Ignoring the Threat from Gaza
Leon Wieseltier’s “Operation Make the World Hate Us” in The New Republic challenges Israel’s blockade of Gaza and the interception of the flotilla. Wieseltier though forgets Gaza's long history of aggression against Israel.
Leon Wieseltier’s “Operation Make the World Hate Us” in The New Republic superficially challenges people like me who have supported Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and the interception of the flotilla to Gaza that was necessary to enforce it. His critique of Israel’s actions is, in one critical respect, different from those of most others who have opposed the interception of the flotilla. He has no illusions about who was on the one boat out of six on which violence occurred. He accepts that they were no peace activists interested in providing humanitarian aid to Gaza’s residents. He acknowledges that the charity that sponsored the “Freedom Flotilla” had ties to Islamist groups. His overall assessment of those who participated in the flotilla is harsh.
A real ‘Freedom Flotilla’ would have sailed for Gaza to liberate from within even as Israel stifles it from without. It oppresses the Palestinians who live in its sway and has brought them to ruin.
Addressing the left-wing activists who joined the flotilla, Wieseltier asked, “When did it become progressive to support a theocracy?
Still he claims that none of this justified the attack on the flotilla. He writes: “This is hardly what Israel likes to call, in the Iranian context, and that quite plausibly, an ‘existential threat’. Furthermore, Wieseltier notes that,
A headline in The Washington Post reported that … ‘Israel says Free Gaza Movement Poses Threat To Jewish State’. Such a claim is absurd. … ‘This was no Love Boat,’ Netanyahu said. ‘It was a hate boat.’ He was right, but so what? The threat of delegitimation is not a military problem and it does not have a military solution.
Wieseltier is right in a very limited sense. The flotilla did not pose an existential threat to Israel, and it was stupid for Israel to claim that it did, but what Wieseltier does not acknowledge is that Gaza poses a physical as well as an ideological threat to Israel. For years before Israel imposed the blockade, the residents of Gaza continuously fired rockets into Sderot and the towns of Southern Israel. Gaza’s aggression against Israel has largely been forgotten. This is no accident.
In none of the print and electronic media coverage of the flotilla interception that I saw this week was the word “Sderot” ever mentioned. Over the many years that 4,000 rockets were shot at Israeli civilians, television networks didn’t have continuous coverage from any of the targeted Israeli communities; the British House of Commons held no special debate, as it did this week; the UN did not send Richard Goldstone to look for war crimes; and, Wieseltier penned no articles to express outrage at the shelling of Southern Israel.
This assault on Israeli civilians has been suppressed by many writers because it contradicts a narrative in which Israel is held responsible for Gaza’s violence and misery. In a New York Times op-ed on the day after the interception of the flotilla, the Israeli writer Amos Oz asserted that this military action showed that Israel’s leaders believed that “what cannot be done by force can be done by more force”. Oz also wrote that Israel mistakenly believed that “Hamas’s control of Gaza can be ended by force of arms, or in more general terms, that the Palestinian problem can be crushed instead of solved.” Wieseltier chastised what he called “the militarization of the Israeli government’s understanding of Israel’s situation” which has led to the “most sterile period of diplomacy in Israel’s history”.
Both Oz and Wieseltier implicitly assumed that Israel has the choice of determining whether its relationship with Gaza – and by extension all Palestinians – is governed by diplomacy or by military action. The attacks on Israeli civilians from Gaza show this assumption to be false. Is there any reason to doubt that had there been no rockets from Gaza, there would now be no blockade?
In 2005, when Jews of all political persuasions were mourning the ethnic cleansing of Jewish settlers from Gaza, Wieseltier wrote,
When I behold the photographs of the settlers in Gaza uprooted by Israeli soldiers, empathy almost completely deserts me. I seem to have a heart of stone, and I am not entirely embarrassed by it. More precisely, I regard the eviction of the settlers as the appropriate reward for their hearts of stone. For many Jews gave their lives so that these Jews could grow their holy tomatoes and study their holy texts in this desert. In order to satisfy their collective and individual aspirations, the Israeli civilians who lived in Gaza required the sacrifice of Israeli soldiers. In the years of Jewish settlement in Gaza, 230 Israelis were killed there. A substantial number of them were soldiers. Why is the life of a Jew in a uniform worth less than the life of a Jew in a greenhouse? This is stone-heartedness.
Had Wieseltier been right, the violence should have stopped after Israel and the settlers left. But the shelling from Gaza increased dramatically after Israel “disengaged”. Should Wieseltier have known that this would happen? Well, Gaza was a base for Arab terrorism long before it was captured by Israel and the settlers arrived. In 1956, the large number of terrorist attacks originating from Egyptian-occupied Gaza was one of the main reasons for Israel launching its Sinai Campaign against Egypt. Moreover, just a few years before the Gaza pullout, parts off the West Bank were ceded to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization leading directly to the Palestinian launching of a terror war against Israeli civilians. This history made the attacks from Gaza quite foreseeable. Perhaps his reluctance to draw attention to the consequences of the Gaza pullout that he promoted for the residents of southern Israel explains why Wieseltier has virtually ignored the shelling. In any case, Wieseltier is now in the position of being an advocate of policies that put the residents of southern Israel under fire, and an opponent of the measures that Netanyahu is taking to make them safer. That’s a pretty good example of chutzpah.