I’m always intrigued both by those very revealing ‘dogs that don’t bark in the night’ (as in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’) and by dogs that, though barking, are not portrayed as barking in the night.
So why is the US MSM– and the British MSM, come to that– so noticeably silent on the ongoing leadership and self-identity crisis that is unfolding within Israel?
If you read HaAretz daily, and Ynet as often as you can, as I do, then it’s evident that there is a major crisis of confidence and of self-identity going on in the Israeli political elite these days.
Thus from the English-language HaAretz site, just from Wednesday’s edition, we have the following stories:
- (1) This one, about the fact that the attorney general has rejected two of the five people (men) whom Olmert had named to serve on the committee he is forming to look into the problems of the recent war. The reason? Because, as an Israeli good-governance NGO pointed oput, these men are both executives with major defense-contracting companies, and therefore have a clear financial/professional stake in the ooutcome of the committee’s work… (Oh, Israel and its massive, globally active military-industrial complex– how far from the more idealistic dreams of the Zionist forefathers, eh?)
(2) This one, about the fact that HaAretz has found potentially five more women who claim they have been either sexually harrassed or sexually assaulted by State President Moshe Katsav– at least one of whom now says she’s prepared to join the existing complainant in testifying publicly against him.
(3) This one, by Ze’ev Schiff, noting that IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz now faces a “crisis caused by the lack of confidence that some top Israel Defense Forces officers, and many reservists, have in him,” after the recent war, and that, ” Halutz and Defense Minister Amir Peretz … do not work well together, a problem that has manifested itself in the competition between them over the committee that each set up to investigate the war. Each leader also faces problems unique to himself… The problem with Peretz is that his term marks the first time in Israeli history that an inexperienced defense minister has been in power during wartime.” (Read the whole piece there. It’s interesting.)
(4) This article, saying that PM Ehud Olmert “did not know in advance” that the Housing Ministry had put out for tender contracts for building 690 apartments in two West Bank settlements. (Most experts in international humanitarian law, I note, consider the building of these settlements to be a, “a trave breach” of the fourth Geneva Convention, that is, a war crime.)… So the Housing Minister just went ahead and put these contracts out for tender, reportedly without Olmert’s knowledge. But guess whom he had informed about them in advance? That would be Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who in his job as DM is, of course, right there in the chain of command regarding anything to do with Israeli actions in the West Bank which is a territory under Israeli military occupation. (As the figure on this blog’s sidebar will tell you, this occupation has now been going on for no fewer than 13,397 days.)
Well guess what again? Amir Peretz (see #3 above), is also the head of the so-called leftwing “Labour” Party and a self-proclaimed “lover of peace”. And now he’s signing off on this gross expansion of the settler presence in the West Bank? No wonder the country’s in an extremely confused situation!!
(5) And then there are this pair of articles in the paper: This one quotes Amir Peretz (see above) as saying “A way has to be found to … do everything possible to create conditions so that there will be a dialogue on the Syrian front”, and this one says that Olmert “yesterday” (i.e. today) told a Knesset committee that ” “it would take a great deal of imagination to see in this situation potential for dialogue [with Syria].” Oh, I have to reproduce a bit more of this report, which is very interesting indeed:
- MK Ran Cohen (Meretz), who called Olmert’s appearance before the committee “haughty,” said everyone in Israel knows the war is the forerunner for the next one. “This war ended in complete failure,” Cohen added.
Banging on the table angrily in response to the criticism, Olmert said, “I’m sorry that some MKs have lost their sense of proportion. Stop exaggerating.
“No danger to Israel was revealed during the past month. You didn’t know that Hezbollah had 12,000 missiles in Lebanon? You didn’t know that Iran supported them?”
Olmert also told the committee that “there were failures in the war, but there were also amazing achievements. Has the U.S. collapsed after three years in Iraq? What’s the panic? We all make mistakes, I first of all.”
“What did you think, that there would be a war and nothing would happen to our soldiers,” Olmert asked the committee. “The claim that we lost is unfounded. Half of Lebanon is destroyed; is that a loss?” [Actually, Ehud, I think it is. It’s a terrible loss, both in absolute terms, and in terms of Israel ever thinking it can live in peace and equality with its neighbors… You honestly think that destroying half of Lebanon can be counted as anyone’s gain??? ~HC]
With regard to the demand for a state commission of inquiry, Olmert said that while he valued the judicial system very highly, “that does not mean that at any given time they have to be the problem-solver.”
The prime minister argued that a state commission would paralyze the political and military systems for a long period of time.
Olmert said the Shahak committee appointed by the Defense Minister Amir Peretz [see above] to examine the military aspects of the war had to discontinue its investigation because the Military Justice Law does not authorize the committee to ensure the immunity of witnesses it might call to testify.
My G-d, what a shambles here. But, moving right along, we have:
(6) This article, saying that Amir Peretz’s Labour Party, plus Shas and the Pensioners’ Party– all key members of Olmert’s present governing coalition– are now threatening to pull out of the coalition “if it turns out today that the social welfare cutbacks are included in the budget book.”
Well, I would say that the fact of the recent war means that Israeli society now needs to decide in a serious way whether it is going to invest in “guns” and the big demands of military readiness, or “butter” and the ever-attractive latte-sipping lifestyle over the years ahead. Can’t have both. Cash is one constraint, sure, but the bought-and-paid-for US Congress will always ensure that ain’t too much of a problem. The real constraint there is the manpower needed for the “guns” option… But right now, it looks like a tussle over the budget. So let’s see which way this one goes.
And finally we have–
(7) This article by Yoel Marcus, in which he makes the interesting argument that Olmert should not as many have urged him to, opt to establish a fully empowered “state commission”, most likely headed by Supreme Court head Aharon Barak, to investigate Israel’s shortcomings in the recent war. Marcus makes two interesting arguments here. First, that this is a highly political matter, so it is best to leave it to the political process to deal with it (including, presumably, the possibility of a coalition breakup and/or a vote of no confidence) rather than throwing the burden onto the judiciary, as happened with the post-October War “Agranat Commission”. His second argument is that actually Olmert shouldn’t have to bear more than a small amount of the responsibility for the failings revealed by the recent war, since he has only been PM for four months, and the failings at all levels that were revealed by the war were the responsibility of many more people– from all parties– acting over the the past few years.
Here’s some of what Marcus writes:
- Yes, the situation on the home front was scandalous. But the commission of inquiry will have to start investigating five years back. It will have to scrutinize what Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, Ariel Sharon and Shaul Mofaz did when they were in power. And the same goes for Moshe Ya’alon, who, according to his friends, is walking around with a belly full of grievances, but who has those empty supply rooms to answer for. And Dan Halutz may be guilty of bad judgment, but he was not appointed by Olmert.
Olmert can tell the state commission: As far as things that depended on me are concerned, I was the one who created the most supportive atmosphere we have ever had in the international community for a war on terror. We had all the time in the world to take care of Hezbollah. In the end, we signed an agreement that will keep Hassan Nasrallah away from south Lebanon, and Lebanese soldiers and a multinational peacekeeping force will deploy in the vacated zone, which is the arrangement we have been wanting for years. From this standpoint, I got Israel the best possible deal – I, Ehud Olmert, who had been prime minister for a total of 120 days. I can only be accountable for things that went wrong after I assumed responsibility…
So there you have it. Or rather, just a portion of what’s right there, in a single Israeli newspaper on a single day in early September.
Is this a country experiencing a severe leadership crisis and crisis of self-identity, or what?
And in “normal” times, wouldn’t the US MSM be absolutely chock-full of details about all these developments? (I’ve never before noticed them ignoring Israel as much as they do most of the other countries in the Third World.)
So as to why the US MSM aren’t writing about it, I have a couple of ideas. One is that all the journos there who write about Israel were so busy during the war that they’ve taken a few days off since then… And the other– operating mainly at the editorial level– is that many of those editors may be kind of embarrassed to give much coverage to this whole cascading set of developments that indicate just how much the strategic failure in Lebanon has rocked the Israeli political system. Much better and safer not to mention that all intra-familial “dirty linen” in front of the broader public, don’t you think?
As for me, I don’t think so. I think these political developments are really important and interesting, and we need to know much more about them. In fact, I’ve been thinking maybe I should go to Israel soon, because so much of great political interest is happening there…
(By the way, as a small counter-weight to all the above-mentioned political shenanigans, I discovered a great new Israeli web-site recently called Occupation magazine. It looks as though it has some great material on it. Check it out! As soon as I can, I’ll put a link to it on the sidebar here.)
An important reason that the US corporate media will not report on the “crisis in leadership” in Israel is that it will call into question the obsequiousness of both political parties in the US.
It may get the public to ask the question “what benefit does the US get from its total and complete support of Israel”. As Charles Krauthammer wrote during the conflict – Israel needs to prove its value to its paymaster. It may raise issues of the power of the Israeli lobby in US politics.
Not good.
Israel is a settler colony. I have lived through the demise of two settler colonies, Kenya and South Africa. In my opinion Israel has entered and irreversible stage of decline as a colony. This is the stage when the colonists themselves have all become aware of the indefensible nature of what they are doing. The founding myth is exposed, and the colonists are divided between the cynical liars on the one side, and the relentless critics on the other.
If it is any consolation to the “hasbaras” who visit this site, let me point out that neither in the case of Kenya nor of South Africa were the whites “driven into the sea”, and one of the reasons that did not happen was the substantial contribution that some of the colonists made to the struggle.
I’m really glad Helena is covering the Israeli press to an extent, because I can’t, but I have picked up a couple of articles in the last couple of days which are by Israeli whites and they are uncompromising. One was from Haaretz by Gideon Levy and one by Prof Ilan Pappe on the Electronic Intifada site. These and other writings I have seen have the right quality and the familiar fire of the anti-colonial colonist.
I would like to name just a couple the earliest of such people that I know of: Olive Schreiner, and Norman Leys. These are very a very great kind of people, and the crop that Israel is producing is great, too.
Interesting spin, but I think in many respects superficial.
True, Israelis (and primarily the press) are asking a lot of questions – much of it under the influence of the foreign press during the war itself. However, I think that it is early, and perhaps inappropriate, to term the war in Lebanon a “strategic failure”. We haven’t yet seen the strategic outcome of this war, or how the ceasefire (and particularly the internal Lebanese handling of Hizballah) will play out over the next six to twelve months. Remember, the Yom Kippur War was marked by significant failures – much worse in all respects than those of the current war – yet the strategic outcome was a peace treaty with Egypt.
There may be a “leadership crisis”; this is natural seeing as there has been an entire generational change in that leadership. However, what you don’t see from the press reports is that there is no lack of confidence in the general population for the state itself, or over the perceived necessity of the war. There is a big difference between demobilized reservists criticizing errors in prosecution of the war and the population rising up to protest the decision to go to war. So I think that rushing to conclusion about “decline” is highly premature. In sum, these are political processes that are taking place in an open, democratic political environment.
As to the US media, I’d say that the reasons you give for lack of coverage are highly speculative. My guess is that these events – which, for the moment appear to be transient – are simply less newsworthy than, say, a tropical storm in the US. Even here, these stories were all pretty much placed on the back burner over the weekend, replaced in the headlines by the possibility of a teachers’ strike at the opening of the school year, which was this past Sunday.
Dominic,
What are “Israeli whites”?
JES, what does your “J” stand for? is it Jack, by any chance, as in “One-eyed Jack”?
Gideon Levy and Ilan Pappe are the ones I mentioned.
One other, on the opposite side that I can mention is one of the two Israeli prisoners of war in Lebanon used as the pretext for the “destruction of half of Lebanon’s infrastructure” that Olmert is so pleased about.
That guy is a white South African, born and bred in Durban.
Interesting Dominic. It just goes to illustrate how people tend to place events into their own frame of reference to try to understand them.
I would like to understand why Gideon Levy, for example, qualifies as an “Israeli white”. And why does one of the soldiers being held hostage in Lebanon qualify as an “Israeli white”, while the second soldier does not?
I suggest that if you were to broaden your perspective a bit and try to understand the individual social, economic and cultural aspects of specific situations, you might see things in another light.
The white South African guy’s name is Ehud Goldwasser.
Helena, it seems to me that the US media has never really covered Israeli politics in any depth or with any consistency. Coverage of Israel is, I think, always done from a perspective of its ‘survival’ against the phalanx of foes.
In regard to the specific dearth of coverage right now, I think there is a concomitant dearth of coverage of the situation in Lebanon, don’t you? And for that matter, there is no in depth or consistent coverage in the mainstream media of the politics of the Iraqi government.
The media responds to immediacy and fireworks and once those elements are missing, they move on. And I have to suppose that a majority of their audience approves.
Dominic,
It seems to me that Ehud Goldwasser lived in South Africa for a period of time. I’m not sure he was “born and bred” there.
No matter. Why is Ehud Goldwasser an “Israeli white”, while Eldad Regev apparently isn’t in your eyes? And why is Ehud Goldwasser “on the opposite side” of Gideon Levy or Ilan Pappe?
JES, when you are not sure you should keep your mouth shut instead of trying to call me a liar.
Dominic, I did not call you a liar. I simply suggested that either you or I may have been misinformed.
But, back to the original questions: Why is Ehud Goldwasser and “Israeli white”, while Eldad Regev apparently isn’t in your eyes? And why is Ehud Godwasser “on the opposite side” of Gideon Levy or Ilan Pappe?
These aren’t just technical queries. They go, I believe, to the heart of your understanding of the situation.
They go, I believe, to the heart of your understanding of the situation.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
After Yom Kippur, the Zionist entity had to deal with Sadat, Assad and Hussein. Today the players are not the leaders. The players are not only the occupied population but also the western population, what they saw whith their eyes wide openned on their tv screens, simply means that no spin can correct the horrific destruction they commited on innocent civilians .
Olmert and his government are not to be blamed, they represent the people in a so called democracy, and when the people’s mentality is built on myths such as “chosen people” and ‘victims of hate” not one person can reverse this junkyard.
My freedom is as equal as any human-being, wars and blood shed will go on as long as this basic human trait is not realised.
The Star, Johannesburg, August 18, 2006 Edition 2
Israeli soldier whose capture sparked war born in SA
Family of captured man desperately hoping for his return – if he is still alive
Paula Slier
Ehud Goldwasser, the Israeli soldier whose capture by Hezbollah guerrillas on July 12 led to a brutal war which has left hundreds dead, was born and bred in Durban.
Goldwasser (31) was captured, along with colleague Eldad Regev (26), in a cross-border raid by Hezbollah, leading to a 34-day war which has seen 117 Israeli soldiers and 39 civilians killed in Hezbollah rocket attacks, with more than 5 000 injured.
The casualty figure on the Lebanese side is far greater, with estimates of the civilian death toll in Lebanon ranging from 500 to more than 1 000, with the Israeli bombardment leaving a path of destruction in southern Lebanon that is unmatched.
Shlomo Goldwasser, Ehud’s father, lives in Durban with his wife Malka, while Ehud spent his formative years in Durban where he had his barmitzvah (Jewish ritual practice) at the United Hebrew Congregation.
Shlomo Goldwasser, a former ship’s captain who is now a maritime shipping consultant, was in Namibia, preparing to return home, when he heard on CNN that Israeli soldiers had been kidnapped.
He was unable to reach his son by cellphone and heard from the family in Israel that Ehud had been captured.
From (subscription required):
http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3398797
How are you going to get out of it now, hasbaristas?
Get out of what? Here is what Wikipedia (sometimes not a reliable source) says:
Prior to his capture, Ehud Goldwasser, 31, lived in Nahariya. He worked at Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, from which he earned a degree in environmental engineering studies.[1] As a teenager, Udi lived in South Africa with his parents and two younger brothers. He is married to Karnit. His parents are Shlomo (father) and Mickey (mother).
At any rate, I don’t think that it’s really impoertant, and it doesn’t come any closer to answering my questions. Do you want me to say that you are right and I was wrong?
http://capeargus.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3400946
The Goldwasser family moved to Durban in 1988 when Ehud, the oldest of three boys, was 12. He attended Carmel College and had his barmitzvah at the United Hebrew Congregation. The family lived in the city for two years although Ehud returned to Israel sooner.
not that it matters to any important question, of course.
“The Hasbara Handbook prescribes fascinating instructions on attacking the messenger and avoiding the message at all costs ‘in ways that engage the emotions, and downplay rationality, in an attempt to promote’ their cause.”
The Hasbara Handbook is on-line at:
http://www.middle-east-info.org/take/wujshasbara.pdf
Interesting, Dominic, because that is precisely what you have done!
I made an innocent comment about where I thought Ehud Goldwasser was “born and bred” (which apparently was correct seeing according to both the Wikipedia entry and Vadim’s source). I then asked you two questions, which you stubbornly refuse to answer, preferring to bicker over a minor, and quite irrelevant, issue.
If you don’t want, or are unable, to answer the questions I posed, then that’s okay. But please don’t belabor this ridiculous point!
It’s not all about you, Jack.
You have no right to take that tone with anybody.
Like all colonialists, you are a has-been-bara or more than likely a never-wasbara.
Go back to the dustbin of history, and be sure to take your rotten handbook with you.
attacking the messenger and avoiding the message at all costs
Unfortunately ad hominem is the coin of the realm. Which is why we see juvenile, insulting terms like “hasbarista” thrown around in the first place, on every single thread. See also: “The Lobby” , Imshin the Mossad agent, the “Senile” Bernard Lewis, the “Un-Iranian” Taheri, “Propagandists” in every closet.
attacking the messenger and avoiding the message at all costs
Agreed that ad hominems are peremptory & juvenile. why are you indulging in them now? Is this how you address your students? With insults and stonewalling? I don’t envy them.
It’s terrible when it gets like that, isn’t it, Vadim?
You could easily end up wanting to wash somebody’s feet, like Adriaan Vlok washed Frank Chikane’s feet the other day.
i’m a bit hesitant to post anything into a thread with a troll in it – even a troll who i often agree with politically.
but having just come back from palestine (both inside the green line and in the west bank and east jerusalem) i’d like to differ a bit with both dominic and helena, who i think are overoptimistic.
neither in tel aviv and west jerusalem during the khurbn levanen (destruction of lebanon) nor in the israeli (english-language) press since the ‘cease-fire’ did i see any sign of an israeli “crisis of self-identity” or a new exposure of the state of israel’s founding myths*. the number of jewish israelis willing to challenge the zionist project is certainly growing, as the tone of the anti-war demonstrations in tel aviv and elsewhere showed. but that doesn’t make it more than a tiny, if brave and outspoken, part of jewish israeli society. and, it’s worth pointing out, those folks aren’t having any crisis of identity – they just don’t identify themselves with the israeli state or its zionist ideology.
outside that segment, jewish israelis seemed to me to be no more likely to be having an identity crisis or question their state’s founding mythology than most white u.s. citizens are – which is to say hardly at all. there certainly are “relentless critics” bringing the anti-colonial, anti-militarist (and usually anti-capitalist, feminist, and environmentalist) analysis to their fellow jewish israelis, but their views aren’t what’s shaking israeli politics.
the ha-aretz articles and so on are testimony to the corruption, sleaziness, and ineptitude of the israeli political system, which rivals what we have in the u.s. (and gets better coverage from the national media there than ours does here). but even the supposed ‘peace camp’/’zionist left’ supported the war, and are now mostly complaining about the army ‘not having done the job right’. ha-aretz isn’t running op-eds (much less articles) questioning the racial/ethnic or religious foundation of the israeli state; it isn’t debating the right of palestinian refugees to return home; it isn’t even calling for a withdrawal from the shebaa farms, much less the golan heights, much less the west bank, gaza strip and east jerusalem.
identity crisis? only if you want to say that connecticut had one when governor rowland was impeached.
an ethnically/racially and religiously homogenous nation-state (in herzl’s description, modeled on bismark’s germany)
“We are an historical entity, a nation made up of diverse anthropological elements. This also suffices for the Jewish state. No nation has uniformity of race.”
Rozele, I don’t know why one would expect anything else. The voice of the critic is not loudly heard. The prophet is not honoured, but is actually in the fulness of time, irresistable.
Even in 1992, two years after the unbanning of the ANC and the SACP, which is when I returned to SA, the atmosphere was utterly weird, like going back in time. I don’t know about Helena but I certainly would not expect any different to what you bear witness to in Israel, for a long time to come. Long after liberation in fact.
I purposefully cited Olive Schreiner (South Africa, turn of the 19th to 20th century) and Norman Leys (1930s Kenya) because they were so long ago – but you have to realise now, looking back, that they were the beginning of an inevitable end.
Israel with its Gideon Levys and Ilan Pappes, its Uri Avnerys and Gilad Atzmon (an exile) is way done the road compared to those two and those days.
“Identity crisis” is not in my vocabulary, by the way. It does not describe what I mean. I suggest this is a stage in Israel where both the lying rulers and their subterranean critics know exactly who and what they are and what is at stake.
The psychology of the mass of the colonists, on the other hand, is another study. But I would say they are not a free-willing collective historical subject any more, if they ever were. The public opinion of colonists is not crucial. They must disperse as a collective and they will do so. Decisions will be made over their heads. They will be angry but they will not be able to do anything with their anger. They will settle down as individuals or they will leave as individuals.
Please! Can everyone focus on the topic of the main post, which is important.
Also, work extra hard to be friendly and courteous…
Rozele, I take your points seriously. Maybe a ‘crisis of self-identity’ is not what all Jewish Israelis are undergoing. (Indeed, many Israeli bloggers seem strongly to want not to think about the ‘big picture’ at all.) But I think a large section of the political elite seems to be suffering some kind of deep crisis of figuring out what their role in the life and in the global political firmament now is?
Israel and the US are alike in that the enemies they want to fight no longer exist, or have transformed themselves into something we can’t recognize for what it is. They are different in that the US has no external enemies who are remotely capable of threatening its existence (outside of our imagination). We in the US can delude ourselves for quite some time about the “war on terror,” and suffer mostly a middle class economic decline, with a few actual casualties. The Israelis are likely to pay a much higher price for their delusions.
I don’t agree with Dominic’s determinism. I think there is a chance that Israel can survive as a predominantly Jewish state, but not as a predominantly European transplant. If Israel continues to view its interests as aligned more with the US than with other countries in its own region, then greater strategic failure lies ahead. Do Israelis have the strength of character to turn their backs on these American “friends” who are urging them forward into wider military conflict? The remaining years of the Bush presidency will be a critical test.
I think Rozie is generally right in terms of her assessment, albeit not with her gratuitous hateful smearing of Israel and Zionism.
Many Israeli leaders are being criticized for their handling of the war in Lebanon. And there are other political and personal scandals that are affecting these and other leaders. As Helena shows, anyone with google can link to these articles and make it look like the wheels are falling off the wagon.
Why isn’t this covered more by the mainstream media in the United States? Probably because covering war is a lot more common than covering internal political disputes in a foreign country.
The various news items could very well have their effect on the politicians. We may see some resignations, some reassignments, and some plain old embarassment.
So in response to Helena’s question “Is this a country experiencing a severe leadership crisis and crisis of self-identity, or what?” I’d have to say no. It’s a country that is experiencing what often happens in democracies with civil liberties and a free press. Bad things get uncovered, and politicians are called to account to varying degrees.
Personally, I say let the chips fall where they may. My admiration of Israel isn’t based on a particular political party or who is in power. Though I (and just about every so called “hasbarist” here) have expressed personal preferences for the left of the political spectrum in varying degrees. The Zionist left that is. Not the Israel hating crowd who sometimes masquerade as “progressives” in some circles.
The one thing I do worry about is that someone like Netenyahu or, worse yet, Avignor Lieberman, will be able to exploit it for political gain. Because that’s the only group that will come out winning in Israel from this if the various items cause a political upheaval. This may not be TOO cataclysmic, because as we saw last time when Netenyahu was PM, that he was politically constrained as to what he could do, in part because of the U.S. influence on the region, and in part because even back then the Likud’s “Greater Israel” platform had been rendered unworkable.
But I don’t think it can be a good thing on balance. The Palestinians will of course suffer more than the Israelis, but no one comes out ahead.
“The Palestinians will of course suffer more than the Israelis”
This not quite right, the Palestinians lost every things from their home land to their future for generations from 1900 till now they just live on the edge, but for Israelis they got a lot in matter of their state and land but their gaol bigger that what they got till now that why they keep focused on wars and crabbing more land built more settlements…