the sense of walls closing in

I'd missed this NYT piece by Israeli historian Benny Morris, published in the wake of the first attacks in Gaza. It offers an insight into the minds of many Israeli Jews, who sense that the existence of their young country is facing a series of mortal threats from beyond and within its borders, more powerful than any since 1967.

What is common to these specific threats is their unconventionality. Between 1948 and 1982 Israel coped relatively well with the threat from conventional Arab armies. Indeed, it repeatedly trounced them. But Iran’s nuclear threat, the rise of organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah that operate from across international borders and from the midst of dense civilian populations, and Israeli Arabs’ growing disaffection with the state and their identification with its enemies, offer a completely different set of challenges. And they are challenges that Israel’s leaders and public, bound by Western democratic and liberal norms of behavior, appear to find particularly difficult to counter.

Israel's actions in Gaza are tactically self-destructive in the longer term. In the short term they are buying a sense of stability.

(via Christopher Hitchens).

Comments

[Beadyell]

The evidence throughout Israel's history is that it is not bound by "Western democratic and liberal norms of behavior" where Palestinians and Arabs are concerned but by its founding fathers' dual dictum of military supremacy and creating facts on the ground, ie evicting the indigenous population in favour of Jewish settlers. Democracy is strictly for the Israelis. When the Palestinians of Gaza elected a Hamas leadership Israel objected, hence the present crisis.