Attacks of some kind

I don't agree with Akiva Eldar's perspective on Israeli-Palestinian peace, but he is right about one thing: Netanyahu will use the attacks to justify even harsher treatment of the Palestinians, and the blood of those victims will then be used to pull the Palestinians back towards a maximalist position, since every other strategy seems to end in failure.

"The attacks in the south should remind us that in the Israeli-Palestinian military arena there is no knockout victory. Whoever didn't want the Palestina Liberation Organization got Hamas. Whoever didn't want Hamas is getting Al-Qaida."

The myth of Israel's Goliath image has been slain
From Ha'aretz

Akiva Eldar

The planning, time, place and methodology of the attacks in the south indicate that the intention was not just to kill Israelis, avenge Palestinian deaths, or speed up the end of occupation. Whoever sent the terrorists is no friend of President Mahmoud Abbas and his people, who are scurrying around trying to lobby support for a UN General Assembly vote for a Palestinian state next month.. . .

Read the rest.

An absence of Schadenfreude

Despite my criticism of its government, its military, and its founding ideology, there has always been one positive fact about the State of Israel that has provided a true - if generally non sequitur - argument in its defense:

Out of all the Middle Eastern states, within the territory it captured in 1948, freedom of expression has been the strongest.

It's been hardly ideal, mind you, considering that people were still jailed for advocating against Zionism, but it has still, traditionally, been legal for people within the Green Line to write, talk, and demonstrate for the Palestinians, about what has happened to them, and it has remained legal for some of them (particularly Jews) to point out the problems that Zionism has wrought.

All of that is changing.

With the passage of these laws, Netanyahu and Lieberman have again changed the score in the Middle East, and not in Israel's favour. Where the Arabs are moving towards freedom, laying down their lives for the right to write and say what they want, the Knesset is curtailing those rights. While the Turkish government is finally making some move to reduce the restrictions on Kurdish culture and language, the Israeli government is making it illegal to talk about what happened to the Palestinians in 1948.

I don't say this with any schadenfreude. It would be nice to feel some pleasure at watching the State of Israel descend into fascism, but it isn't humanly possible. It is, however, possible to hope that this signals the conflict entering its final phase, and that Zionism will finally be forced to take a look at itself in the mirror to see what it has become.