The inevitable reaction
"What, exactly, is a decent person supposed to think?" That was Bradley Burston's question in an emotional piece published on the website of Ha'aretz shortly after an Arab resident from the southeast Jerusalem neighborhood of Sur Baher killed three and injured dozens in a bulldozer rampage on Jaffa Road last Wednesday. A day later, a Jerusalem Post editorial critically reviewed what the international media were suggesting their readers should think about this terrible attack.
Among the reports and commentaries highlighted in the editorial was a piece that had been published just a few hours after the attack on the Guardian's website under the title "The inevitable overreaction." Once you start to read this piece, you quickly realize that, just a few hours after the carnage, the verdict was already clear: any Israeli reaction to the attack would be an "overreaction", because if Israelis found themselves "targeted by terrorist killers", there was an obvious reason: "Occupation breeds terror" - and if this was not a good enough explanation for terrorist attacks, there was still another one on offer: "the relentless oppressive tactics employed by successive Israeli governments since the very foundation of the state." As the first comment posted in response to this article aptly noted: "Before the dead are cold and buried their murder is 'explained' away. How sad."
Comments (128)Hamas is known for that
If it wasn't such a serious issue, it could be quite funny to read that, not long after spending hours with former President Carter talking about peace, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal declared in an interview on Al-Jazeera television that for his group, any cease-fire with Israel was just "a tactic in conducting the struggle... It is normal for any resistance that operates in its people's interest... to sometimes escalate, other times retreat a bit. ... The battle is to be run this way and Hamas is known for that." Well, Mashaal is right: Hamas is known for that; Hamas is also known for its charter, its vile anti-Semitism, and its often re-affirmed goal of "liberating" all the land west of the Jordan.
For his part, former president Jimmy Carter is known for his belief that no view is vile enough to deserve ostracism. As a Forward editorial put it: "During nearly three decades as a freelance apostle of peace, the man from Plains has built a record marked by grand gestures, modest accomplishments and a few big goofs that somehow fail to pierce his halo. In office and out, his actions have been driven by a desperate desire to do good and a misplaced confidence that his radiant good intentions could bring out the hidden good in others."
Perception and reality
A cynic might say that it was a contest we used to win hands down: most dangerous, most disliked, most dreadful - as long as it was a poll asking people who's the worst of them all, Israel was sure to score first place. One of the most widely reported of those poll results was a European survey back in fall 2003 which ranked Israel as the greatest threat to peace in the world.
Last year, a global BBC poll showed that when asked which countries "have a mainly negative influence in the world", Israel was again ranked first, but the same poll this year ranked Israel "only" second - which means we switched places with Iran: they came in second last year; this year, they snatched the "bad-guys-award" from us...
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 cant 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."
Hitler's heirs
Before President Bush left Israel last Friday to continue his trip to several countries in the region, he visited Yad Vashem. In the international press, this visit was widely described as "an emotional tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial", and reports highlighted that Bush "stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz [...] and told his secretary of state that the US should have bombed the death camp to stop the extermination of Jews there". Bush described Yad Vashem as "a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it."
Whether it would have been indeed feasible to bomb Auschwitz is still a controversial question; but what is striking to note in the context of our own times is that, as one expert explained, the Jewish leadership "was afraid to ask publicly for the Allies to bomb the death camps, believing that would turn the conflict into a war for the Jews". This can hardly fail to bring to mind that fantasies about wars being fought "for the Jews" have remained quite popular - whether among respected academics, pundits and commentators who worry about the "Israel Lobby", or among the wider public that shares such concerns. And when it comes to the Middle East, it is of course entirely acceptable to assert that there "was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it" - and in the context of the Hamas Charter's Article Twenty-Two there is no need to ask whose "fingerprints" it is all about.
About this blog The Warped Mirror
How the world sees Israel - comments and analysis by a contemporary historian.
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