Link Banana

Speaking of war… Just to haunt your dreams, The Economist paints a vivid picture of quickly and easy the Hamas-Israel conflict could start a war to engulf the Middle East. Here’s hoping they’re wrong about this.

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, finds he can no longer resist pressure to end the rocket fire, a job that military men say can be achieved, if at all, only by a ground invasion. But ground warfare against Hamas’s guerrilla fighters in the teeming confines of Gaza will certainly kill many Palestinian civilians. That will tempt Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah in Lebanon, to help his fellow Islamists by opening a second front from Lebanon.

Of course, to weaken Hizbullah, Israel sees a need to attack Syria as well. Remember that, for now at least, this is all fiction. It’s best for all of us if it stays that way.

David Grossman presents a fascinating look at the future of Israel though the eyes of a profoundly concerned citizen.

We haven’t gotten off the hook [about the 2006 war with Lebanon] because we haven’t yet really gotten onto it. We have not yet dared to face, open-eyed, this war’s deep and frightening significance. Set aside for a moment the convoluted, supremely cautious final report. Go back to the war days. Recall the moments of anxiety, the sense of ever-widening fissures, when it suddenly became clear to each and every one of us that perhaps the army will not always be able to save us, and that there could be a time when a war could end otherwise.

Isn’t that what suddenly began to seep through the tightly fastened armor of denial that we Israelis always shut ourselves up in? True, existential fear is an almost constant companion; it is always hovering over us; but perhaps precisely for that reason it is so threatening, and so hard for us to look straight at. Maybe that is why we actually do not dare face it soberly, and why we don’t take the necessary measures to counter it. I do not mean just military measures (even there we failed), but also the profound and comprehensive change of consciousness required of all who are truly determined to prevent such a deadly danger.

Amos Elon’s essay in the most recent New York Review of Books is the best introduction I’ve seen to Ehud Olmert, the history of Israeli settlements, and the prospects of success in the latest push for peace.

Olmert may be the most pragmatic Israeli leader since 1967. One hopes he does not come too late. According to Haaretz, he told an American delegation recently that in “Israel there are perhaps 400,000 people who maintain the state, leaders in the economy, in science and in culture. I want to make sure they have hope, that they’ll stay here.” His own two sons, it is well known, live in New York. He is the first Israeli premier who has expressed some empathy for the Palestinian tragedy. In his speech in Annapolis in late November, he said, “We are not indifferent to [the Palestinians’] suffering.” It is true that the next morning eight Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army but it is impossible to overlook what seems, at least, the beginning of a change. The leftist Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy was uncharacteristically optimistic, wondering whether perhaps an Israeli de Klerk was emerging here.

I’d struggle to see this as anything but a good thing:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel promised the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Sunday that Israel would no longer disrupt the supply of food, medicine and necessary energy into the Gaza Strip and intended to prevent a “humanitarian disaster” there.