The LA Times reports:
In declaring a cease-fire Saturday in Gaza, Israel asserted that it had achieved its goals: hurting Hamas' military wing, discouraging rocket fire into Israel and cutting the flow of smuggled arms into Gaza. But Israel had a broader goal: sending a tough message to its arch-enemies Iran and Hezbollah.
All this is utterly delusional. But delusion is all Israel has left.
In what is surely a sign of the Apocalypse, The New York Times runs a story about a Palestinian as a human being, "Gazan Doctor and Peace Advocate Loses 3 Daughters to Israeli Fire and Asks Why":
TEL HASHOMER, Israel -- Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Gazan and a doctor who has devoted his life to medicine and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.
But on Saturday, the day after three of his daughters and a niece were killed by Israeli fire in Gaza, Dr. Abuelaish, 53, struggled to hold on to the humane philosophy that has guided his life and work.
As he sat in a waiting room of the Israeli hospital where he works part time, he asked over and over, "Why did they do this?"
Elsewhere in the hospital another daughter and a niece were being treated for their wounds.
"I dedicated my life really for peace, for medicine," said Dr. Abuelaish, who does joint research projects with Israeli physicians and for years has worked as something of a one-man force to bring injured and ailing Gazans for treatment in Israel.
"This is the path I believed in and what I raised and educated my children to believe," he said.
Against this immediacy, Ezra Klein has an op-ed in Haaretz "What it means to be pro-Israel" that's a further reflection of how things have changed this time around--not enough, certainly for Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish and his family, nor all the others who have died or lost family members in Israel's assault on Gaza, or the millions of Palestinians still deprived of a homeland, but enough to clearly signal that Israel's current path is a road to nowhere.
Klein begins:
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It is a striking image. Three cords of barbed wire cut violently across the top of a heavy concrete wall. Behind it is a Star of David, drawn to look simultaneously menacing and menaced. The text is urgent. "Why Israel Can't Win," it says.
This is not a normal cover for Time magazine, the august periodical that weekly defines America's consensus. But these are not normal times. Writing on The New York Times op-ed page, Nicholas Kristof condemned the murderous provocations of Hamas, but concluded, "Israel's right to do something doesn't mean it has the right to do anything." The very next day, Kristof's colleague Roger Cohen gave voice to his private horror. "I have never previously felt so despondent about Israel, so shamed by its actions," he wrote. These are not writers who tend to criticize Israel. For the American media, this is not normal.
Indeed, it is not normal. Normal is changing.
Normal has already changed. And I think that Juan Cole has told us why: we've seen the same movie with the neocons in Iraq. We've had our noses shoved in it for five, going on six long years. Klein doesn't dwell on this, though. His real focus is on how hardliners have responded to criticism, particularly the challenge presented by J Street.
Traditionally, Israel's American advocates have prized a dogmatic species of support, best encapsulated in the "Israel, right-or-wrong" approach favored by groups like AIPAC. There is little room for discussion in this vision, and even less for dissent. Debate on a specific action is recast as a referendum on Israel itself.
Gee, pure authoritarianism. What could be wrong with that?
Ezra could go after such foolishness hammer and tongs. But he does not:
The upside of this strategy is that it silences disagreement. While many question the strategic wisdom and proportionality of Operation Cast Lead, fewer are against Israel. This approach subsumes doubts about the former within the fierce commitment to the latter. The downside is that this makes for a brittle form of support. It cannot bend. It can only break. To judge the State of Israel wrong is a much graver judgment than to see its Gaza operation as misguided.
In recent years, a challenge has arisen to this perspective. In part out of virtue and in part out of necessity, new groups like J Street have argued that Israel is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. This approach has more space for criticism, which also means it has more space for support. It can bend without breaking.
This has terrified the "right-or-wrong" crowd.
Klein goes on to give a bit of a blow-by-blow account of some assaults against J Street, including their ever-shifting grounds for accusing it of not being "pro-Israel", and pointing out how broadly J Street's views are reflected, both in Israel and the US. He ends thus:
The American center, thankfully, considers itself resolutely pro-Israel. But it does not agree with Israel's every action. It wants an immediate cease-fire and is only tepidly supportive of Operation Cast Lead. In this, it is well-represented by groups like J Street, which provides a home for those who support the state without justifying its every twitch and gesture. And in this, Israel is well-served by J Street, and by other attempts to broaden its base of supporters rather than narrow the definition of support. It would be deeply unwise to write that perspective, and those supporters, out of the community that can consider itself "pro-Israel." A country that cannot brook criticism cannot have friends. And when Operation Cast Lead ends, Israel will still need friends. Indeed, it may need them more than ever.
This is a pretty mild argument, to put it mildly. It's hard to see how any Palestinian, any Arab, any Muslim could get excited by this. Nor should they. And yet, for Jews--particularly American Jews--it is huge. And the fact that it is huge is a measure of how small we have allowed ourselves to become.
At the Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer on Saturday, Dr. Abuelaish was surrounded by Israeli colleagues. Several were crying. Tammie Ronen, a professor of social work at Tel Aviv University, knelt beside the doctor. "You cannot let yourself collapse, you have your living children to take care of," said Dr. Ronen. Dr. Ronen had worked with him in researching the effects of conflict-related stress on Palestinian children in Gaza and Israeli children in Sderot, a border town that has been the main target of Gazan rocket fire in recent years....
Outside the room, Ms. Harpaz crumpled into a chair, sobbing.
"I hope this is a wake-up call," she said. "This is such a peace-loving family."
Dr. Abuelaish is a rarity: a Gazan at home among Israelis. He describes himself as a bridge between the two worlds, one of the few Gazans with a permit to enter Israel because of his work.
"I wanted every Palestinian treated in Israel to go back and say how well the Israelis treated them," he said. "That is the message I wanted to spread all the time. And this is what I get in return?"
As I said, Ezra's argument is a mild one. But mine is not. Of course Israel killed a Palestinian peace-maker's daughters. It's what they do.
"Collateral damage." Everyone and everything is "collateral damage" to them. Including Israel itself, for all their professed love.
Let's put it bluntly: The "pro-Israel" crowd is not pro-Israel at all. They are pro their own narcassistic self-infatuation. They do not love Israel any more than a stalker loves a celebrity. Neither the love nor the object is real. It is self-centered, self-obsessed infatuation that is above all a cowardly, terrified retreat from the real world. And vitally important as the emergence of J Street has already proven itself to be, it represents, so far, mere baby steps at the beginning of a long pathway to recovery. Recovery from a form of addiction that deludes itself into thinking it is love.
The stalker does not love. The addict does not love. The addict kills what it thinks it loves. The addict does not know the meaning of the word "love." The addict knows nothing-nothing of themselves, nothing of love, nothing of what they claim to love.
No wonder they kill everything in their path. No wonder they make a wilderness and call it peace. |
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