by Peter A. Belmont / 2011-08-19
© 2011 Peter Belmont

RSS Recent Essays (All Topics)   •(12/23) How did we get to October 7th? •(11/23) Our Political Habits Are Ending The Human Race •(10/23) Sketch of Israel-Palestine History •(10/23) Whoever controls the discourse controls emotional reactions to reality •(08/23) Russia On Trial •(01/23) The Purpose of "Conservatism" •(10/22) The project of returning the earth to the cockroaches couldn't be in better hands! •(05/22) Abortion, The Constitution, And The Supreme Court •(03/22) The Problem of Climate Change Framing or Discourse or Understanding •(06/21) Israel-Palestine: If not apartheid, then what? The August 18 attack on a bus in southern Israel, claimed by Israel to have been an attack by Palestinians from Gaza (perhaps by way of Egypt) has been useful to Israel’s government as a “security” distraction from the tent-city civil protests. It much resembles America’s 9/11 event. See Adam Keller’s take on this.

Israel has a carefully nurtured and often well-deserved reputation for taking careful security measures. The borders of Israeli-controlled territory with Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank have been very carefully tended.

What can there have been about the recent “Arab Spring” in Egypt to make Israel less careful of its border with Egypt? Nothing. And yet, the August 18 attack from Sinai into southern Israel makes it seem that Israel still doesn’t protect its border with Egypt.

(Israel’s whipping-boy-like retaliation-against-the-wrong-party by aerial attack on long-pre-selected targets in Gaza is not evidence of the authorship of the attack, nor even of Israel’s opinion of that authorship. It is merely evidence of Israel’s retaliatory impulse—and perhaps also of a degree of caution about attacking Egypt. In Ariel Sharon’s heyday, Israel would have obliterated a Egyptian village near the Israeli border, teaching the villagers a lesson.)

And the attack on the Israeli bus, etc., is evidently useful politically to the Israeli government, taking Israelis’ minds off the civil protests of the tent-cities at a moment when they inconveniently make the government’s preparations for the anticipated September 20 Palestinian demand for statehood at the UN rather unmotivated (from a security perspective).

An attack! We are insecure! Oh, dear! Please forget the tent-city protest and rally around the flag.

Richard Silverstein’s “take”: Lia Tarachansky has exposed a potentially very important disagreement among senior Israeli officials about who is responsible for the attack. Bibi Netanyahu very specifically blamed the Popular Resistance Committees for the attack. But in her interview with IDF spokesperson Avital Leibowitz, the latter refuses to say that the PRC is responsible. In fact, she says specifically that she “isn’t prime minister Netanyahu,” implicitly rejecting her boss’ claim. I think this is a major break in the story. It appears that Israel wanted to assassinate the leadership of PRC and took advantage of the terror attack to do so, all the while lying in implicating the group in the attack. All that Leibowitz will say on tape is that someone from Gaza is responsible, which is a little like saying that someone from Saudi Arabia was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

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