What
You're Missing in our subscriber-only CounterPunch newsletter
Special Issue: the Collapse of America
Paul Craig
Roberts gives CounterPunchers the definitive data on what is
happening to jobs in America. Not just blue collar jobs. Middle-class,
white collar jobs. Roberts'
stunning probe is the first true picture of what the U.S. economy
is fast becoming and of the savage class wars that lie ahead.
Plus Mike
Ferner on what it really means to investigate war crimes in Iraq. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers
each month! But
remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the
print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription
to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find
anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions
are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
Israel is sinking into a strident, nationalistic
atmosphere and darkness is beginning to cover everything. The
brakes we still had are eroding, the insensitivity and blindness
that characterized Israeli society in recent years is intensifying.
The home front is cut in half: the north suffers and the center
is serene. But both have been taken over by tones of jingoism,
ruthlessness and vengeance, and the voices of extremism that
previously characterized the camp's margins are now expressing
its heart. The left has once again lost its way, wrapped in silence
or "admitting mistakes." Israel is exposing a unified,
nationalistic face.
The devastation we are sowing
in Lebanon doesn't touch anyone here and most of it is not even
shown to Israelis. Those who want to know what Tyre looks like
now have to turn to foreign channels--the BBC reporter brings
chilling images from there, the likes of which won't be seen
here. How can one not be shocked by the suffering of the other,
at our hands, even when our north suffers? The death we are sowing
at the same time, right now in Gaza, with close to 120 dead since
the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, 27 last Wednesday alone, touches
us even less. The hospitals in Gaza are full of burned children,
but who cares? The darkness of the war in the north covers them,
too.
Since we've grown accustomed
to thinking collective punishment a legitimate weapon, it is
no wonder no debate has sparked here over the cruel punishment
of Lebanon for Hezbollah's actions. If it was okay in Nablus,
why not Beirut? The only criticism being heard about this war
is over tactics. Everyone is a general now and they are mostly
pushing the IDF to deepen its activities. Commentators, ex-generals
and politicians compete at raising the stakes with extreme proposals.
Haim Ramon "doesn't understand"
why there is still electricity in Baalbek; Eli Yishai proposes
turning south Lebanon into a "sandbox"; Yoav Limor,
a Channel 1 military correspondent, proposes an exhibition of
Hezbollah corpses and the next day to conduct a parade of prisoners
in their underwear, "to strengthen the home front's morale."
It's not difficult to guess
what we would think about an Arab TV station whose commentators
would say something like that, but another few casualties or
failures by the IDF, and Limor's proposal will be implemented.
Is there any better sign of how we have lost our senses and our
humanity?
Chauvinism and an appetite
for vengeance are raising their heads. If two weeks ago only
lunatics such as Safed Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu spoke about "wiping
out every village where a Katyusha is fired," now a senior
officer in the IDF speaks that way in Yedioth Aharonoth's main
headlines. Lebanese villages may not have been wiped out yet,
but we have long since wiped out our own red lines.
A bereaved father, Haim Avraham,
whose son was kidnapped and killed by Hezbollah in October 2000,
fires an artillery shell into Lebanon for the reporters. It's
vengeance for his son. His image, embracing the decorated artillery
shell is one of the most disgraceful images of this war. And
it's only the first. A group of young girls also have their picture
taken decorating IDF shells with slogans.
Maariv, which has turned into
the Fox News of Israel, fills its pages with chauvinist slogans
reminiscent of particularly inferior propaganda machines, such
as "Israel is strong"--which is indicative of weakness,
actually--while a TV commentator calls for the bombing of a TV
station.
Lebanon, which has never fought
Israel and has 40 daily newspapers, 42 colleges and universities
and hundreds of different banks, is being destroyed by our planes
and cannon and nobody is taking into account the amount of hatred
we are sowing. In international public opinion, Israel has been
turned into a monster, and that still hasn't been calculated
into the debit column of this war. Israel is badly stained, a
moral stain that can't be easily and quickly removed. And only
we don't want to see it.
The people want victory, and
nobody knows what that is and what its price will be.
The Zionist left has also been
made irrelevant. As in every difficult test in the past--the
two intifadas for example--this time too the left has failed
just when its voice was so necessary as a counterweight to the
stridency of the beating tom-toms of war. Why have a left if
at every real test it joins the national chorus?
Peace Now stands silently,
so does Meretz, except for brave Zehava Gal-On. A few days of
a war of choice and already Yehoshua Sobol is admitting he was
wrong all along. Peace Now is suddenly an "infantile slogan"
for him. His colleagues are silent and their silence is no less
resounding. Only the extreme left makes its voice heard, but
it is a voice nobody listens to.
Long before this war is decided,
it can already be stated that its spiraling cost will include
the moral blackout that is surrounding and covering us all, threatening
our existence and image no less than Hezbollah's Katyushas.
Gideon Levy writes for the Israeli daily newspaper
Ha'aretz.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
