ISRAEL’S PARANOIA?…OR OPINIONS BASED ON BIAS?….SUPERB COLUMN
Sunday Mar 07, 2010
The Warped Mirror: Israel’s ‘paranoia’
Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The British Sunday paper The Observer devoted one of its recent editorials to an ostensibly well-meaning lecture about what really, truly was in Israel’s best interest. The title counseled that “Israel can accelerate peace by exercising restraint,” and the sub-header elaborated: “The diplomatic challenge is to help Israel grasp how its failure even to engage with international opinion risks an isolation which will make the country much less secure.”
The piece was open for comments by readers for just 12 hours, but attracted more than 300 responses in this time, and if the thrust of these comments reflected “international opinion”, they provided a good example of the futility of any Israeli efforts to “engage” with this kind of utterly misinformed and deeply hostile audience.
The analysis offered in the editorial suggested that:
Israeli policy is driven by two fears. The first, quite justified, is that the country is mostly surrounded by hostile states, some of which host terrorist attacks against its civilians. The second, unjustified, is that criticism from any quarter includes an implicit question of the legitimacy of the Jewish state. That paranoia leads to constant reliance on isolationist militarism which, as well as creating terrible injustice for the Palestinians, has consistently failed to provide the security that Israelis crave.”
The assessment that efforts to provide Israelis the security they “crave” have “consistently failed” is most peculiar given that the relevant Israeli authorities reported at the end of last year that in 2009, there was “a marked decrease in the volume of terrorist attacks compared to previous years.”
Any editorial writers who would like to dispense free advice on how best to achieve the “security that Israelis crave” could also benefit from contemplating the graphic that accompanies the quoted report, because it vividly illustrates that Israeli efforts to achieve peace in Camp David and Taba from summer 2000 to January 2001 were followed by the violence of the so-called “Al Aqsa intifada.”
But the perhaps most appropriate response to the rather patronizing Observer editorial could be found in a recent, unrelated article by veteran Middle East analyst Barry Rubin, who commented on the controversy about the assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh and suggested:
Proposition One: if you truly understand that the terrorist groups are going to try to kill you no matter what you do, it removes the fear of making them angry.
Proposition Two: If you know the world is going to criticize you no matter what you do, it removes the fear of making them angry.
That’s Israel’s situation.”
One could actually argue that Rubin’s take represents a somewhat too rosy scenario, because it seems that the world isn’t just going to criticize Israel no matter what Israel does; instead, rumors and accusations about what Israel might have done are already enough to trigger criticism, condemnation and political punishment.
Reactions to the assassination of Mabhouh illustrated this all too well. As Tom Gross has noted, “no forensic evidence that points to Israel” has been provided so far, and there were actually many governments and various other parties that might have “wanted Mabhouh out of the way.”
Yet, according to a Jerusalem Post report last week, the visiting Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak indicated that “European anger over supposed Israeli misuse of passports to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on January 19 played a ‘certain role’ in shifting EU votes on the Goldstone Report in the UN General Assembly,” resulting in more votes in favor of an Arab resolution to keep the issue on the agenda.
Assuming that the Slovak foreign minister is correct in his assessment, this means that several European countries were prepared to change their votes in the UN on the basis of mere accusations of Israeli wrongdoing.
Moreover, just on the basis of such accusations from an Arab country, these European countries found it apparently appropriate to endorse an Arab initiative to keep a report on the UN agenda that condemns Israel for finally defending hundreds of thousands of its citizens who for years had to live under a relentless barrage of rocket and mortar attacks. Likewise, the outrage over the assassination of Mabhouh ignores the question of how many people would have paid with their lives if the man in charge of replenishing the Hamas arsenal had been allowed to go about his business undisturbed.
One could also note in response to the criticism of Israel’s conduct in the Observer editorial that the disengagement from Gaza in the summer of 2005 was a move that should have greatly pleased the “international opinion” that Israel is supposedly ignoring so stubbornly at its own peril. Of course, as long as there were Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, “international opinion” held that these settlements fuelled Palestinian extremism and terrorism. As we know now, after Israel completely withdrew from the Gaza Strip, the rocket attacks from there increased dramatically, Hamas was voted into power and eventually managed to take over the Gaza Strip completely.
Against this backdrop, complaints about Israel’s supposed “paranoia” and disregard for “international opinion” seem hard to justify – but saying so might invite accusations of “paranoia” and disregard for “international opinion.” When it comes to Israel, “international opinion” has apparently turned into some kind of absolute imperative that is above such pedantic considerations as the question of whether the opinion is based on a factually sound assessment.
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/warpedmirror/entry/israel_s_paranoia_posted_by
Comments are closed.
