...What is also new is the open way so many enjoy, let alone tolerate, the killing of civilians. There is a sense of satisfaction, even joy among Jewish Israelis....

Body count is of the essence, because there are no clear objectives to this assault. Since victory would be elusive any way, and since Hamas is going to win due to the mere fact that it won't be eradicated and it will emerge from the war as a power that will have survived the attack of the most powerful army in the region -- a power that has already enforced a new agenda and must be reckoned with by all other players -- death and destruction remain the only possible indicators of the Israeli sense of victory. The low number of Israeli casualties is also important for the continuation of public support for the "war". Everyone wants it to be as economic and as "clean" as possible. In order to achieve this goal the soldiers' hands must be really dirty. Unidentified commanders speaking to Haaretz from inside Gaza explained how they proceed: with a lot of force. You do not come close to a suspicious house without firing on it first, with a missile, with a tank, then tear off one of its walls with an armored D 9 (a huge tractor), and only then look to see who is inside, if anyone is still alive....

The prevalent moral argument goes more or less like this: It's not about their children but about ours. The government has a duty to protect its citizens (the duty of the Israeli sovereign to its Palestinian subjects has been denied since the Oslo accords, but in the Gaza Strip after the "disengagement plan" it has been wiped out altogether -- in fact this was one of the main purposes of that plan). And no matter how notoriously deadly our self-defense appears to be, the argument still sticks. In order to save one Jewish child, one is ready to sacrifice the lives of 100,000 of theirs. The number may vary of course; 100,000 is the figure I heard this morning with exactly this formulation from a colleague, a distinguished professor of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. He was speaking in public, very conscious of and proud in his position....

Alongside the moral argument there is the ideological one. It is all too familiar. We are different from them; they kill indiscriminately while we don't; they want to eliminate us together with the entire Western civilization while we are only defending ourselves. Since our very existence is at stake (and they are not ready for any compromise that would let us live here in peace) we are locked in a war unto death. It's either us or them, all of us or all of them. We don't want to kill so many of them, of course, but we have no choice. Actually, it's not us -- it's their own ideology that kills them. It's a tragedy, the more liberal Zionist would say, but they have only themselves to blame for what is happening to them. Since they are totally uncompromising, the only way to deter them is to make it so painful for them that they would think twice before shooting at us again. Only we don't know exactly how many bodies would deter them. 750 dead -- the number is rising as I am writing -- several thousand injured, and immense destruction of houses and infrastructure have not deterred them so far. Hence it is necessary to call on more reserve soldiers and widen the scope of this assault. It's a war, "the most justified of our justified wars" said our president, the dear peace-maker Shimon Peres, and we have no choice.

Justification aside, this is not a war. The assault resembles an expedition of a colonial power that goes out of the colonists' enclave to teach a lesson to rebellious barbaric tribes. The kind of raids known from 19th century colonial wars; the kind of raids South Africa conducted often in the seventies and eighties against neighboring countries. Only now the natives not the colonists are in the enclave. The Jewish colonists have turned the entire Palestinian territory into a series of enclaves, more or less separated from each other, and from "Israel proper" (which includes not only the territory west of the 67 border , "the green line," but also most of the Jewish settlements east of the green line). Different enclaves are treated differently. They are more or less "external" to the Israeli mainland, more or less forsaken by the Israeli sovereign and its governmental apparatuses. Gaza is an enclave of a special kind and status. It is an enclave that has turned into a frontier, a no man's land and an experimental field for man's hunting and for a gradual, more or less controlled destruction....

Nearly seventy ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands. Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz. This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war. Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam...

posted by speakingcorpse : 1/12/2009 07:18:00 PM