Bird’s-Eye: This week we’re running three sections of links on the Israeli attack on the Gaza-bound flotilla, and that hardly seems enough. (If you’ve been away and missed the story, Alternet has a quick “Three Basic Facts” ) We start with three of Tikkunista’s favourite writers: David Grossman and Amos Oz are both Israeli; Margaret Atwood has survived her crash course in Middle Eastern politics (“The whole experience was like learning about cooking by being thrown into the soup pot.”) and emerged with insights worth reading.
* A Puppet on a String David Grossman, Haaretz
How insecure, confused and panicky a country must be, to act as Israel acted! With a combination of excessive military force, and a fatal failure to anticipate the intensity of the reaction of those aboard the ship, it killed and wounded civilians, and did so – as if it were a band of pirates – outside Israel’s territorial waters. Clearly, this assessment does not imply agreement with the motives, overt or hidden, and often malicious, of some participants in the Gaza flotilla. Not all its people are peace-loving humanitarians, and the declarations of some of them regarding the destruction of the State of Israel are criminal. But these facts are simply not relevant at the moment: such opinions, so far as we know, do not deserve the death penalty.
* Israeli Force, Adrift on the Sea Amos Oz, New York Times (via Peace Now)
Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and Monday’s violent interception of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid there are the rank products of this mantra that what can’t be done by force can be done with even greater force. This view originates in the mistaken assumption that Hamas’s control of Gaza can be ended by force of arms or, in more general terms, that the Palestinian problem can be crushed instead of solved.
But Hamas is not just a terrorist organization. Hamas is an idea, a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force — not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one.
* The Shadow Over Israel Margaret Atwood Haaretz (Thanks, Amy!)
I’d been told ahead of time that Israelis would try to cover up the Shadow, but instead they talked about it non-stop. Two minutes into any conversation, the Shadow would appear. It’s not called the Shadow, it’s called “the situation.” It haunts everything.
The Shadow is not the Palestinians. The Shadow is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, linked with Israeli’s own fears. The worse the Palestinians are treated in the name of those fears, the bigger the Shadow grows, and then the fears grow with them; and the justifications for the treatment multiply.
