Israel's Anguish

by Hugh Fitzgerald (Oct. 2008)

New English Review

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/27371/sec_id/27371

[excerpt]

Indeed, it seems clear already that the Arabs have not always “failed to miss an opportunity.” They took the “opportunity” of Israel’s victory in a war of self-defense and turned it into the most successful re-branding campaign in history, repackaging the Jihad against Israel as merely a “struggle for the legitimate rights of the ‘Palestinian’ people” who were created out of the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel, the local Arabs.

Enough nonsense about those supposedly “tough-minded” Israeli figures – whether military men, such as Rabin and Sharon, who both were willing to offer disastrous surrenders, of rights and of tangible assets, or of those civilian politicians, Olmert and now Livni. Zipporah “Tzipi” Livni, as I have suggested above, is a playwright, the star of her own play, as a child-of-Irgun-supporters who, because she has "matured" and "developed" and become so much more of a "realist" than her poor benighted mother and father, way back in the 1940s could ever have been. What exactly she now understands about Islam that they did not understand is entirely unclear. And the theatre has been rented on a long-term lease, and the claque hired for many seasons to come, both paid for in the coin of Israel's security.