Of Israel, Gaza, Grief, and Victimhood

The BuzzFlash Editor's Blog

By Mark Karlin, Editor and Publisher

Beneath the growing body count in Gaza, there is the underlying public relations battle as to who is the bigger victim: Israel or the Palestinians?

Cultures that wallow themselves in victimhood are ultimately doomed to self-destruction, as the spiraling descent into death that knows no end in Gaza evidences.

But we've seen it all before, most recently in the ill-fated IDF incursion in Lebanon.

Most Americans accept two basic premises: the State of Israel has the right to exist and the Palestinians have a right to a state of their own.

If you begin with this underlying goal, much can be understood.

There are minority contingents of Palestinians and Israelis who want either the destruction of Israel, on the one hand, or the denial of a Palestinian state on the other.

Hamas and Hezbollah are Islamic fundamentalists who don't represent the relatively secular Islamic Palestinians as a whole.  Hamas came to power in a U.S. and Israeli approved election, largely because the residents of Gaza were fed up with the corruption of the PLO and also because Hamas, like Hezbollah, had set up a shadow system of social services to the Palestinian population.  But with Hamas's rise to power in Gaza came a fanatical political goal of destroying Israel. 

Hamas fortunately has not had the means to do it, largely because most Arab nation states see Islamic fundamentalists as a threat to their rule and ways of life. (Remember, Anwar Sadat was assassinated by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood for making peace with Israel.)  So the Arab Sunni Hamas is left with the Shiite and Persian Iran as its key ally, although Iran has given Hamas just enough weaponry to be a nuisance to Israel, but not enough to seriously threaten its national security as a nation.

Hamas actually appears to have stopped, for nearly two years, the most horrifying and psychological devastaing threat to Israelis: suicide bombings.  When Hamas rattles its tail nowadays, it shoots off homemade rockets in random and occasionally deadly attacks on Israelis in the south, where Gaza is located.

Meanwhile, in Israel, the guy who is the Israeli counterpart of the American Neo-con movement, Benjamin Netanyahu, was leading in the polls in the upcoming Israeli Knesset election in February.  Netanyahu does not want a two-state solution.  In fact, he and his followers have done everything possible to undercut peace with the Palestinians, beginning with undermining the Oslo Accords.  Just as Bush needed Osama bin Laden to achieve certain political and industrial-military complex goals, Netanyahu needs Hamas to crush hopes of a two-state solution and continue to subjugate the Palestinians as a non-people.

In this context, it is vital to remember that the warrior turned peace maker, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli during a gigantic rally for peace in Tel Aviv in the '90s.  So a Prime Minister of Israel seeking an end to conflict is killed not by an Arab, but by an Israeli, and the assassin is revered as a hero by a segment of the fundamentalist Israeli religious right.

After 9/11, Bush was able to seize unConstitutional executive authority because the majority of Americans were traumatized by terror.  That is just what happens in Israel when Palestinians attack.  This pleases Netanyahu to no end, because he then sets the tone for a hardline policy.  His two leading rivals for leadership are the heads of the Kadima and Labor parties.  Because Netanyahu was so far ahead in the polls, they raced -- at the end of the ceasefire with Hamas and the beginning of the rocket attacks on Israel -- to launch an assault on Gaza, which had been in the planning stages for months.  In fact, Ehud Barak (the former Israeli Prime Minister who almost signed off on a second-stage peace agreement with the Palestinians brokered by Bill Clinton in the last days of his presidency) -- currently Israeli Defense Minister -- has soared in the polls since the Gaza invasion. So, apparently has Tzipi Livni, who replaced Ehud Olmert as head of Kadima. (As in the British Parliament, Israelis vote for parties, who then form a coalition to elect the Prime Minister, who is generally the head of the party with the largest number of Knesset seats.)

Given a couple years of peace, the large majority of Israelis and Palestinians would favor -- and have in the lulls in terrorist attacks on Israel and Israeli counter-attacks on Palestinians -- peace and a two-state solution.  But there are significant minorities on both sides who want to sabotage that possibility -- and they inevitably carry the day.

In the end, the Palestinians and the Israeli government are going to have to face "get over it" moments that will be extremely difficult for both of them.  The Palestinians are going to have to give up their "right of return" demand, and the Israelis are going to have to dismantle the settlements on the West Bank, which will be an enormously difficult political goal to achieve.  But if the Israelis and Palestinians can't get over it, then there is no chance of peace.

Ironically, Israel is in a much better security position than in the past.  Think about it: it is inflicting horrid casualties in Gaza and not one Arab state is going to war with it, not one!  Until the Jimmy Carter-brokered peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, Israel faced endless wars and threats of wars with neighboring Arab states.  Not anymore.  That's an incredible accomplishment, and it came through steps toward peace, not war.  (There has even been "chatter" over the past two years that Israel is close to a peace agreement with Syria.)

Now the Persian Islamic Iran is the greatest fear of Israel, but the best security for Israel is peace and partnership with the Palestinians, not creating new recruits for the Islamic fundamentalists by laying siege to Gaza and killing hundreds of civilians.  That's the Netanyahu formula for keeping Israel in a permanent state of war.  Netanyahu is Israel's Cheney.  It is also what Hamas and Hezbollah want.  They know how to bait the bear.

A couple of years ago, I attended a graduation at Brandeis University, a college that was set up at a time when Jews were under a quota at the Ivy League schools.  I met a young Israeli Palestinian graduate who was vivacious, brilliant and crying because of all of her mixed emotions (yes, there are Arab students at Brandeis).  Her parents were there from an Israeli Arab town, and, ironically, someone was translating in Hebrew (they didn't speak English) what was happening.  And I thought, this is a young Palestinian woman, who if she had been in Gaza or in the West Bank might have been killed in one of the many clashes between Israel and the Palestinians.  But through her intelligence and fortitude, she had ended up with a full scholarship at a prestigious university in America that happened to be established as an academic refuge for Jewish students and scholars at a time when Anti-Semitism was socially acceptable in the United States. 

And I recalled many years ago meeting a young Israeli woman on a Kibbutz whose face was disfigured.  Her Kibbutz was on the Lebanese border and she had been riding a horse that stepped on a landmine placed there by terrorists.  She was also vibrant and full of life.

And I think of what is happening now in Gaza and I grieve, because both Israelis and Palestinians are being denied a future of peace by extremists on both sides.  Young people are being killed, whether it has been in the horror of suicide bombings that ravaged Israel for years, rocket attacks, or the bombings from the air by the IDF in Gaza.

Is there hope?  It is certainly difficult to see past the horror of Gaza at this time.  There is a cliched Israeli grim joke about a frog and a scorpion who meet at the edge of a river.  The scorpion asks the frog if it can ride on top of the frog to the other side of the water.  The frog responds, "Only if you promise not to sting me."  The scorpion agrees and crawls on the back of the frog.  Mid-river, the Scorpion delivers a lethal sting to the frog.  The frog, gasping for breath, asks: "Why did you sting me? You'll die too because you'll drown as I sink to the bottom." The scorpion responds: "Because this is the Middle East."

Were it not so, may it not be so in the future!

May the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton have the courage to bang some heads on both sides and provide a future of opportunity and a future without the threat of more blood and death to the young Israelis and Palestinians.

They deserve to live in peace.  Yitzhak Rabin and Anwar Sadat came to understand that -- and they were killed for daring to dream of an end to war between Israel and the Palestinians. 

The BuzzFlash Editor's Blog

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