As GregMitch pointed out earlier this week, the mainstream debate about Israeli policy is far more robust and nuanced inside Israel than it is inside the United States.
On the blogs, of course, there's a wide variety of views expressed - including despicable anti-Semitism and equally detestable screeds against Arabs. But in the traditional media, not to mention among elected officials, it's a rare day to hear more than kow-towing to the most right-wing Israeli stances. Occasionally, there will be a tepid critique of this or that policy. And, of course, there's ubiquitous lip-service to "a peaceful settlement." The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page or similar sources may sometimes lament the acceptance of socialism in Israel.
Obviously, we also don't get much of a robust traditional media debate about a lot of issues right here in America. The narrowness of that discussion has a great deal to do with why we've wound up where we are, facing multiple crises and being peppered with propaganda and pernicious disinformation that limits people's understanding in an attempt to rein in the political options our elected leaders are willing to discuss, much less adopt.
When Israel is the matter under scrutiny, the already-prevalent unwillingness to present a wider spectrum of views on anything is combined with the fact we are still afflicted by anti-semitism and an even more widespread anti-Arab sentiment in the United States - factors which always taint any attempts at rational discussion. Even an editor predisposed to publishing something a little more daring legitimately fears that anything outside the usual highly constrained, narrowly defined "debate" will trigger hateful displays and calls for his or her removal. So it's no surprise we never see a truly wide-open discussion of either Israeli policy or of U.S. policy toward Israel and the rest of the Middle East.
Editors of Haaretz, the widely read left-of-center daily in Israel, don't see things that way. The discussion there is robust, tough-minded, hard-hitting.
Here are excerpts from two recent opinion pieces. Obviously, two pieces can never do justice to this complex situation. For one thing, they do not represent Palestinian points of view. But these two illustrate the level of internal public debate for which the Israeli media - but not the American - are willing to provide a forum.
The first is by Gideon Levy, a member of the editorial board of the newspaper, who has covered the West Bank and Gaza for a dozen years. A spokesman for Prime Minister Shimon Peres in 1978-1982, he has long been strongly critical of government policy toward the Palestinians. In 2007, he told the Australian Broadcasting Company that "modest mission to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say, "We didn't know'."
Our finest young men are attacking Gaza now. Good boys from good homes are doing bad things. Most of them are eloquent, impressive, self-confident, often even highly principled in their own eyes, and on Black Saturday dozens of them set out to bomb some of the targets in our "target bank" for the Gaza Strip.
They set out to bomb the graduation ceremony for young police officers who had found that rare Gaza commodity, a job, massacring them by the dozen. They bombed a mosque, killing five sisters of the Balousha family, the youngest of whom was 4. They bombed a police station, hitting a doctor nearby; she lies in a vegetative state in Shifa Hospital, which is bursting with wounded and dead. They bombed a university that we in Israel call the Palestinian Rafael, the equivalent of Israel's weapons developer, and destroyed student dormitories. They dropped hundreds of bombs out of blue skies free of all resistance.
n four days they killed 375 people. They did not, and could not, distinguish between a Hamas official and his children, between a traffic cop and a Qassam launch operator, between a weapons cache and a health clinic, between the first and second floors of a densely populated apartment building with dozens of children inside. According to reports, about half of the people killed were innocent civilians. We're not complaining about the pilots' accuracy, it cannot be otherwise when the weapon is a plane and the objective is a tiny, crowded strip of land. Our excellent pilots are effectively bullies now. As in training flights, they bomb undisturbed, facing neither an air force nor defense system.
But all of this is well hidden from the pilots' eyes. They are only doing their job, as the saying goes, only following orders like bombing machines. In the past few days they have excelled at this, and the results are there for the entire world to see. Gaza is licking its wounds, just like Lebanon before it, and almost no one pauses for a moment to ask whether all this is necessary, or unavoidable, or whether it contributes to Israel's security and moral image. Is it really the case that our pilots return safely to base, or are they in fact returning to them as callous, cruel and blind people?
Ari Shavit is a journalist and Haaretz columnist who, since the 1980s, has written about Israel, and especially about the country's foreign policy, for publications such as Harper's and The New York Review of Books.
Operation Cast Lead is a tragic campaign. Tragic, because it is causing the deaths of hundreds and injuring thousands. Tragic, because it is causing physical and emotional injury to innocent Palestinians, including women and children. Tragic, because like every war it creates intolerable human hardship and heartbreaking suffering.
But the tragedy of Operation Cast Lead is unavoidable. It derives directly from the fact that the Palestinians did not take proper advantage of the historic opportunity given to them in 2005. It derives from the fact that when the Palestinians achieved self-government for the first time in their history they misused it. It derives from the fact that the Palestinian need to destroy Israel is still stronger than their need to build Palestine.
Israel-hating Israelis call Operation Cast Lead a war crime. They record the names of each and every Palestinian killed, denounce each and every Israeli action and portray their state as a bully. While the Egyptians are saying that Hamas is largely responsible for the tragedy of Gaza, Israel-hating Israelis place the whole responsibility on their government and military. While the international community silently understands that a sovereign state is duty-bound to protect its citizens' lives, Israel-hating Israelis believe that Israeli lives can be forfeited. ...
The real motivation of Israel-hating Israelis is not genuine concern for the Palestinians, but rather a form of reverse racism. By showing forgiveness toward Palestinian fascism they turn their backs not only on Israelis but also on moderate, freedom-loving Palestinians. Those who blame Israel for everything and exonerate the Palestinians of everything are neither serving the cause of peace nor helping to end the violence and occupation. All they are doing is proving the extent to which they are blinded by their burning self-hatred.
One of those essays may have pegged your rage gauge. Both of them may have. But wouldn't it be something if opinions as diverse as these - and even more so - could be found in our own traditional megamedia?