[Peace-discuss] no green light?

[C. G. Estabrook]

Predicting the future, even in the short term, with even a minimal degree of 
accuracy, is obviously difficult -- but understanding what's going on now may be 
more useful.  Here's an attempt at that:

	Understanding Gaza
	How to Inflame the Entire Muslim World
	By GABRIEL KOLKO

How will history describe the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza? 
Another Holocaust, this time perpetrated by the descendants of the victims? An 
election ploy by ambitious Israeli politicians to win votes in the February 10 
elections? A test range for new American weapons? Or an effort to lock in the 
new Obama Administration into an anti-Iranian position? An attempt to establish 
its military “credibility” after its disastrous defeat in the war with Hezbollah 
in Lebanon in 2006? Perhaps all of these…and more.

But one thing is certain. Israel has killed at least 100 Palestinians for each 
of its own claimed losses, a vast disproportion that has produced horror in much 
of the world, creating a new cause which has mobilized countless numbers of 
people—possibly as strong as the Vietnam war movement. It has made itself a 
pariah nation—save in the United States and a few other countries. Above all, it 
has enflamed the entire Muslim world

As Bruce Riedel, a “hawk” who has held senior posts in the CIA for nearly 30 
years and is now one of President Obama’s many advisers, has just written: “…the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central all-consuming issue for al Quaeda,” 
and “Muslims feel a profound sense of wrong about the creation of Israel that 
infuses every aspect thinking and activities and has become the rallying cry 
used the convince the ummah of the righteousness of al Quaeda’s cause.” That was 
before Gaza. Much of the world now detests Israel but most it will live for many 
years to come with the consequences of Israel’s atrocities. Muslim extremists 
will now become much stronger.

Charges of war crimes are now being leveled—and justifiably so—at the Israelis, 
many of whom themselves come from families that suffered in the hands of the 
Nazis over 60 years ago and now claim that the Holocaust was the only tragedy—as 
if the far more numerous deaths of goyim throughout the world after 1945 count 
for nothing. The United Nations and human rights groups are demanding that 
Israel be brought to justice for what now amounts to having killed over 1300 
Gazans with immense firepower, many of which, like phosphorous bombs, are 
illegal. Israel has already prepared its senior officers to be ready to defend 
themselves against war crimes charges and Israeli Attorney General Menahem Mazuz 
several weeks ago warned the government was expecting a “wave of international 
lawsuits.”

It will now have to live with the geo-political consequences in the region. 
Israel has, perhaps irreparably, imperiled its relations with the neighboring 
Arab states and other Muslim nations—Qatar and Mauritania have already suspended 
diplomatic relations with it—less because the ruling classes of these nations 
want to penalize it but because the Arab masses demand it, imperiling their own 
positions as rulers.

Even more important, although the United States has loyally supported Israel for 
decades, deluging it with the most modern arms and giving it diplomatic 
protection, it is now in an economic crisis and needs Arab money, not to mention 
oil imports, as never before. The stability of this crucial alliance will now be 
tested.

Since its inception, a cult of machismo—called self-defense—characterized much 
of Zionism, and although there were idealists like A. D. Gordon, the mainstream 
was more and more committed to a violent response to the Arabs who surrounded 
them. The military was increasing glorified, including by nominal Leftists like 
David Ben Gurion, so that today Israel is a regional Sparta armed with the most 
modern military and nuclear weapons, giving it a virtual monopoly in a vast 
region—one that will inevitably be challenged.

Uri Avnery, a leading Israeli anti-war activist, has just written that “… 
hundreds of millions of Arabs around us… will they see the Hamas fighters as the 
heroes of the Arab nation, but they will also see their own regimes in their 
nakedness: cringing, ignominious, corrupt and treacherous….In coming years it 
will become apparent that this war was sheer madness.”

We are living through yet another great tragedy, and tragedies have been the 
staple of world history for centuries. Now former victims and their descendants 
are the executioners.

Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of 
the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another 
Century of War? and The Age of War: the US Confronts the World . He has also 
written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US 
and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is After Socialism.


Randall Cotton wrote:
> " Olmert said he had considered allowing the army to continue the attack as
> GOC Southern Command Maj. Gen Yoav Gallant had sought, but felt this would
> have required a period of time 'for which we did not a sufficient diplomatic
> window.' "
> 
> http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057390.html
> 
> Again, I suspect the likely chain of events here is that:
> 
> 1. Israel will continue their blockade, allowing only marginal and very 
> restricted cargo through.
> 
> 2. Largely as a result, as a cause-and-effect reality, Hamas (and/or maybe 
> others) will resume firing rockets at Israel.
> 
> 3. Israel will respond with overwhelmingly disproportionate and 
> indiscriminate violence as already demonstrated ("Foreign Affairs and Defense
> Committee Chairman Tzachi Hanegbi told Army Radio. "If the [rocket] fire
> resumes, we will respond with force so strong and overpowering, they will
> miss the day the Israel Air Force's offensive began." This from the same
> article above.
> 
> 4. We wind up with a decisive, empirical litmus test of Obama's foreign 
> policy "change".