There can be no solution with the Israeli government, and perhaps no solution is possible with the Israelis themselves either, because no peaceful solution can come through a fascistic government and a people that moved from the centre and left to far right extremism. I write on Tuesday morning, and I have with me the English language translations of the Israeli press. The latter seems to suffer from a break from reality and the world as other people know it, but there is a small conscientious minority that writes logically even as we disagree with them in politics. This minority includes Nahum Barnea, who wrote an article published on the front page of Yedioth Ahronoth, one of the most widely circulated Israeli newspapers. The article was entitled “Longing for a Leader.” In it, Barnea criticized Benjamin Netanyahu for not anticipating the reactions to the raid on the peace flotilla, and said that a true leader would take the initiative. Barnea proposes that a good initiative would include supporting the sovereignty of the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank and lifting the blockade from the Gaza Strip, and concludes by saying that “as of now, Israel has no leader, and it has no leadership.” There are numerous others who write in the same spirit as Barnea, especially in Haaretz, while there are equally many others who refuse to see the truth or attempt to turn it upside down to suit their loyalties or extremism. In Yedioth Ahronoth, Itamar Eichner wrote about the international pressure campaign against Israel. He cites among those demanding Netanyahu to form a commission of inquiry the US vice president, the French president, the prime ministers of Canada, Greece, Bulgaria and Georgia, and the Quartet envoy to the Middle East. The writer also adds to those the British Foreign Secretary and the Secretary General of the United Nations. The whole world wants an investigation, and the above is completely insufficient because it involves an investigation to be conducted by the Israeli government itself, which means another Winograd Committee which investigated the 2006 Summer War but under a different name, with the sole aim of covering up Israeli violations. What is required instead is an independent international probe. There was a news story in Ma'ariv about the Israeli captive soldier in Gaza, Gilad Shalit. His family asked the organizers of the peace flotilla to pass a message to their son but they refused, and then the family discovered that the easing of the blockade on Gaza will take place without any progress in their son's issue. I don't know if the article's writer is an extremist racist or just an ignorant, as he linked a blockade against 1.5 million people that prevents them from even rebuilding what the occupation destroyed and denies them medicine and sometimes food, to the issue of only one prisoner. There are ten thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israel – mostly civilians, including women and children. However, we hear nothing about them from Israel and all we hear about every day is one soldier. There is a clearly Nazi logic behind linking the fate of one soldier to the blockade on 1.5 million people, or in considering him alone more important than ten thousand prisoners. In fact, their logic goes beyond that of the Nazis who believed that each one of them was equal to a hundred non-Aryans, but I never heard that they equated each one of them to 1.5 million or ten thousand. What is worse than all the above regarding racism, whether intended or not, is the article Amos Gilboa wrote in Maariv, entitled ‘The Army of Israel's Destruction'. He said that the Israeli Prime Minister and Defence Minister described the peace flotilla as being a ‘hypocrisy offensive'. This is a mistake in his opinion because Israel has been facing a war since the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, aimed at removing Israel from the map of the world, or at least to invalidate its sovereignty. I will overlook the exaggeration in this claim and will remain on topic with the writer, who continues by saying that the army waging war against Israel is composed of Hamas, some elements in the Palestinian Authority, extremist Islamic organizations, various terrorist groups, international media outlets such as Al-Jazeera, extremist left wing and right wing groups, hundreds of human rights and charity organizations, international NGOs, environmental groups, student unions and lecturers in Western universities, and individuals in Israel and the Balad Party, Azmi Bishara's party. The main base for all these groups is in England. The Nazi logic in the above lies in the fact that the writer is saying that the whole world is against Israel, and then he rejects the opinion of the world, just like Israelis reject the UN resolutions against Israel because they consider themselves to be above the whole world. The article then stoops down further from the abyss of Nazism to the obscenities of the street when he criticizes the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for attacking the murder of the Turkish peace activists. This is in the writer's opinion hypocrisy because Turkey killed 37 thousand Kurds and destroyed 2500 Kurdish villages. Even if we overlook how accurate these numbers are, he is saying that the murder of Kurds justifies the murder of peace activists in international waters. He must also have a justification for the murder of five thousand Palestinians, mostly civilians, since 29/9/2000, including 1500 minors. However, I believe that his justification will not include the fact that Israel is a fascistic state that was delegitimized by its own extremist government. [email protected]
