Bombing for Votes

The US is nearly the only country in the world where it's impossible to see any mainstream media criticism of Israel. Such is the grip of the Israel Lobby on the American Press, political parties, and most of the American public. If you want hard hitting critiques of Israeli policy, you need to go to Israeli papers, or the web.

Mark Lynch went to listen to the Israeli Ambassador

It was a profoundly dismaying experience. Because if Ambassador Meridor is taken at his word, then Israel has no strategy in Gaza.

Asked three times by audience members, Meridor simply could not offer any plausible explanation as to how its military campaign in Gaza would achieve its stated goals.(

via Kevin Drum)

Cristopher Hitchens thinks he knows what Israel is up to. Israeli politicians are bombing for votes:

Until last week, Benjamin Netanyahu was strongly favored to come back as the man whose hard line against territorial concessions had been vindicated by the use of long-evacuated Gaza as a launching pad for random missile attacks. It now seems unlikely that he can easily outbid the current ruling coalition, at least from the hawkish right. (Remember that all the nonsense of the so-called "Al-Aqsa intifada," which wasted so much time and life in the last decades, was first instigated by an electoral rivalry between Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, in which the latter showed himself more hard-line than the former by waddling militantly across the Temple Mount in the company of an armed band. For such vanities do children end up screaming in the streets over the mangled bodies of their parents—and vice, if I may so phrase it, versa.)

Israel's politicians play for short term gains, but they are risking a lot - that Americans will wake up to the fact that we are playing the role of Israel's patsy. How much longer will Americans be willing to pay Israel for the privilege of fighting its wars?

I certainly don't expect it, but I would be pleased if Obama told Israel that if it's going to keep messing up Gaza it had better take responsibility for cleaning it up - with a proper occupation, like the one we imposed on Japan after WWII. They need to shape a constitution, rebuild the government, arrest all the radicals, reform the schools and rebuild the economy.

Of course it won't happen.