with longevity who tend to sink into nostalgia at events of this sort, Prof. Netanyahu did not say a single word about the past or about himself. He spoke for only a few minutes, from a prepared text, and about only one topic: the existential danger facing the Jewish people.
Here are a few excerpts from his speech: "I want to make a number of observations concerning the continued existence of the Jewish people in light of the threats of its imminent, declared destruction by its enemies … The increasing threats are obvious, threats of the destruction of the Jewish people. From the Iranian side, the promise is heard that within a short time an end will be put to the Zionist movement and there will be no more Zionists in the world … Very significant things are liable to happen in the encounter between Iran and nuclear weapons. The Jewish people is showing the world today how a nation should behave when it is facing an existential danger: Look the danger straight in the eye, calmly weigh what should be done, and be prepared to enter the fray the moment the chances of success seem reasonable."
