BY BRADLEY BURSTON
A war tells a people terrible truths about itself. That is
why it is so difficult to listen. We were determined to avoid an honest
look at the first Gaza war. Now, in international waters and having opened
fire on an international group of humanitarian aid workers and activists,
we are fighting and losing by the second. For Israel, in the end, this
Second Gaza War could be far more costly and painful than the first.
In going to war in Gaza in late 2008, Israeli military and
political leaders hoped to teach Hamas a lesson. They succeeded. Hamas
learned that the best way to fight Israel is to let Israel do what it has
begun to do naturally: bluster, blunder, stonewall, and fume.
Hamas, and no less, Iran and Hezbollah, learned early on
that Israel’s own embargo against Hamas-ruled Gaza was the most
sophisticated and powerful weapon they could have deployed against the
Jewish state.
Here in Israel, we have still yet to learn the lesson: We
are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege
itself is becoming Israel’s Vietnam.
Of course, we knew this could happen. On Sunday (May 31),
when the army spokesman began speaking of a Gaza-bound aid flotilla in
terms of an attack on Israel, MK Nahman Shai, the IDF (Israeli Defence
Forces) chief spokesman during the 1991 Gulf war, spoke publicly of his
worst nightmare, an operation in which Israeli troops, raiding the
flotilla, might open fire on peace activists, aid workers and Nobel
laureates.
Likud MK Miri Regev, who also once headed the IDF
spokesman’s office, said early Monday (June 1) that the most important
thing now was to deal with the negative media reports quickly, so they
would go away.
But they are not going to go away. One of the ships is
named for Rachel Corrie, killed while trying to bar the way of an IDF
bulldozer in Gaza seven years ago. Her name and her story have since
become a lightning rod for pro-Palestinian activism.
Perhaps most ominously, in a stepwise, lemming-like march
of folly in our relations with Ankara, a regional power of crucial
importance and one which, if heeded, could have helped head off the First
Gaza War, we have come dangerously close to effectively declaring a state
of war with Turkey.
“This is going to be a very large incident, certainly with
the Turks,” said Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the cabinet minister with the most
sensitive sense of Israel’s ties with the Muslim world.
We explain, time and again, that we are not at war with
the people of Gaza. We say it time and again because we ourselves need to
believe it, and because, deep down, we do not.
There was a time, when it could be said that we knew
ourselves only in wartime. No longer. Now we know nothing. Yet another
problem with refraining from talks with Hamas and Iran: They know us so
much better than we know ourselves.
They know, as the song about the Lebanon War suggested (“Lo
Yachol La’atzor Et Zeh”) that we, unable to see ourselves in any
clarity, are no longer capable of stopping ourselves.
Hamas, as well as Iran, have come to know and benefit from
the toxicity of Israeli domestic politics, which is all too ready to
mortgage the future for the sake of a momentary apparent calm.
They know that in our desperation to protect our own image
of ourselves, we will avoid modifying policies which have literally
brought aid and comfort to our enemies, in particular Hamas, which the
siege on Gaza has enriched through tunnel taxes and entrenched through
anger toward Israel.
For many on the right, it must be said, there will be a
quiet joy in all of what is about to hit the fan. “We told you so,” the
crowing will begin. “The world hates us, no matter what we do. So we may
as well go on building (Read: ‘Settling the West Bank and East Jerusalem’)
and defending our borders (Read: ‘Bolster Hamas and ultimately harm
ourselves by refusing to lift the Gaza embargo’).”
Hamas, Iran and the Israeli and Diaspora hard right know,
as one, that this is a test of enormous importance for Benjamin Netanyahu.
Keen to have the world focus on Iran and the threat it poses to the people
of Israel, Netanyahu must recognize that the world is now focused on
Israel and the threat it poses to the people of Gaza.
Courtesy: www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/a-special-place-in-hell-the-second-gaza-war-israel-lost-at-sea-1.293246