Gaza grotesque

It was hardly surprising to read reports that, as the Arab League summit got under way in Damascus this weekend, Hamas was organizing a rally in Gaza to glorify their "resistance" and to call on Arab leaders to withdraw the Saudi-sponsored peace initiative that was re-launched at last year's Arab summit in Riyadh. For Hamas-leader Mushir al-Masri the Arab peace initiative was a "burden" on Palestinians because "Hamas is defending the honor and dignity of this nation on the [Arabs] behalf."

Some Arabs clearly beg to differ. "Hamas Must Stand Down" was the straightforward title of a recent article in the Saudi English-language daily Arab News, which argued:

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The terrorists' calculus

The sense of shock and overwhelming sadness, the heartbreak of families and friends gathering at yet another funeral for a victim of a terrorist attack are all too familiar emotions for Israelis and Jews around the world. But beyond the shared grief, there is the deeply divisive question of how to react. Revenge and retaliation, or restraint and careful reasoning about how to proceed, about how best to put an end to the recurrence of yet another terrible tragedy? When it comes to answering this question, it is perhaps best to first ask another question: what did the terrorist want to achieve beyond the killing of as many of his chosen victims as possible?

There is little reason to disagree with Calev Ben-David's analysis that "the goal was to outrage the general public and to inflame that particular segment of it most skeptical of the possibility of Israel one day coming to terms with its most immediate Arab neighbors".  And sadly, judging from the Sunday papers, it looks as if the terrorist might well have achieved this goal. As the British Observer already reports: "Israel's far-right settler movement has set itself on a renewed collision course with the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, declaring that last week's massacre in a Jewish religious school had targeted them directly and vowing to build a new illegal outpost in the West Bank for every one of the killed students."

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'Hasbara' in the real world

Against the backdrop of the recent escalation of rocket and missile attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Foreign Ministry "began preparing the grounds for a large hasbara campaign" designed to explain that Israel had a right to defend itself. Obviously, that is a right that everybody else can take for granted, and thus there is clearly a reason why Israelis and their friends and supporters complain often enough that the government's "hasbara" efforts are woefully inadequate.

What is often overlooked when Israeli "hasbara" is criticized as not effective enough is that, while the Hebrew word literally means "explanation", there are plainly quite a few people who don't want to listen to any explanation of Israeli concerns and viewpoints. For them, "hasbara"is nothing but propaganda. Thus, the ostensibly objective SourceWatch site claims with an unabashed lack of objectivity: "Hasbara refers to the propaganda efforts to sell Israel, justify its actions, and defend it in world opinion. [...] Israel portrays itself as fighting on two fronts: the Palestinians and world opinion. The latter is dealt with hasbara. The premise of hasbara is that Israel's problems are a matter of better propaganda, and not one of an underlying unjust situation."

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Inventing new Nazi victims

A week ago, the Israeli branch of the German Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation and Netanya College organized a debate on a manifesto published in the wake of the 2006 Lebanon war by a group of 25 German social scientists, most of whom work on conflict resolution and peace research. According to the Ebert-Foundation website, the manifesto calls for a re-evaluation of Germany's relationship with Israel, arguing that the friendship between the two countries has become mature enough to allow for criticism. That sounds like a rather reasonable argument, because there is indeed little justification for the notion that German history should oblige Germans to be completely uncritical of Israeli policies. But the manifesto does more than just claim a right to criticize Israel - it also attempts to rewrite history.

Consider this report, which, when checked against the original German text of the manifesto, is indeed quite accurate: "According to the manifesto, German responsibility toward the Palestinians is 'one side of the consequences of the Holocaust which receives far too little attention.' It [i.e. the manifesto] went on to argue that it was the Holocaust which Germany perpetrated that brought about 'the suffering that has persisted [in the Middle East] for the last six decades and has at present become unbearable.'" 

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Catch 22 country

Whether it is the findings of the Winograd report published last week or criticism of Israel's failure to prevent Hamas's breach of Gaza's border with Egypt, the conclusion that "in today's Israel the long term does not reach much beyond tomorrow" rings all too true.  It is an anonymous diplomat to whom this observation is attributed in a recent article by Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens. But what rings equally true is Stephens's own observation that Israel faces "many Catch 22s" - and that explains at least partly why "in today's Israel the long term does not reach much beyond tomorrow".

One of the Catch 22s is illustrated all too well in the commentary on recent events in Gaza featured in the current issue of the Economist. Arguing that "Palestine's Islamists can’t be defeated or ignored, but embracing them won't be easy", the editorial acknowledges that on paper, "Hamas's policy is both grotesque and delusional: the destruction of the Jewish state." Supposedly, however, "Hamas is also pragmatic" and should "be judged by its deeds rather than its declaratory words." The "deeds" that prove Hamas's pragmatism don't really take too much space to list, but it also seems to count as a sign of "pragmatism" that there are just "some" within Hamas who "think only of Israel's destruction; for more, it remains their long-term ambition."

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Hate on Holocaust Memorial Day

It is utterly depressing to see how quickly a well-intentioned and well-written article about Holocaust Memorial Day will attract anonymous talkbacks that eagerly insinuate that Gaza is Warsaw, that the Palestinians are the Jews, and that the Israelis are the Nazis. Take as just one example Karen Pollock's "Confronting our past" that was published on the Guardian's website last week. Pollock who is chief executive of the British Holocaust Educational Trust tried to explain that even though more than 60 years had passed since the liberation of Auschwitz, it would be wrong to "simply consign the terror of the Holocaust to our history books"; instead, she argued, everyone still had "a duty to learn from the past and apply those lessons today". But among the first dozen readers to respond to her article, quite a few were all too sure that they had learned whatever was to learn and that they were thus ready to "apply those lessons today".

The very first talkback read: "Pity that on Sunday [i.e. Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27] the Palestinians will still be off their own land and barricaded in ghettos. Tantamount to ethnic cleansing." Talkback number 5 asserted: "What relevance does the Holocaust have for modern Britain? None." Another talkback read: "This week hundreds of thousands of Palestininans starving and dying in a ghetto closed off to the outside world (Warsaw redux) blasted thru a wall into Egypt in order to get basic goods like medicines, food, mattresses [...] Israel slowly starves and kills a powerless, impoverished people to death because they did not have the privilege of being born Jewish. [...] 60 years ago it was perfectly ok to starve Jews to death because they didn't matter as human beings to an anti-semitic world. Decades later it's perfectly ok to starve Arabs to death for the same reason." Or, another variation on the same theme: "What a pity that the memory of the Holocaust is invoked as justification for the persecution of others that continues to this day."

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The time for peace has come

Given that anything that sounds like "Wahabi" usually triggers associations with Saudi Arabia, it was perhaps somewhat startling to see a recent Jerusalem Post article entitled: "Whbee to Arab states: Stop vilifying Israel". But it was of course no Saudi official who urged the Arabs to recognize that the "time has come [...] to cease using international forums to vilify Israel and to [stop] indulging in point-scoring, which merely serves to postpone confidence-building in the region; and to publicly condemn those forces of hatred and violence which, ultimately, undermine everything they stand for". These words were part of a speech given by Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Majalli Whbee at the Mediterranean Seminar held in mid-December in Tel Aviv by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
 
Because the annually held meeting was hosted this year by Israel, several of the Arab member states - Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco - preferred not to attend, while Jordan and Egypt sent only two junior representatives. Openly challenging this attempt to once more use an international meeting to boycott Israel, Whbee suggested that the countries of the region should "ask themselves what is the greatest threat to their future. Is it Israel, which has no designs on any of them, or is it the hatred and viciousness propounded by those who strive to drag them into a backward world order."

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Hoping for failure

Here is a quiz to test your political acumen. When you read the following statement, try to guess the political affiliation of the person who made it: "statehood as such is a relatively recent addition to Palestinian aspirations. The main Palestinian impetus after [...] 1948 was that of 'return'; it was more about reversing the loss of Arab land and patrimony, than the fulfillment of classical post-colonial self-determination, via statehood. [...] It was only after [...1967] that a new Palestinian national identity began to take shape. At its core was the notion of the armed struggle as a galvanizing force. Armed struggle, according to Fatah, restored Palestinian dignity and gave the Palestinians a say in determining their future. Statehood and state building had no real place in this scheme. Indeed, the first tentative proposals to establish a state [...] were rejected as defeatist and a betrayal of the national cause."

You may think this is an easy one - who wouldn't recognize the standard argumentation of people on the political right who deny that there is any historical validity to Palestinian claims of a distinct identity and who insist that it was never a priority for Palestinians to get a state of their own, because all they really wanted was to get rid of the Jewish state? It sure sounds like that, doesn't it?

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