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• Monday, July 24, 2006 06:33 PM

  Yet another existential threat?

  Dr. Freedman explains the Israeli consensus behind this war as due to the existential nature of the threat facing Israel today: essentially, he's claiming that Israel is today facing non-rational actors bent on the country's destruction, and so the normal calculus of war and peace doesn't apply.

  Problem is, we've heard all of this before. In every military crisis that Israel has been involved in since 1967 at least, the same sense of crisis is invoked: this is a new situation, this time it's _really_ a threat to Israel's survival, this group of opponents really is nuts, we have to take the gloves off. And some converted doves are (yet again) trotted out as justification.

  Over this period, Israel's strategic situation has steadily improved, to the point where today it faces no serious military threat to its existence from anywhere and where its main security challenge has been dealing with people whose land the Israeli state annexed in 1967. And so the Middle East is back to the same exchange: 10 Israeli artillery shells reply to each incoming rocket (whether in Gaza or Lebanon), the IDF practises Schrecklichkeit over the roads of southern Lebanon, and the only justification is: but this time the threat is really serious!

  Fortunately or unfortunately for Israel, the threat has changed. The state of Israel is not the underdog any more. Now Israel is more like Britain during the Mandate, flailing around in the ruins of the King David Hotel and wondering about the irrationality of the terrorists it's itself produced.

  —SMac Read SMac's other letters
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