Stephan: Benjamin Netanyahu has made a deal and by aligning himself with ultra conservatives both politically and religiously has formed a Theocratic Rightist coalition government. The result will be even more aggressive policies.
Something has gone very wrong in Israel in my view. The pictures alone tell the story. The Jews for centuries were forced into ghettoes, sometimes they were walled and sometimes, as in Warsaw with the Nazis, there resulted genocidal massacres. Gaza has been walled into a ghetto and, as this report describes, dreadful acts have been committed in the interest of the state. Or looked at another way, Israel has ghettoized itself walling itself apart from the Arab world. Either way the only outcome to be expected is increased violence, and further isolation of Israel from the rest of the world, except America.
This approach has not worked since 1948, and there is no reason to believe it will work in the future. It is beginning to look like Israel and the U.S. have committed themselves to endless asymmetrical warfare with radicalized Muslims whose numbers increase with every drone strike.
A Palestinian man cries in front of his destroyed house in northern Gaza Strip.
Credit: Oliver Weiken/EPA
The Israeli group Breaking the Silence issued a report this morning containing testimony from Israeli soldiers about the savagery and criminality committed by the Israeli military during the attack on Gaza last summer. The Independent has a good article describing the report’s findings: “The Israeli military deliberately pounded civilian areas in the Gaza Strip with incessant fire of inaccurate ordinance” and “was at best indifferent about casualties among the Palestinian population.” At best.
This should surprise nobody who paid any attention to the brutal Israeli destruction of Gaza or, for that matter, countless Israeli attacks before that. The U.N. has said that 7 out of 10 people killed by the Israelis were civilians, “including 1,462 civilians, among them 495 children and 253 women”; video of Israelis killing four Gazan boys as they played on a beach […]