Tuesday, June 01, 2010

A Special Place in Hell : Israel lost at sea

Bradley Burston is a senior editor at Haaretz; his blog is A Special Place in Hell

The Second Gaza War : Israel lost at sea

We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege, which is itself becoming Israel's Vietnam.

A war tells a people terrible truths about itself. That is why it is so difficult to listen.

We were determined to avoid an honest look at the first Gaza war. Now, in international waters and having opened fire on an international group of humanitarian aid workers and activists, we are fighting and losing the second. For Israel, in the end, this Second Gaza War could be far more costly and painful than the first.

In going to war in Gaza in late 2008, Israeli military and political leaders hoped to teach Hamas a lesson. They succeeded. Hamas learned that the best way to fight Israel is to let Israel do what it has begun to do naturally: bluster, blunder, stonewall, and fume.

Hamas, and no less, Iran and Hezbollah, learned early on that Israel's own embargo against Hamas-ruled Gaza was the most sophisticated and powerful weapon they could have deployed against the Jewish state.

Here in Israel, we have still yet to learn the lesson:
We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege itself is becoming Israel's Vietnam.

continued ...

1 comment:

opit said...

This is a good catch ( yes, I've read it )The senior editor at Op-Ed News made a post 'Not in My Name',Rosenberg over at HuffPo is featuring one against AIPAC...There's a lot of reaction. The spin artists are working hard too. I put up a piece by Rick B at Ten Percent forecasting that.But the Zemanta
spiders went nuts on my last post. They're at the end.
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2010/06/2-june-oil-and-israel-concurrent-crises.html

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