The issue that Israel needs to make clear is that Gaza was no worse a hell than many other assymetric instances of warfare, for example, Iraq, Sri Lanka and Chechna, and in many ways, Gaza was outstanding in the standards of moral behavior in such invidious situations when a terror group initiates attacks against a civilian population and then blatantly uses their own civilians as shields.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The Goldstone Effect
As one commentator observed, and I am paraphrasing:
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I actually disagree. We will argue the Goldstone report until we are blue in the face. But, the details are unimportant. Israel's enemies don't accept the country's right to exist let alone its right to defend her citizens. Israel could have sent in Dennis the Menace with a super-shooter water pistol and someone would still complain about collective punishment. We aren't permitted to defend ourselves from those who have been dispossessed, as far as these groups are concerned.
The real fight - IMHO - must be about our right to self-identification and self-determination. Oddly, there was international agreement 100 years ago that the Jews were a people with these inherent rights. We've been undermined, I think, by American Jewry and its inability to reconcile Jewish and American nationalisms, and post-war Europeans, so fearful of ethnocentric and ideologically driven patriotism, that they're barely able to lift a finger to defend their own cultural identities let alone someone else's.
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