Sderot as Stalingrad, Hamas as blind Samson

[bemildred]

Mostly for the discussion about misuse of loaded analogies. I doubt that Bradley has that good a grip on how "the World" views things.

---

In the iconography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, symbols can be surprisingly interchangeable. David and Goliath, for starters. Or, for example, the question of which side can lay claim to the symbolism of Stalingrad, and which side is as ephemeral and disassociated from concrete reality as Brigadoon.

Consider the question of Stalingrad. When Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield in March, 2002 - the largest military operation in the West Bank since the 1967 Six Day War and a response to the killings of 130 Israelis in suicide attacks that month alone - Yasser Arafat compared the Jenin refugee camp to besieged, bombarded and demolished World War II Stalingrad.

Veteran Israeli leftier-than-thou Uri Avnery was among the first to have invoked the Stalingrad theme, writing with something approaching Socialist Realism in an April 16, 2002 article entitled "Immortal heroes of Jenin" in the British Guardian newspaper. According to Avnery, in ordering the operation, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon and his defense minister Shaul Mofaz "created the foundations of the Palestinian nation and the Palestinian state."

"When the international media cannot be kept out any more and the pictures of horror are published, two possible versions may emerge: Jenin as a story of massacre, a second Sabra and Shatila; and Jenin, the Palestinian Stalingrad, a story of immortal heroism. The second will surely prevail."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/953207.html

[Fredda Weinberg]

1. Heros? Hijack planes, kill old men in wheelchairs ... blow up pizza

joints ... sorry, but you kill 130 Israelis, you're asking for war. That's not heroic - it's using your own people as cover.

[Selatius]

2. What an idiot Bradley is.

I find he is mute on Israel's colonial policies in the West Bank post-1967. Everything is all the Palestinians fault and none the fault of the Israelis, which is the impression I get when he omits one side of the conflict. The likely narrative closest to reality would likely show Palestinians and Israelis have been locked in conflict since Israel kicked Jordan and Egypt out of the Palestinian Territories in '67 and decided to build colonies on the captured land, a policy pushed by religious extremists in Israel. In response, groups like the PLA emerged and the even more fanatical Hamas. Now, Hamas cannot exist without provoking conflict with Israel. Otherwise, they lose their raison d'être.

It is a conflict in which at almost every turn the extremists on both sides of the conflict have intentionally or unintentionally derailed any peacemaking efforts by moderates on both sides of the barrier. If you're a moderate, you're cursed. It has been that way, and I think it will continue to be that way for a long time, and the US has shown absolutely no leadership except simply being the leader in arms sales to the region.

As far as Stalingrad goes, nobody in this conflict has experienced that. Comparisons to that battle belittle the sheer level of suffering the Russians endured under Nazi assault. Maybe if one side in this conflict lost 20,000,000+ soldiers and civilians alike like the Russians did against Nazi Germany, then that side might be apt to invoke Stalingrad.

[bemildred]

3. Well, it's sixty years on now, more than that actually, with this situation.

And it seems reasonable to me to consider that the current mess is an indictment of the policies pursued to bring it about. But nobody wants to consider that, too many vested interests, too many people that don't think beyond next Tuesday.

You last paragraph was what interested me in this. Why the heck are we constantly seeing all this WWII crap over and over? The modern world and the modern situation are NOTHING like WWII. I remember in the 50s when I was a kid still having all the Civil War discourse prominent in US politics, and it reminds me of that. You'd think these old wars were the high point of our civilization or something, rather than our greatest failures. But hey ...

[Vegasaurus]

4. The comparisons to WWII come up

because some posters insist on comparing Israel to the Nazis.

There is certainly NOTHING comparable to a Nazi concentration camp in anything that Israel is doing, even in Gaza. So I would agree with you there, that this modern situation really is nothing like WWII.