Creating enemies

Probably due to the divide in American liberal opinion about anything related to Israel, a lot of bloggers have been avoiding the topic of the Lebanon-Israel-Gaza war.  Josh Marshall is an example of this reticence, and accordingly he wrote an entry yesterday attempting to explore his feelings about the issue.  In the US context, he's a vociferous partisan, a liberal Democrat who writes mostly about the corruption in the Republican-controlled congress.  I sometimes find his style youthfully self-indulgent, but there is a valuable depth to his journalism and his blog Talking Points Memo is quite effective and important in the domestic arena.  Josh makes a real difference, and yet, though it's clear that he's deeply troubled by the war, he cannot bring himself to publicly criticize Israel since, as he says, he is personally dedicated to the "Zionist project," defined as setting up a Jewish state in Palestine within the Green Line.  Apparently, he has received a lot of heat from the lunatic fringe, and this may be what he is reacting to, but I'm reminded of Elie Weisel's refusal to comment during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.  Both Weisel and Marshall make a veiled accusation of anti-semitism when they repeat that Israel's critics hold that country to a double standard.  I see no double standard in the basic human refusal to countenance mass murder, and what of their own double standard?  Is Israel to be endlessly indulged and forgiven for its policy of extreme violence and the Arabs eternally condemned for theirs?

I appreciate Josh's willingness to examine the "dissonance" of his position and look forward to further elucidation, but there you have it—this subject divides the liberal/left opposition, a split that is easy for Rove/Bush to exploit, and after all these years we still don't know how to talk about it.  That makes it dangerous.  We have to learn how to talk more clearly and honestly about Israel/Palestine and Israel's relations with its Arab neighbors because it's the biggest fluorescent elephant in the room.

In Israel there is currently a lot of war fever, something that tends to preclude rational debate.  Peaceniks are receiving death threats over there, yet I also notice less reticence and greater willingness to criticize the government's decision to go to war and the manner in which the war is being prosecuted.  Today in Haaretz, for example, Nehemia Shtrasler asks in an editorial whether the war planners are aware that they're creating an enemy state out of a country that could have been Israel's partner in peace if Israel's diplomatic policies were other than maximally belligerent.  It's very eloquent and worth reading, more so than anything I've been able to contribute on this important topic, though I've done my best.  Note:  this weblog is not intended to be a link aggregator, which is mostly what I've been doing lately even though it's totally useless for that since it is the ten millionth of ten million blogs that nobody ever reads (thank god!).

So nobody cares what I think and I'm really only writing about this as part of my own struggle to come to terms with what's going on in the world, but I will add anyway that—in my opinion—it is always the weakest governments that busy themselves with the creation of external enemies because they need to cover for their own poverty of vision and lack of competence and accomplishment.  The USA is the prime current example of this phenomenon.  The end of the cold war left America without a worthy national enemy, but then Osama came along and volunteered for the role.  Ever since 9/11, the previously listless and failing Bush administration has been intently focused on legitimizing itself by using that catastrophe to create new enemies all over the Arab and Islamic world, and in this they have succeeded beyond measure.  The real enemy of the American people is not terrorism or Islamic militancy or any of the usual suspects, it is the Bush administration that works so dilligently and so effectively to create hatred of the US everywhere throughout the world.  Israel, by creating an enemy state out of Lebanon, is following the same disastrous program.  Both Israel and the US will pay dearly for their short-sightedness and total lack of diplomatic aplomb in the months and years to come.