The country that wouldn't grow up

From one perspective Israel's future is bleak. Not for the first time, a Jewish state has found itself on the vulnerable periphery of someone else's empire: overconfident in its own righteousness, willfully blind to the danger that its indulgent excesses might ultimately provoke its imperial mentor to the point of irritation and beyond, and heedless of its own failure to make any other friends. To be sure, the modern Israeli state has big weapons - very big weapons. But can it do with them except make more enemies? However, modern Israel also has options. Precisely because the country is an object of such universal mistrust and resentment - because people expect so little from Israel today - a truly statesmanlike shift in its policies (dismantling of major settlements, opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling Hamas' bluff by offering the movement's leaders something serious in return for recognition of Israel and a cease-fire) could have disproportionately beneficial effects. But such a radical realignment of Israeli strategy would entail a difficult reappraisal of every cliche and illusion under which the country and its political elite have nestled for most of their life. It would entail acknowledging that Israel no longer has any special claim upon international sympathy or indulgence; that the United States won't always be there; that weapons and walls can no more preserve Israel forever than they preserved the German Democratic Republic or white South Africa; that colonies are always doomed unless you are willing to expel or exterminate the indigenous population. Other countries and their leaders have understood this and managed comparable realignments: Charles De Gaulle realized that France's settlement in Algeria, which was far older and better established than Israel's West Bank colonies, was a military and moral disaster for his country. In an exercise of outstanding political courage, he acted upon that insight and withdrew. But when De Gaulle came to that realization he was a mature statesman, nearly 70 years old. Israel cannot afford to wait that long. At the age of 58 the time has come for it to grow up.

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Israeli-Palestinian Conflict–It Never Stops Breaking Your Heart

Tonight, Diane wrote about a particularly nasty 2003 incident first reported in the New York Times, in which Israeli Border Police picked a 17 year-old Hebron boy at random, threw him in the back of their jeep, drove him to the town’s deserted industrial zone and beat him up along the way. An officer in the front seat filmed a trophy video of the beating while his colleagues in the back seat did the deed. When they tired of the beating they physically threw him from the speeding jeep. The boy died when his head hit the ground with the jeep traveling roughly 40-50 mph. The reason Diane wrote about this story is that this month one of the four perpetrators was convicted of the killing (his three colleagues remain on trial). But after reading the defense lawyer’s claim that these men were only acting according to standards set for them by the Border Police itself, she began to realize that a litany of similar prosecutions against other Border Police personnel for similar abuse proved the lawyer correct. In other words, both the Border Police–perhaps explicitly–and Israeli society tacitly want their police to terrorize the Palestinian population treating it in a brutish, bestial manner. So why prosecute individual officers for doing what they were taught to do?

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Haaretz on Israeli Settlers: How Mean Can you Be?

Israeli settlers in the West Bank have shot Palestinians, stolen their land, stolen their water, chased them out of their homes, put their own orchards off limits, and generally been about as mean as you could be short of an actual concerted war. They have also lobbied successfully to keep Palestinians stateless, about the closest the modern world comes to large-scale slavery. And now the big colonies have convinced Prime Minister Olmert just to unilaterally steal the Palestinians' land on which the colonists are squatting! But when you push little children into thorn bushes, somehow that is more eloquent than all the other things I just said. It reminds me of the jeers and jostling engaged in by American whites when the first southern black students walked on to previously segregated campuses.

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