Zionism’s Colonial Enterprise Is Doomed, but…
Ronen Bergman, a senior military and political analyst for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, recently wrote what I consider to be one of the most important articles for decades on the subject of the mindset of the Zionist state’s military and political leaders. It was reproduced in the Wall Street Journal under the headline Siege Fatigue and the Flotilla Mistake.
Getting to the main thrust of his analysis, Bergman wrote this (my emphasis added):
“What we witnessed in the early hours of Monday morning was symptomatic of a new degree of fatigue in Israeli governing circles. The fact that both the political and military authorities could sign off on such an irresponsible operation suggests that the leadership of the country has given up what it has concluded is ultimately a Sisyphean attempt to accommodate world opinion. Isolation is no longer a threat to be fought, their thinking seems to go, because Israel is terminally isolated. What remains is to concentrate exclusively on what is best for Israel’s survival, shedding any regard for the opinion of others.”
Bergman went on to quote from a conversation he had with a very senior military source two days before Israel’s attack on the Gaza-bound flotilla. The source said it made no difference how careful Israel was in its actions or how it tackled the flotilla. “Whatever we do, they’ll all be against us, they’ll condemn us at the UN and we’ll be scolded. We might as well at least preserve our national dignity and maintain the blockade of Gaza.” In other words, Bergman commented, “the war over world opinion is over and Israel has lost.”
A little later in his article Bergman wrote:
“Israel’s fatigue and deep sense of ostracism is, to say the least, unhealthy… And, of course, it is profoundly disturbing when the fatigued and isolated country itself has the means to strike pre-emptively and punishingly at its enemies, including in ways from which, realistically, there may be no return.”
As I note in the three-volume, American edition of my book ZIONISM: THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS (www.zionismbook.com), the question of whether or not Israel should care about what the non-Jewish world thinks was the ticking time-bomb at the heart of Israeli politics from the moment of the Zionist (not Jewish) state’s birth.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was firmly and unshakably of the opinion, as were most of his leadership colleagues, that what the non-Jewish world thought of Israel’s policies and actions did not matter. “Our future,” Ben-Gurion was fond of saying, “does not depend on what Gentiles say but on what Jews do.” The logic (paranoia?) supporting this way of thinking went something like this. The world has always been and always will be anti-Semitic (anti-Jew). Holocaust II, shorthand for another great turning against the Jews, is at some point in the future inevitable. So by definition there can be no limits to what Israel might have to do to preserve itself as refuge of last resort for all Jews everywhere.
My own Gentile take on this aspect of the matter is that after the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, and because of it, the giant of anti-Semitism would have gone back to sleep and, very probably, would have died in its sleep – if the major powers had not allowed Zionism right or wrong to have its way. But let’s put that to one side.
The only heavyweight Israeli leader who opposed Ben-Gurion’s view of Israel’s position in the world was Moshe Sharett, the state’s first foreign minister and prime minister for a short period after Ben-Gurion stood down because of doubts about his mental stability. In my view Sharett was the only completely sane member of Israel’s early leadership.
I think the most perceptive summary of Sharett and his significance is to be found in The Iron Wall, Israel and the Arabs, a book of revelations by Avi Shlaim, one of Israel’s leading “revisionist” (meaning honest) historians who now lives in the UK and is Professor of International Relations at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Shlaim wrote (my emphasis added):
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