Israel needs Goldstone

[Violet_Crumble]

By Bradley Burston


(Part two of Fear of peace will be the death of Israel)

Shock (noun): a major medical emergency, often seen after serious injury. Among its signs and symptoms are mental changes including a sense of great anxiety and foreboding, confusion and, sometimes, combativeness.

This is about fear of the dark. Of the monstrous. In this case, the terror of finally uncovering what we ourselves are really made of.

This is about the lengths we will go, and the depths, in order to protect what we so desperately need to believe about ourselves. This is about how many others we will need to blame, vilify, assault, scapegoat and smear, before we actually take one wholly honest long look in the mirror.

This is about the war we made in Gaza, and what it did to Israel. This is about how Israel's conduct of the war has done more damage to the Jewish state than all the thousands and thousands of Palestinian rockets and mortar shells put together. It has been a year and more since a truce was called in Gaza, and - thanks in no small part to Israel's freely admitted policy of hamstringing and stonewalling UN investigators - the world is still at war with Israel.

The result is only now becoming felt. In a thousand ways, in new ways every single day, we have brought the war home.

Israel's battle plan, which effectively called for bludgeoning Hamas and the whole of Gaza into a state of shock, had the further effect, intentional or not, of inducing shock in Israel itself.

We have been sensing the symptoms for a year now. In shock, the first sign to appear is often confusion. A curious sense of weakness can be felt. A restlessness that is little understood. A coldness. Mental clouding. Apathy. Inactivity. There may be blurred vision.

We think: It's not the war. The war is over. The war was over there. The place we can't see. The place we're not allowed to see. The place, that is, that we don't want to look.

The place that makes us much prefer dreading the truth, to the truth itself.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1148871.html

[Douglas Carpenter]

1. very interesting article!!

It was Israel which deprived the committee of access to Sderot and Israeli victims of Palestinian rocket attacks. It was Israel which kept the committee from hearing testimony, including rebuttals, from government and military officials. It was Israel which - even before the committee began its work - blackballed any cooperation with the panel, in the process guaranteeing an unbalanced result.

It was the same Israeli government which provided, in the bluster of public statements by the deputy prime minister, the foreign minister, and senior IDF commanders, the most damning evidence of a strategy which would bring devastation to the whole of the Gaza Strip, civilians and armed groups alike, in the form of bellicose public statements

It is this Israeli government - lending credence to those who believed that it had much to hide - which resisted until the last possible moment the Goldstone Report's most crucial and also its fairest finding: the recommendation that both Israel and Hamas establish independent investigations into its allegations of human rights violations

And it is this Israeli government, in continuing its siege of Gaza, in denying Gazans access to concrete and other materials needed to rebuild homes destroyed by Israeli fire during Cast Lead, that lends further credence to the Goldstone Report's suspicions that Israel's policy has been and continues to be one of collective punishment of a civilian population.

Despite the nightmarish numbers of civilians killed in Gaza, the right has argued again and again that the problem with the war was that it was not pursued aggressively enough. Now, at home, they are getting their way. Finally, the war is being pressed to the full - with peace activists and human rights workers as the primary targets.

........

The Goldstone Report is, indeed, deeply flawed. But it is exactly what Israel needs. A deeply flawed report for a deeply flawed country. A country which will not, and cannot, begin to heal itself, repair itself, right itself, unless it faces with honesty and courage the issues and allegations raised by the report.

As long as Israel ducks the report, and keeps buried the whole truth about Cast Lead, it will not recover from this state of shock. Israel will be more vulnerable than ever to destruction from within.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1148871.html