A clarifying insight into what’s happening in Israel

Here is an interpretation of the Israeli action against Gaza, by Tim Butcher in The Telegraph, that makes sense of what I have been describing as Israeli’s long-overdue but still essentially unserious action. Butcher says that war cabinet members Tsipi Livni and Ehud Barak are trying to save their political careers, and, by doing so, save “their vision of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

They are both key figures in supporting the plan—backed by America, the European Union and the United Nations—of peace talks between Israel and the moderate Palestinian leadership under Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Under the plan Israel would be willing to give up some of the land it occupied in 1967 for a new Palestinian state but this is based on the assumption that the land would not be used as a base for attacks on Israel.

Right-wingers like Mr Netanyahu do not believe in a land-for-peace swap because they believe militants will continue to attack across any new Israeli-Palestinian frontier.

Miss Livni and Mr Barak are using force to try to prove Mr Netanyahu wrong, to show that militants in Gaza can be silenced once and for all prior to its incorporation into a future Palestinian state.

I don’t think it’s about silencing the militants once and for all, as is suggested by the IDF’s saying that the purpose of the incursion is merely to gain “control” of Hamas launch sites. I think it’s about a display of force that will make the Palestinian attacks temporarily stop.*

So, not only is the attack on Gaza not serious, meaning that it’s not aimed at defeating Israel’s enemies but only at quieting things down for a while, but, more significantly, the reason for quieting things down for a while is to enable the “peace process” to move forward. The purpose of Israel’s tough-seeming but actually wimpy military action against its enemies is to facilitate Israel’s much larger surrender to its enemies in the form of the two-state solution.

And, again, the greater Israel’s appeasement, the more the world damns it as a Hitler-like crusher of humanity. Such is the inverted world of liberalism.

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* In this sense, the Gaza campaign is like the U.S. attack on Falujah in December 2004, which was billed by Bush supporters as the decisive act in winning the war and creating a new Iraq, but which in reality was only aimed at lessening the violence enough to allow for an election.

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Ken Hechtman writes:

The reason Israel can’t destroy launch sites is that there’s really not much to destroy.

This clip should give you an idea of what a “launch site” looks like:

It’s not Strategic Air Command. It’s a parking lot, an orchard clearing, a rooftop, pretty much any small open space will do.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 03, 2009 08:04 PM | Send