It’s too soon to know whether the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas will be more than a sticking plaster to be ripped off by more violence whether provoked by Israel or not, but while we wait for events to give us the answer, there is a good case for saying that under Netanyahu’s leadership the Zionist (not Jewish) state has suffered a significant defeat.
When Israel rained death and destruction on the Gaza Strip four years ago, Chris Hedges wrote the following. “Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and Naval vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks mosques and slums, to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armour, no command and control, no army and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is Murder. Images of dead Palestinian children lined up as if asleep on the floor of the main hospital in Gaza are a metaphor for the future. Israel will from now on speak to the Palestinians in the language of death.”
There was a fascinating moment on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme this morning when Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, answered a question honestly because he thought he was off the air. That was enough to cause a craven BBC (dictionary definition of craven – “cowardly”) to apologize for the fact that one its presenters had caught him off-guard. So what did he say?
I imagine I am not the only one who feels the need to vomit (dictionary definition – “to throw up the contents of the stomach through the mouth”) when Israel’s Goebbels justifies the Zionist state’s ferocious and monstrously disproportionate attacks by air and sea on the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip, the prison camp which is home to 1.5 million besieged and mainly impoverished Palestinians. The Israeli to whom I am referring is, of course, Australian-born Mark Regev, the prime minister’s spokesman, for which read spin doctor. The more I see and hear him in action, the more it seems to me that he makes Nazi Germany’s propaganda chief look like an amateur.
When President Obama tried to get a real Middle East peace process going by calling on Israel to halt its illegal settlement activity and his “Yes, we can” became “No, we can’t”, I dared to invest some hope in the idea that in a second term he would use the leverage all presidents have to oblige Israel to end its defiance of international law and be serious about peace on terms the Palestinians could accept. And that investment was not the consequence of mere wishful thinking on my part.
