[Flames Fan, Ph.D.]

Good reflective article by Max Hastings:

Israel’s tragedy is that the only democracy in the Middle East has fallen prey to a succession of Right-wing governments, which derive much of their electoral strength from Russian emigres and extremist religious parties.

Part of the explanation, they said, was that since the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish fanatic back in 1995, no Jerusalem government has pursued a serious political strategy for peace.
The security forces have simply been left to impose varying degrees of repression, while Jewish settlers grab ever-larger areas of the West Bank and Jerusalem. In a remarkable moment of frankness, one former Shin Bet chief said: ‘Occupation has made us a cruel people.’

Initially, Israel’s government had no policies for the Occupation, because it had never dreamed of achieving such conquests. Those in charge simply followed impulses.
The general in charge of former Jordanian east Jerusalem, for instance, ordered bulldozers to demolish 137 Arab homes, to clear a plaza in front of that sacred Jewish place, the Wailing Wall.
Israel’s justice minister told Teddy Kollek, mayor of West Jerusalem: ‘I don’t know what the legal status is. Do it quickly, and may the God of Israel be with you.’ Some elderly Arabs refused to leave their homes, and were crushed in the debris.
In those days I, as a passionate admirer of Israel, would have said: the Arabs caused this war. They gambled, and lost. Israel is entitled now to secure its future. Since the Arab nations refuse peace on any borders, why should not Israel’s soldiers set these where they have conquered?

I still felt the same in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War when Israel reeled before a devastating Egyptian and Syrian surprise attack. From amid the Israelis’ camp fires, as a correspondent I wrote expressing my admiration for the nation, for what it had created from a near-wasteland: ‘They are a very great people, who have come closer to destruction than blind Europe seems willing to recognise.’ The veteran journalist James Cameron, who had known Israel since its inception, wrote me a generous note after that piece was published, saying: ‘It is quite impossible to work in combat with the Israeli army without this response, if you have any sense of history and drama.’
But then he added reflectively: ‘I have sometimes wondered over the past few years whether this irresistible military mesmerism hasn’t clouded for us some of the political falsities.’
Some 40 years on, I have become sure that Jimmy Cameron was right. Too many of us allowed ourselves to become blinded by military success to the huge injustice done to the Palestinians.

That the current crisis is giving rise to some ugly displays of anti-semitism in parts of Europe is utterly contemptible.
But it is also contemptible that some apologists hurl charges of anti-semitism at all Israel’s critics — many of whom are admirers of so much that this great nation has achieved.
Most of us merely attack Israeli excesses as we do those of Russia, Burma, China, Syria, the U.S. or any other government that deploys disproportionate violence against those at its mercy.
Israel’s people deserve a less unworthy leader than Benjamin Netanyahu, and a higher vision than that of reducing Gaza to rubble. This can breed only a new generation of alienated, embittered Palestinian radicals, who will sustain their desperate struggle through decades to come.