Israeli Politics and Gaza

Noah Millman offers this provocative commentary on Israeli politics regarding Gaza following the flotilla fiasco on Tha American Scene.

The fact is that outside of the far left and the far right, nobody on the Israeli spectrum is particularly interested in trying to think the way a Palestinian might think. On the far right, the assumption is that the Palestinians are comprehensively unappeasable. They want what they want: all the land, with no Jews on it. They are willing to sacrifice massively, to fight and die and see their children die, for this goal. Since there is no way to satisfy that demand except by abject surrender and flight, there must be war forever. The nice thing about this line of thinking is that by following it in practice you automatically prove it to be true. On the far left, there is similarly an understanding that a Jewish state as such was always going to be an affront, and that therefore what looks like terribly painful concessions from the Israeli side looks to the other side like grudging half-measures. The assumption, however, is that there is a set of political compromises that would constitute mutual recognition of each side’s narrative, and on that basis of mutual recognition, an agreement to end the conflict is possible. In between, in the broad middle that constitutes most of the Israeli Jewish public, there is mostly fury that nothing ever seems to be enough.

Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish adds that neoconservative escalation reminiscent of Bush-Cheney seems to rule in Israel.

And let's not delude ourselves: the reason so many of us find the policy toward Gaza repellent is that it is quite obviously an attempt to collectively punish the people of Gaza for voting for Hamas, and then for lobbing missiles after Israel's withdrawal. That was the element of the 2009 war that was so horrifying to those of us on the outside, and that is why this blockade, designed to maintain total control over 1.5 million people (and to benefit various Israeli economic sectors), is so disconcerting.

And it is, of course, self-reinforcing. Has the war and the blockade hurt the idea of Hamas? Au contraire. It has legitimized it. When you end up killing civilians to prevent access to toys and wheelchairs, you have lost any desire to win the war of ideas and have retreated instead to the logic of force. The Bush-Cheney administration is, in other words, alive and well ... and in Jerusalem, and backed by the opposition, because it is backed by the people.

--Ballard Burgher