The NYT, which used to be an almost shameless apologist for any US-funded Israeli crimes, has turned a corner, it appears: this article about the rise of the religious crazies in Israel (in the immortal words of the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan, "Fundamentalism is the mortal enemy of civilized humanity") and then this opinion piece revealing what is increasingly obvious to the whole world:
America’s romantic mythology and wishful thinking about Israel encourage a tendency to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the main cause of the ruthlessness in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 35,000 people. The unpopular, scandal-ridden premier makes a convincing ogre in an oversimplified story.
But Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the creeping famine, the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods — this, polling suggests, is the war the Israeli public wanted. A January survey found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis said the force being used against Gaza was appropriate or even insufficient. In February, a poll found that most Jewish Israelis opposed food and medicine getting into Gaza. It was not Mr. Netanyahu alone but also his war cabinet members (including Benny Gantz, often invoked as the moderate alternative to Mr. Netanyahu) who unanimously rejected a Hamas deal to free Israeli hostages and, instead, began an assault on the city of Rafah, overflowing with displaced civilians.
(The failure of Israeli leadership to secure the freedom of Israeli hostages, or even to priotize their freedom, is really quite extraordinary.)
I recommend this talk by my colleague John Mearsheimer about what a disaster all this is for Israel. John is from New York City, and he has a slightly disarming way of speaking about atrocities, but he is a realist: his basic view is that morality has nothing to do with the behavior of states, which live in the proverbial Hobbesian state of nature (notwithstanding the recent arrest warrants for Netanyahu and various Hamas criminals--but no one will be arrested, unless Israel captures the Hamas criminals). As John says, there are four options for Israel, given that they control land (the West Bank, Gaza) that includes over seven million Palestinians: a democratic state for everyone (the benign meaning of "from the river to the sea"); a two-state solution; the existing apartheid; or ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. As John says, quite correctly, the first two options are off the table as far as Israel is concerned (barring a political revolution there: see the NYT article, above, about the rise of the religious zealots in Israel), so the media blather about a two-state solution is just pure propaganda: no one with political power there wants it. I seem to recall Steve Salaita saying on Twitter (I don't have the energy to track it down), that the real problem for Israel is that the Palestinians still exist. And that means apartheid (which is tough to maintain), or ethnic cleansing--with the conduct of the war on Gaza suggests ethnic cleansing is the real goal by making Gaza uninhabitable and driving out the population.
John makes the interesting point that "escalation dominance" has always been the Israeli approach to deterrence (as a Mafioso would put it: whack us, and we'll whack you much harder), but the current war in Gaza has prevented that (witness the necessarily benign Israeli response to Hezbollah attacks in northern Israel--I disagree with him that the Israeli response to Iran's missiles is also an example of that, in part for reasons his own talk suggests). This is one respect in which Israel has made Israel much more vulnerable--the other, of course, is technological, namely the ability of missiles and drones to reach into Israel. Nuclear weapons help deter iran, but they do not help with Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthi (who, as John notes, just launched their first missile into Israel itself). The latter technological development poses an increased risk to the civilian population of Israel.
I speak here purely from the prudential point of view of Israel, not from a moral or cosmpolitan point of view (Palestinians will rightly see all this rather differently). Israel is a country of nearly ten million people; only a homocidal maniac could wish its demise. Yet the world-historic irony of the ethnic group that was the victim of the worst genoicde of the last century being hell-bent on what may prove to be (who knows?) the worst ethnic cleansing of the 21st century is extraordinary. The Palestinians lost in 1948, and Israel now seems hell-bent on repeating and extending their loss.
The scale of the unfolding atrocities in Gaza has given renewed momentum for calls by academics to boycott Israel, including Israeli academia. I won't do that, but I also won't sign the circulating petition denouncing academic boycotts of Israel: individuals should retain the right to protest what is happening in Gaza in any lawful ways they choose to do so, including boycotts. From where I sit, Israeli academia still represents the most reliable opposition to government policy that has brought Israel to this point, and I don't want to be party to a collective punishment of Israeli academia that will have zero impact on the current war criminals in power there (Netanyahu and company already hate academia, just like they hate the courts).
Recent Comments