Israel's onslaught on Gaza has been a disaster for Israel as well as for its victims. No longer does the outside world see 'plucky little Israel', surrounded by a sea of enemies, valiantly defending itself against overwhelming odds. Those days are long past. In the intervening years a monster has developed, funded and protected by the USA. Nuclear armed Israel has emerged as the 'neighborhood bully' and twice now has revealed itself as such, first in laying waste to the Lebanon in 2006 in an attempt to destroy Hezbollah and secondly by its blitz on the helpless inhabitants of Gaza in an attempt to destroy Hamas. How the destruction of UN compounds, the use of phosphorous bombs against civilians and the murder of hundreds of Palestinian children is expected to advance the prospect of peace, perhaps only the Israeli War Cabinet can tell us. Common sense tells us it will engender even more bitterness among the Palestinians.
If Hamas were to collapse (and there is no sign of that) it would simply be replaced by another group determined to reclaim what Israel has stolen from the Palestinian people. Hamas is as much a creation of the Israelis' actions against Palestinians as the French Resistance in the Second World War was a creation of Nazi Germany, by its occupation of France. But Israel wants more than the defeat of Hamas and the cessation of rocket attacks against its southern towns. Israel wants a compliant Palestinian leadership who will collude in ensuring that she retains the lion's share of the illegal settlements and resources in the West Bank, has sole ownership of Jerusalem and denies any right of return to Palestinians driven out in 1948 or 1967. But Palestinians in general will disown any leadership which tries to 'sell them out' in such a way. That is the reality which the Israeli government and many Israelis seem strangely unable to grasp.
For too long, Israel has shamelessly traded upon the collective guilt felt by the Western World over the Holocaust. Israel has, literally, been allowed to get away with murder. One can only wonder how the founders of the State of Israel back in 1948 would view the actions of their descendants over the last few weeks. One can only hope that they would weep and be ashamed. Many of the generation of Jews who built Israel in the late 1940s and 1950s had suffered at the hands of Fascists in Europe. How sad that their descendants should have built a country which sees violence against its neighbors as a good thing, seizing their land as justifiable, regards its own citizens as superior and discriminates against others on account of their race. That all seems, well, a bit Nazi, doesn't it? The analogy should not be taken too far of course, for there are no gas chambers or death pits but it seems clear that the Israeli government and many Israelis do not see Palestinians as having equal worth as human beings nor equal rights. Bottling up over 1 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and denying them the food, medicine and power supplies needed to sustain life is uncomfortably reminiscent of the incarceration of Europe's Jews in Ghettoes. One thousand three hundred dead Palestinians in Gaza as against fifteen dead Israeli soldiers does not seem to disquieten most Israelis. Indeed, the timing of the onslaught against Gaza, just ahead of Israeli Parliamentary elections, suggests that it is viewed as a potential vote winner. What an eloquent indictment of contemporary Israeli society!
The more Israel brutalizes its neighbors, the more it dehumanises itself. A generation indifferent to the suffering of others and blind to the injustice it is handing out seems doomed to know war not peace, suffering not joy. For Israel's true friends, the time has come to tell her the truth to her face. In the end, conflicts are resolved by talking to your 'enemies' and respecting their humanity. No matter how long you have spent fighting and killing each other, in the end you have to talk to Hamas, talk to Hezbollah, talk to Fatah and they have to talk to you. There is no other way, short of extermination; and of course, the Nazis tried that!