“The good guys don’t always win”
JVL Introduction
Comments under this Ha’aretz article point out the incongruities in the author’s argument. True as Chaim Levinson says, Israel’s international standing has been dealt a beating since October 7, its leadership’s weakness revealed. True also: “for years we managed to fool them into thinking we were a strong country, a wise people and a powerful army. In truth, we’re a shtetl with an air force, and that’s on the condition that it’s awakened in time.” You can feel his pain as he confesses that Israel has lost the war and “The inability to admit it encapsulates everything you need to know about Israel’s individual and mass psychology.”
But how should we respond to the idea that Israel has “found its soul after Netanyahu”? That the IDF “fought, demonstrated skill as soldiers and chalked up impressive tactical achievements” as a result of which “Hamas is severely wounded”? Or that Israel’s failure only goes to show: “The good guys don’t always win.”
In the words of one commenter: “’The good guys’. The ones who slaughter tens of thousands of civilians after 76 years of massacring, chasing out, stealing the property of and dehumanizing their cousins are the good guys.”
Another says: “No, it’s not Netanyahu’s fault. Israel’s conduct, since its inception, has not changed: expropriate, displace, kill, dissemble. That is what produced October 7. The only difference is that since October 7 the displacement and killing has accelerated and the mask has been ripped off.”
Levinson regrets that Israel security “won’t be restored”, but when did Palestinians ever have it?
Some commenters suggest Levinson himself is reflecting what is wrong with “Israel’s individual and mass psychology.” Read the piece and decide for yourself.
NWI
This article was originally published by Ha'aretz on Thu 11 Apr 2024. Read the original here.
Saying What Can't Be Said: Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat
The war’s aims won’t be achieved, the hostages won’t be returned through military pressure, security won’t be restored and Israel’s international ostracism won’t end
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If only we didn’t have Netanyahu, if only we could get rid of Hamas, if only our brave and noble soldiers were allowed to do their job, if only someone else (“a coalition of countries with money and good intentions”!!!) would come and sort it all out at their expense, then we could all go back to the way it was and forget about Gaza again and hope that the Palestinians will just fade away.
This article exemplifies how Liberal Zionism is a contradiction in terms.
Levinson might have adopted the “slowly, slowly catchee monkey” approach of telling uncomfortable facts as the best way of getting Israelis to listen to ANY of them.
I’m left wondering whether there’s enough time left for such a gradualist approach. Israel may well have to deal within a few months with legal, diplomatic and economic events that put its survival as a state at risk. The Israeli public and government seem barely aware of the dangers they may well face. They seem to be courting more harm rather than doing anything to ward it away.
Nothing to say about the 34+ thousand Palestinians who have died in the hopeless quest to save Israel’s face and Netanyahu’s career.
Israel lost the minute Netanyahu said they were going to eliminate Hamas. As long as there is occupation, the Palestine resistance, whether they are called Hamas or something else, will NEVER be eliminated.
This article should be a source of some optimism, but, strangely, I can’t help but feel pessimistic because of the – so many – ‘what ifs’ it throws up.
What if – Israelis continue to believe the lies they’re being told, on a daily basis?
What if – they vote Netanyahu out, but retain – and strengthen – Ben-Gvir and Smotrich?
What if – the settlers are left to run amok in the West Bank, burning and looting – assaulting and murdering Palestinians?
What if – the US, UK and the EU continue to support these Israeli crimes without equivocation?
Yesterday, Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah was refused entry to Germany, to speak at a Palestinian Conference, in Berlin. He was detained, then deported.
What if – German bureaucrats continue to apply their twisted logic to Israel/Palestine?
David: “Nothing to say about the 34+ thousand Palestinians who have died in the hopeless quest to save Israel’s face and Netanyahu’s career.”
Just what I thought on reading the blubbing of a disillusioned hawk brought down to earth. Every word was concerned with Israel alone, as if the Gazans, and West Bank inhabitants were not there, not where they had been for generations, living in peace alongside peoples of numerous nationalities and religions including Jews. What, I wonder, changed all that? The article was riddled with expressions of the belief that Israel had sole rights to determine the future for Palestinians, just as if Palestinians were inanimate objects, incapable of, or entitled to a say in their existence: totally under the jurisdiction of a failing, flailing regime. BDS NOW.
Chris Romberg eloquently puts his finger on the liberal Zionist contradiction at the heart of this piece.
Indeed its principal interest lies in its exposure of the author’s psychological trauma which appears similar to that of a lifelong member of a quasi-religious cult when the cult is brutally confronted by the incompatibility of its beliefs with reality. Cognitive dissonance abounds. Here the cult’s intrinsic colonial mentality remains intact, yet the recognition of the cult’s existential failure is profound. So the latter is unconvincingly attributed to the cult’s mistaken trust in its present leader. In many places Levinson acknowledges reality. e.g.:
“The reality is that the war’s aims will not be achieved. Hamas will not be eradicated. The hostages will not be returned through military pressure. Security will not be reestablished”
Yet earlier he simply cannot admit that it is the foundational colonial beliefs of the cult which have failed:
“The shock of the outbreak of the war could have been a starting point for a swift, powerful, aggressive, eminently justified campaign to quickly root out Hamas wherever that was possible. ….. We [sic!]could have created a viable alternative to Hamas in Gaza. After six months, there already might have been the first signs of independent government there.”
The anachronistic Zionist cult has been mortally wounded by its confrontation with reality. Yet given the criminal complicity or indifference of the world’s oligarchs, only determined actions by the planet’s masses can curtail the murderous madness of the its death throes.
“and Yahya Sinwar will be killed”. Check the kill ratio. You’re still not out the rabbit hole mate. The only reason Israeli rulers and their pathologically lying shills that operate on telepathic auto fib are not getting reciprocally assassinated is the collective punishment policy. Such a gift to the world. At the supposedly intellectual heart of the ‘liberal’ pretence is a Escher drawing of a worm.
What if the UK and the US continue to support…. Well we have nothing left but corrupt and incompetent bought and paid for politics and one functional and efficient thing – a highly developed system for trashing anyone who doesn’t comply. Whilst everything else turns to s***. Including the water supply. Our ‘leaders’ have one qualification only. Anyone care to guess? Nice work bibi boy.