In a NY Times piece about Gaza that has generated some
possibly useful controversy — "Falling for Hamas's Split-Screen
Fallacy" — Matti Friedman writes that "As is often the case where
Israel is concerned, things quickly became hysterical and divorced from the
events themselves" .
He writes: "Israeli soldiers facing Gaza have no good
choices. They can warn people off with tear gas or rubber bullets, which are
often inaccurate and ineffective, and if that doesn't work, they can use live
fire."
Fair enough. Did Israeli soldiers use tear gas? They did,
and it obviously failed to contain the protest. Did they then try rubber
bullets and discover them to be "inaccurate and ineffective?" Not
that I've read or heard. From what I can tell, the IDF went directly to live
fire with predictably ghastly results.
But wait: Friedman tells us that, "a Hamas leader,
Salah Bardawil, told a Hamas TV station that 50 of the dead were Hamas members.
The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed three others." And we, critical
readers all, not at subject in the least to hysteria where Israel is concerned,
don't stop to doubt the Hamas boast, do we? No, because if Hamas says it, it
must be true: everyone cut down by the IDF must be a shahid, a true Islamicist
martyr.
If you believe that, this bit of Hamas self-glorification,
than maybe you’d like to invest in this bridge I happen to know about. You
don't have to go to Gaza — who'd want to, right?— to get in on this offer; it's
right there, at the lower tip of Manhattan. A nice bridge.
. . .
. . .
My view is this:
1) recognize the perniciousness of Hamas
and
2) can still criticize Israel.
Amazing.
There are those on the Israel-bashing left (assuming it can
be called a left) who deny that there can be liberal Zionists. There is no room
for liberal Zionism in their anti-Zionist qua anti-Semitic worldview. For them,
Israel is so bad from the ground up that liberalism doesn't apply to it; Israel
can't be corrected or usefully critiqued, only, one way or another, torched and
reconstituted according to better —
internationalist? Leninist? — principles. You don't have to go far to find examples
of this. Dig just below the surface of JVP/BDS and you'll come on a raging source.
But it just ain't so. Like I said, I am a Zionist insofar as
I believe without reservation in the state of Israel. I am a liberal Zionist in
that I simultaneously believe that the country has deep flaws and I have the
right to point them out.
This liberalism of mine is portable. It's American
liberalism, to start with, and as critical of Trump and his gang of thieves, warmongers
and liars as it is of Netanyahu's brand of nationalists and theocrats.
But getting back to Gaza, it doesn't make me an
Israel-basher to say, after due consideration, that the use of live fire against
protesters in Gaza was brutal and unjustified, and gave Hamas all the deaths it
could now claim for itself, all the shahids, real or mostly bogus.
I bet a lot of the people out here who rush to the defense
of Israel are liberals/progressives in the American context. Trump disgusts
them. But somehow Netanyahu doesn't.
Now that's hysterical.
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