Disconnection, Oversight
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"I think every single day that goes by
[Obama] is finding that there's a bigger and bigger gulf between his
hoped-for view of the world and reality," Cheney said. "I think
the danger is enormous, I don't think the president understands it."[i]
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Why do
commentators, even those who are very pro-Israel and anti-Hamas, feel they have
to make a concessionary statement that to make statements against Israel is not
to be anti-Semitic? Is there a category
of speech which condemns Israel for what it is doing in Gaza in a valid way?
Yes, it is called anti-Semitism. In
other words, there is no valid criticism of Israel because the motivations and
the consequences of such statements are invalid, made on false premises, and
merely disguise more or less vicious hatred of Jews and Judaism. One may, to be sure, argue with or against,
as is done within Israeli politics, decisions taken by the government. That is not the same as taking all of Israel,
each and every citizen and resident as representative of all the Jews in the
world and Judaism, now and forever.
There is no valid criticism of Operation
Defensive Edge until there is first and foremost condemnation of of all the
very real mass killings going on in Syria,. Iraq, Nigeria and all those other
murdering states which belong to the so-called Human Rights Council of the
United Nations, all the countries that have espoused the cause of Durban, and
all the individuals and groups who take part in the Boycott, Divest and Censure
movement which singles Israel out, unjustly and groundlessly, for the very
crimes against humanity which scores of other governments are perpetrators.[ii]
But while it is becoming increasingly clear
that the context of the current crisis in Gaza is much larger than any conflict
between Israel and the Hamas-led Palestinian mini-state (a small part of what
was once a larger, though still very small) Palestinian Authority territory in
Judea and Sumaria, that is, something that involves Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Syria,
Turkey, Iran, Iraq and other nations in the Middle East; what is not clear, and
therefore doubly dangerous through its ambiguities, is the role that the Great
Powers of the West—as well, eventually, in the East—will play once the
emergence of the caliphate of ISIS establishes itself (as it seems certain to
do until there is an essential change in the policies of the United States, the
UK, and so on—an d any such fundamental shift lies two or three years down the
road, after the next American elections).
Until then, smaller decisions on the part of Israel will either shift
the balance of power too much one way or the other or, God willing, maintain
some equilibrium through the (temporary) holding of Hamas at bay.[iii]
Through a Glass Darkly
While Wearing Sunshades, Blinkers
and Looking the Other Way
Judging
by the U.S. leadership’s surprise, one has to reach the
conclusion that the U.S. Administration was either not privy to similar
information, or that it decided to ignore it.
Incredibly, Obama said the conflict was not a “religious”
one, but rather one of a shared “common security and a common set of values.”[iv]
Why should the White House choose to ignore the
build-up of ISIS for more than a year, and thus be surprised by its rapid
advance through large parts of northern Iran and much of Syria? What does Obama mean by saying that a fanatical
Islamicist declaration of war against Christendom and the Jews everywhere is
not religious?
There are only three ways to understand what
the policies are of governments when they make public statements to a wide
television audience, including, of course, the citizens of one’s own country
who have to be convinced that the president or prime minister and his officials
are doing all that they should to defend them and their interests around the
world; yet we know for strategic reasons and for the sake of behind-the-scenes
negotiations, not everything they say is the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth. Such statements are also
made to send signals to other governments, and to the very groups with whom
proper diplomatic channels are not possible or unwished for. Therefore we also have to examine actions
actually being taken, or as much as we can come to know; after all, a raid to
rescue kidnapped journalists or businessmen or soldiers will not be disclosed
until months or years later, unless it is spectacularly successful; and
attempts to negotiate a deal for ransom or prisoner exchange also must be
conducted out of the bright lights of television cameras. That leaves us with finding a way to evaluate
the trustworthiness of leaks, unofficial statements, and unofficial
hackers. But perhaps, more than that, as
we have been trying to do, we have to learn to read the words and images
symptomatically, doing fantasy-anbalysis and seeking the very aspects of
government policies that leaders do not wish the public to be aware of—or perhaps
do not know themselves.
Learning the Hard Way—or Not at All
Israelis
have learned the hard way that the conflict is not over borders, but over the
existence of the Jewish state, even the presence of Jews in the Middle East.
The idea that economic incentives could override the ideology of the PLO (not
to mention Hamas) has been shown to be an illusion. The rapid changes in the
Arab world, the rise of the Islamic State and the Sunni-Shiite
conflict may have made Israel some temporary allies, but have also raised the general level of tension and
insecurity in the region.[v]
Meanwhile, the way in which the strategic game
is played out between Israel and Hamas is also partly dependent on the
influence of the balance between left and right wing—and hopefully some role
for the middle as well—and that means a balance between what the media people,
the intellectuals, the academics are able to do in terms of their own coming to
realize at some point that they are misreading the whole situation, that they
are filtering the facts on the ground and the historical earthquake happening
in the region through discourses either utterly outdated already since 9/11
(2001) or some other crucial date up to a year or two ago, and further
believing themselves correct because of the sweeping surge of anti-Zionist and
anti-Semitic rage throughout the world, taking this mixture of gross ignorance
and fanatical racism as evidence that Hamas is right and Israel is wrong, that
the people in Gaza are suffering mainly because of a non-existent blockade and
an aggressive, genocidal war waged by the Zionist Entity (the Jewish
Conspiracy) and that Israel’s actions have nothing to do with what is going on
in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Nigeria.
What Israelis have learned the hard way, not
just not to trust Hamas under any circumstances or, much more bitter a pill to
swallow, do not trust your oldest and usually most faithful; allies in the
United States, the intellectual chattering classes of the left and in the
Jewish liberal movements have yet to figure out: instead, they remain fixated
on the idea that the conflict between Israel and Gaza is part of an older
struggle over land, sovereignty, or geo-politics. Such notions seem comforting because, on the
one hand, they seem tractable, open to negotiation, while on the other, as
though there had been no Holocaust, it makes you feel part of the majority of
thinkers who identify with Hamas for their own perverse needs and thus give to
such well-intentioned, good-hearted souls an illusion of being part of the politically-correct
game (whose real name is Appeasement, Dhimmitude and Surrender).
It also has a more pernicious and subtle aspect
to it, insofar as many believe that they are acting and feeling in a more
Jewish way than the aggressive Zionists.
What was a virtue spawned of necessity for Ashkenazim huddled in ghettos
and shtetlech, the need for seeking to bribe officials with your show of
loyalty, to make yourself so useful to the state that they would not kill or
expel you yet again, and to agree with the masters or prison guards (sometimes
to join them as kapos) so as to put off for as long as possible the awful day
of destruction for your family and yourself, does not work in the twenty-first
century, not in the atmosphere of pure hatred emanating from the various
caliphates, rabid statelets run by Jew-hatred, or those faubourgs, suburbs,
districts, and no-gone areas lorded over by fervent preachers of martyrdom and
mass murder.
Whatever debates were legitimate and necessary
for and against the foundation of a modern state of Israel from the 1890s to
the 1930s no longer obtain after the State has come into existence and become
the homeland for millions of people, as well as a continuing refuge for
persecuted Jews from all parts of the world.
Israel has gone so many demographic shifts—from its earliest origins as
a place of pioneering from Central and Eastern Europe through tis absorption of
millions of refugees from Islamic and Arab lands to the last major shift with
the arrival of people from the old Soviet Union—that generalizations made in the
1940s or even 1970s don’t work. Today the wide-spread danger of anti-Semitism
nominally caused by—but actually, as we have argued above, in existence long
before—under the code of anti-Zionism and Arab-nationalism means that debates
which seemed to have some purpose ten or twenty years ago are now also
otiose. Internal dissension within the
Diaspora Jewish communities, like those within the halls of power of western
democracies, sound like hollow shouting today: voices from the peace-camp or
the appeasniks are full of sound and fury signifying nothing but gut feelings
and self-righteousness. The issues fly
past one another blindly. Meanwhile, as
Israel still faces more dangers than it dares name—not least, the possibility
of a “truce” with Hamas and a concession of power to the PLO, would mean the
transfer of rocket attacks, tunnels, and other suicide missions from Gaza to
land of the Palestinoan Authority, just as the probability of British or French
or American Jihadis fighting in Syria and Iran now will (in a matter of hours,
thanks to modern air transport) will take their experiences and training home.
[ii] Jonathan Carey, “Israel’s Endless Trials” The Times of Israel (14 August
2014) online at http://blogs.
timesofisrael.com/israels-endless-trials.
Also see Caroline R. Glick, “Column One: Understanding the
Israeli-Egyptian-Saudi Alliance“ The
Jerusalem Post (21 August 2014) online at http://www.
jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.asp?id=371891
[iii] For a more long-term perspective see Nicholas Saidel, “Axing the Axis: A
Doctrinal Assessment of Israel’s War
with Iran’s Resistance Axis’ The Times of
Israel (22 August 2014) http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/axing-the-axis-a-doctrinal-assessment-of-israels-war-with-irans-resistance-axis
[iv] Rachel Ehrenfeld, “It’s Jihad, Stupid!” American Center for Democracy (24 August 2014) online at http:// acdemocracy.org/its-jihad-stupid/
[v] Vic Rosenthal, “URJ
officials: ask your cabdriver for the facts |” Abu Yehuda (22 August 2014) online at http://abuyehuda.com/2014/08/urj-officials-ask-your-cabdriver-for-the-facts/
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