Speaking In (delusional) Tongues

Most of the pictures coming out of the Middle East these days have been of dead kids and flattened buildings in Gaza, the result of Israel's relentless, high-firepower air and ground assault.

What's largely gone unnoticed are the changes on the quiet side of the Gaza/Israel border. The overwhelming majority of Israelis, 90% by some estimates, support the carnage. As Chris McGreal reports in The Guardian/Observer, Israeli public opinion has turned astonishingly medieval.

The world has reeled in horror at revelations of Israeli atrocities as the Palestinian death toll has climbed toward 800. The International Red Cross was so outraged it broke its usual silence over an attack in which the Israeli army herded a Palestinian family into a building and then shelled it, killing 30 people and leaving the surviving children clinging to the bodies of their dead mothers. The army prevented rescuers from reaching the survivors for four days.

Israel's shelling of a UN school that had been turned into a refugee centre near Gaza city, killing 42 people who had fled the fighting, drew further accusations of indifference to civilian lives. And Israel has struggled to justify the eradication of entire families, including small children, in pursuit of Hamas officials.

But ordinary Israelis have been told little about this and when they are they generally brush it aside with assertions that it is sad but Hamas has brought it on the Palestinian people. Israel is the real victim, they say. The mainstream Israeli press has stuck firmly to the official line that it is a war of defence, a moral conflict forced on Israel by Hamas rocket fire.
The scale of Palestinian civilian casualties is played down. The dead are overwhelmingly described as terrorists. The accounts of entire Palestinian families being wiped out are buried beneath stories of the Israeli trauma at Hamas attacks.

Support for the vague notion of peace has been further buried under the rhetoric of the looming Israeli election, where the right in particular, led by a former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is playing on fear of a nuclear Iran in league with Hamas. Netanyahu, who is likely to win the 10 February ballot, has no intention of dismantling settlements or relinquishing the control that Israel exercises over the lives of Palestinians on the West Bank. He dances around the issue of a Palestinian state and has made clear in the past that what he wants to see amounts to a canton or bantustan (homeland) surrounded by Israeli control.

And so the vast number of mainstream Israelis, while saying they support peace, once again find themselves in bed with the settlers and on the side of oppression. "I hate to say we told you so," said Yisrael Medad, a prominent Jewish settler from Shilo, deep inside the West Bank. "Now you hear all the time that it was a mistake to pull out of Gaza. You hear it on the television when it was never discussed before. More of the anchors are willing to ask that question. They would never ask that a year or two ago. They used to say ours was the extreme view. Now I would say that it's the mainstream, that no matter what we have done territorially speaking it's not going to satisfy them [the Palestinians]. They are always going to attack us."

Read this entire article here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/11/gaza-israel-political-attitudes

But if you want an even better sense of Israeli public opinion today, glance through the pages of The Jerusalem Post. You might find it stomach-churning but you'll learn a lot about some of the other hurdles that stand so powerfully in the way of peace.