``Having been treated to these propaganda techniques repeatedly and continuously for 8 years, the US public can suddenly hear the similarity in the assertions of Israeli officialdom and its supporters.
Of course, the Neoconservatives had borrowed a lot of their techniques from the Jabotinsky/Likud tradition of revisionist Zionism, so what goes around comes around.''
If anybody doesn't know who Jabotinsky was and why he is important, here is his classic essay, The Iron Wall (originally published in Russian, November 1923):
http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/ironwall.htm
I picked up a lot of ideas on how to view the Neconservatives, Israel and the Middle East from two sources who are far less polite than Cole. Hal Draper and Lenni Brenner. Draper died awhile back. Brenner is still alive and kicking up shit as usual. Both were old time radicals, marxists, and Jews, part of the international Jewish Communist conspiracy...
I was going to suggest Doug do an interview with Brenner. But I watched a recent interview by Harold Channer. Brenner has a strong tendency to rattle on in apparently random fashion, and then fail to make his point clear. He has a high signal to noise ratio. He lives this stuff and so he has a continuous conversation going on in his head and just rambles out whatever happens to be the state of his thinking at the moment. You have to study him a little first. What's central to his thinking are several inter-related issues. The separation of church and state, the centrality of civil and human rights, class war on capital and imperialism. He is on the good side of all those, but the way he gets there is often very circuitous. Here is a recent interview if anybody is interested. It's long, a full hour:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyAfZDMxEQE
In any event, the bottom line application for today is to understand what Israel is doing in Gaza. Juan Cole noted in an earlier blog entry that Israel had switched from macro-wars to mini-wars. So, Israel is destroying Gaza's Hamas led government and infrastructure. That's why it is bombing government buildings, mosques, schools, hospitals, and utilities, well and UN facilities.
In order to provide itself with political cover Israel is treating these targets as targets of opportunity. If IDF intelligence can provide some figleaf, then the IDF will destroy that target and various apartment buildings that offer themselves as similar targets. What this apparently collateral damage does, is cover up the deliberateness of going straight for these infrastructure targets, as infrastructure alone. There is a sort of legalistic technicality in operation here, since destroying civilian infrastructure by an occupation army is a war crime.
The military similarity between Gaza and the southern Lebanon invasion in 2006(?) must be evident. The parallel is, go after Hezbollah and try to destory its material and human infrastructure, while punishing Beirut in hopes of destablizing Lebanon.
This is a war and as such it is politics by other means. Israel's political goal is to destroy Hamas, aka the government of Gaza. If that can be accomplished, then Israel can claim Abbas and Fatah represents Gaza by default, or something like that. There are internal political goals as well, like keeping a hard rightwing government in power in Israel. No fuzzy Obama liberals allowed. Stern resolve in time of war must be the order of the day.
Whatever the home made rockets have to do with the Israeli assault seems more figleaf to me, just as their use by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the PFLP (thanks to Kevin Dean for the reminder) is mostly a symbol of resistance. Yes, they have killed Israelis and should stop, but I doubt they will. I seriously doubt that the Israeli government cares. After all the rockets continue to offer a pretext and continue to be a so-called negociating point for Hamas et al.
Meanwhile the asymetry of power as represented in the crude body count has moving from 1:10, to 1:100 and now 1:500.
CG