A piece by the indispensable JJ Goldberg
points out how much the current war in Gaza resulted from
missed cues, miscommunication, bluster, fear, nationalism run rampant, and suppressed
differences between Israel's civilian
leadership and its more cautious military, not to mention wounds, everywhere, primed
to reopen.
Cold comfort all that is.
This is not the first war to originate that way. (Are we
not, for example, marking the centenary of that most horrendous of all
misbegotten, vaguely avoidable, modern conflicts, World War I?)
It doesn't take much to tip Israel/Palestine back into the
cycle of violence that has been operative since the 1920s. Of course, back
then, the Yishuv (as the Jewish settlement in Palestine was known) was an
embattled minority, and, make no mistake, Arab leaders — headed up by Haj
Amin el-Husseini, who met and sought common ground with Hitler — wanted nothing more than to utterly
destroy it.
It's different today.
The British, who could be counted on to play Jews against
Arabs, if for no other reason than that they lacked a more coherent strategy, a
way to fulfill the contradictory promises they had issued to both people, are
long gone. And there is a Jewish state, backed by one of the most powerful
militaries on earth.
It's different today. These differences are substantial and not
about to melt away. But if you study the history you might conclude, with me, it's
just not different enough.
The article in the Forward is quite excellent.
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