Free Press
09-16-2009, 02:12 PM
(4.5 out of 5 stars so far in Jerusalem Post)
Sep 16, 2009 21:25 | Updated Sep 16, 2009 21:57
Rattling the Cage: A wake-up call from Judge Goldstone
Maybe this will do it. Maybe the Goldstone report on Operation Cast Lead will be the thing that finally puts the fear of God into Israeli society, that shocks this country into deciding once and for all that the occupation must come to an end - for our sake if no one else's.
I don't want to see Israeli political and military leaders brought to The Hague; I don't want them to be unable to get off a plane in a foreign capital. It wouldn't be fair, not if fairness entails equity: There are countless foreign politicians and military men who've done much, much worse things than we did in Gaza who roam the world freely.
But if Israelis have a sense of foreboding since Tuesday's release of the Goldstone report, a fear that the world may really be fed up with our treatment of the Palestinians, then I'm glad. Then I'm hopeful. Because fear is the only thing that might get us to finally set free the 4 million people of Gaza and the West Bank. Of our own accord, of our own moral reckoning, we won't do it. Four years of intifada bus bombings hardened us for a generation, maybe longer. When it comes to Arabs, we've been morally numb for too long to change on our own.
WE JUST don't get it about Gaza. Why, we wonder, doesn't the world understand that we fought a just war, that we were defending ourselves?
We're unable to see that if anybody did to Israel what we did to Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, we wouldn't be talking about war crimes. We wouldn't be talking about crimes against humanity. We would be saying, in one voice, that the end of Israel was upon us, and we would be out to obliterate whoever did that to us.
But, we exclaim, what about the context? What about those thousands and thousands of rockets they fired at Sderot? No country would stand for that. We had to go to war.
We've become so numb, so brainwashed, that we really believe that that's all that happened before we started the war, that that's the entire context. We don't see what the rest of the world saw - that those thousands and thousands of rockets on Sderot caused a tiny fraction of the death and destruction we caused in Gaza at the same time.
In the three years and three months between our disengagement from Gaza and the start of Operation Cast Lead, 28 Israelis were killed by rockets, bombs and bullets from Gaza.
In that same period, more than 1,250 Gazans were killed by missiles, tank shells and all sorts of other ammunition fired by the IDF.
The context of the war - the full context - was that we had blockaded Gaza by air, sea and to a great extent by land, we were racking up a kill ratio of nearly 50 to 1 - then we invaded the country, destroyed thousands upon thousands of homes and public buildings and bumped up the ratio to more than 100-to-1.
And we don't see that we did anything wrong. Somebody's got to tell us. Lots of people have tried, including Amnesty International, the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch and, last but definitely not least, dozens of our own soldiers.
MORE:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251804588667&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Sep 16, 2009 21:25 | Updated Sep 16, 2009 21:57
Rattling the Cage: A wake-up call from Judge Goldstone
Maybe this will do it. Maybe the Goldstone report on Operation Cast Lead will be the thing that finally puts the fear of God into Israeli society, that shocks this country into deciding once and for all that the occupation must come to an end - for our sake if no one else's.
I don't want to see Israeli political and military leaders brought to The Hague; I don't want them to be unable to get off a plane in a foreign capital. It wouldn't be fair, not if fairness entails equity: There are countless foreign politicians and military men who've done much, much worse things than we did in Gaza who roam the world freely.
But if Israelis have a sense of foreboding since Tuesday's release of the Goldstone report, a fear that the world may really be fed up with our treatment of the Palestinians, then I'm glad. Then I'm hopeful. Because fear is the only thing that might get us to finally set free the 4 million people of Gaza and the West Bank. Of our own accord, of our own moral reckoning, we won't do it. Four years of intifada bus bombings hardened us for a generation, maybe longer. When it comes to Arabs, we've been morally numb for too long to change on our own.
WE JUST don't get it about Gaza. Why, we wonder, doesn't the world understand that we fought a just war, that we were defending ourselves?
We're unable to see that if anybody did to Israel what we did to Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, we wouldn't be talking about war crimes. We wouldn't be talking about crimes against humanity. We would be saying, in one voice, that the end of Israel was upon us, and we would be out to obliterate whoever did that to us.
But, we exclaim, what about the context? What about those thousands and thousands of rockets they fired at Sderot? No country would stand for that. We had to go to war.
We've become so numb, so brainwashed, that we really believe that that's all that happened before we started the war, that that's the entire context. We don't see what the rest of the world saw - that those thousands and thousands of rockets on Sderot caused a tiny fraction of the death and destruction we caused in Gaza at the same time.
In the three years and three months between our disengagement from Gaza and the start of Operation Cast Lead, 28 Israelis were killed by rockets, bombs and bullets from Gaza.
In that same period, more than 1,250 Gazans were killed by missiles, tank shells and all sorts of other ammunition fired by the IDF.
The context of the war - the full context - was that we had blockaded Gaza by air, sea and to a great extent by land, we were racking up a kill ratio of nearly 50 to 1 - then we invaded the country, destroyed thousands upon thousands of homes and public buildings and bumped up the ratio to more than 100-to-1.
And we don't see that we did anything wrong. Somebody's got to tell us. Lots of people have tried, including Amnesty International, the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch and, last but definitely not least, dozens of our own soldiers.
MORE:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251804588667&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull