BEER-SHE­VA, Israel – On Sat­ur­day, Dec. 27, the war began. The first bom­bard­ment took 3 min­utes and 40 sec­onds. Six­ty Israeli F‑16 fight­er jets bombed 50 sites in Gaza, killing more than 200 Pales­tini­ans, and wound­ing close to 1,000 more. A few hours after the dead­ly strike, Israeli

Despite the ever-increasing loss of Palestinian life, Israel remains the perpetual victim in the collective self-image. Regardless of what happens, we Israelis are presented as the moral players in this conflict.

Prime Min­is­ter Ehud Olmert con­vened a press con­fer­ence in Tel Aviv. With For­eign Min­is­ter Tzipi Livni sit­ting on his right and Defense Min­is­ter Ehud Barak on his left, Olmert declared: ​“It may take time, and each and every one of us must be patient so we can com­plete the mission.”

But what, exact­ly, is Israel’s mission?

Although Olmert did not say it direct­ly, the ​“mis­sion” includes four objectives.

The first is the destruc­tion of Hamas, a total­ly unre­al­is­tic goal. Even though the loss of hun­dreds of cadres and some key lead­ers will no doubt hurt the orga­ni­za­tion, Hamas is a robust polit­i­cal move­ment with wide­spread grass­roots sup­port, and it is unlike­ly to sur­ren­der or capit­u­late to Israeli demands fol­low­ing a mil­i­tary assault. Iron­i­cal­ly, Israel’s attempt to destroy Hamas using force has always strength­ened the orga­ni­za­tion in the end, thus cor­rob­o­rat­ing the notion that pow­er pro­duces its own vulnerability.

The sec­ond objec­tive has to do with Israel’s Feb. 10 elec­tions. The assault on Gaza is also being car­ried out to help the Kadi­ma and Labor Par­ties defeat the con­ser­v­a­tive Likud and its leader Ben­jamin Netanyahu, who was ahead in the polls until the war began. Whether the dev­as­ta­tion in Gaza will help Livni defeat Netanyahu or help Barak gain votes is dif­fi­cult to say, but the strat­e­gy of com­pet­ing with a war­mon­ger like Netanyahu by beat­ing the drums of war says a great deal about the three major contenders.

The third objec­tive involves the Israeli mil­i­tary. After its notable humil­i­a­tion in Lebanon in 2006, the Israel Defense Forces has been look­ing to re-estab­lish its rep­u­ta­tion. Last spring, it used Syr­ia as its lab­o­ra­to­ry and now it has decid­ed to focus on Gaza.

Final­ly, Hamas and Fatah have not yet reached an agree­ment on how to pro­ceed when Mah­moud Abbas ends his term as pres­i­dent of the Pales­tin­ian Nation­al Author­i­ty on Jan. 9. One of the out­comes of this assault is that Abbas will remain in pow­er a while longer because Hamas will be unable to mobi­lize sup­port­ers to force him to resign.

What is miss­ing from this list of Israeli objec­tives is the attempt to halt the fir­ing of rock­ets into Israel’s south­ern towns. Unlike the above four objec­tives, the gov­ern­ment presents this one as the operation’s pri­ma­ry objec­tive, which is mis­lead­ing because Israel could have put an end to the rock­ets a long time ago.

Dur­ing the six-month Israel-Hamas truce that end­ed Dec. 19, there was rel­a­tive qui­et – a qui­et bro­ken most often as a reac­tion to Israeli vio­lence, such as the Nov. 4 bomb­ing of tar­gets in Gaza or the impo­si­tion of a total block­ade that pre­vent­ed basic goods, like food­stuff and med­i­cine, from enter­ing the Gaza Strip.

Rather than con­tin­ue the truce, which would have stopped the rock­et attacks, the Israeli gov­ern­ment has again cho­sen to adopt strate­gies of vio­lence that are akin to the ones deployed by Hamas. Only, the Israeli ones are much more lethal.

The log­i­cal fallacy

More than 90 per­cent of Jew­ish Israelis sup­port the assault on Gaza. They say to them­selves that Israel with­drew from the Gaza Strip three years ago, and that despite the with­draw­al, Hamas has been shoot­ing rock­ets at us. This expla­na­tion seems log­i­cal, yet it elides some cru­cial facts.

One fact is that Israel main­tains sov­er­eign­ty over the Gaza Strip, despite the with­draw­al. Anoth­er fact is that the Pales­tini­ans have been liv­ing in a cage. Pales­tini­ans have not had access to basic food­stuff. Their elec­tric­i­ty has been cut off, and many don’t have access to clean water.

When one for­gets these facts, it is only ratio­nal to ask ​‘Why are they still shoot­ing at us?’ This is pre­cise­ly what the media here has been pump­ing the pub­lic with. By con­trast, if you look at what’s been going on in the Gaza Strip in the past three years and you see what Israel has been doing to the Pales­tini­ans, you would think that the Pales­tin­ian resis­tance is ratio­nal. And those are the facts miss­ing in the Israeli and U.S. main­stream media.

Under attack

I am not speak­ing from an arm­chair. I know what it is like to be under rock­et attack. For the past 10 days, my two chil­dren – Ariel, 4, and Aviv, 9 months – have been sleep­ing in a bomb shelter.

After being stuck for 72 hours in Beer-She­va – locat­ed in the Negev Desert, 28 miles east of Gaza – my spouse Cather­ine and I decid­ed to vis­it my moth­er, who lives north, so that our chil­dren could play out­side dur­ing the week­end far away from the rockets.

Once there, I sat to watch TV with my moth­er, who like most Israelis is a devout news con­sumer. For the most part, the broad­cast was more of the same images and voic­es of suf­fer­ing Israeli Jews, along with the pro­mul­ga­tion of a hyper-nation­al­ist ethos. One news sto­ry, for exam­ple, fol­lowed a Jew­ish moth­er who had lost her son in Gaza about two years ago. The audi­ence was told that the son has been a sol­dier and, with his brigade, had pen­e­trat­ed the Gaza Strip in an attempt to save the kid­napped sol­dier Gilad Shalit, who has been held hostage by Hamas since June 2006.

“Because mem­bers of his com­pa­ny did not want to hurt civil­ians,” the moth­er said, ​“they refrained from open­ing fire in every direc­tion, which allowed Pales­tin­ian mili­ti­a­men to shoot my boy.” When the inter­view­er asked her about the cur­rent Gaza assault, she said, ​“We should pound and cut them from the air and from the sea,” but added, ​“We should not kill civil­ians, only Hamas.”

The report end­ed with the inter­view­er ask­ing the moth­er what she does when she miss­es her son, and, as the cam­era zoomed in on her face, she answered: ​“I go into his room and hug his bed, because I can no longer hug him.”

Thus, despite the ever-increas­ing loss of Pales­tin­ian life, Israel remains the per­pet­u­al vic­tim in the col­lec­tive self image. Indeed, the last frame with the moth­er look­ing straight into the cam­era leaves the aver­age com­pas­sion­ate view­er – myself includ­ed – a bit choked up. Over the past few years, how­ev­er, I have become a crit­i­cal con­sumer of Israeli news. I can see how, regard­less of what hap­pens, we are pre­sent­ed as the moral play­ers in this con­flict. There­fore, this kind of reportage – where the huge death toll in Gaza is ignored and Jew­ish suf­fer­ing is under­scored – no longer shocks me.

What did unnerve me in the broad­cast was one sen­tence from a reporter who cov­ered the entry of a human­i­tar­i­an aid con­voy into the Gaza Strip on Jan. 2.

My moth­er and I – like oth­er Israeli view­ers – learned that 170 trucks sup­plied with basic food­stuff donat­ed by the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment entered Gaza through the Car­mi cross­ing, on the south­ern part of Gaza. That the report had noth­ing to say about the con­text of this food ship­ment did not sur­prise me. Nor was I sur­prised that no men­tion was made of the fact that 80 per­cent of Gaza’s inhab­i­tants are unable to sup­port them­selves and are there­fore depen­dent on human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance – and this fig­ure is increas­ing dai­ly. Indeed, noth­ing was said about the severe food cri­sis in Gaza, which man­i­fests itself in short­ages of flour, rice, sug­ar, dairy prod­ucts, milk and canned foods, or about the total lack of fuel for heat­ing hous­es and build­ings dur­ing these cold win­ter months, the absence of cook­ing gas and the short­age of run­ning water. The view­er has no way of know­ing that the Pales­tin­ian health sys­tem is bare­ly func­tion­ing or that some 250,000 peo­ple in cen­tral and north­ern Gaza are now liv­ing with­out any elec­tric­i­ty at all due to the dam­age caused by the air strikes.

While the fact that this infor­ma­tion was miss­ing from the report did not sur­prise me, I found myself com­plete­ly tak­en aback by the way in which the reporter jus­ti­fied the convoy’s entrance into Gaza. Explain­ing to those view­ers who might be won­der­ing why Israel allows human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance to the oth­er side dur­ing times of war, he declared that if a full-blown human­i­tar­i­an cat­a­stro­phe were to explode among the Pales­tin­ian civil­ian pop­u­la­tion, the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty would pres­sure Israel to stop the assault.

There is some­thing cyn­i­cal about how Israel explains its use of human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance, and yet such unadul­ter­at­ed expla­na­tions actu­al­ly help uncov­er an impor­tant facet of post­mod­ern war­fare. Not unlike rais­ing ani­mals for slaugh­ter on a farm, the Israeli gov­ern­ment main­tains that it is pro­vid­ing Pales­tini­ans with assis­tance so that it can have a free hand in attack­ing them. And just as Israel pro­vides basic food­stuff to Pales­tini­ans while it con­tin­ues shoot­ing them, it informs Pales­tini­ans – by phone, no less – that they must evac­u­ate their homes before F‑16 fight­er jets begin bomb­ing them.

One notices, then, that in addi­tion to its remote-con­trol, com­put­er game-like qual­i­ties, post­mod­ern war­fare is also char­ac­ter­ized by a bizarre new moral ele­ment. It is as if the mas­ters of wars real­ized that since cur­rent wars rarely take place between two armies and are often car­ried out in the midst of civil­ian pop­u­la­tions, a new just war the­o­ry is need­ed. So these mas­ters of war gath­ered togeth­er philoso­phers and intel­lec­tu­als to devel­op a moral the­o­ry for post­mod­ern wars, and today, as Gaza is being destroyed, we can see quite plain­ly how the new the­o­ry is being trans­formed into praxis.

We have to say ​ ‘ no’

This prax­is is scary. Israel has been bomb­ing Gaza from the air and mas­sacring peo­ple. As In These Times went to press, Israel had killed more than 750 Pales­tini­ans, includ­ing more than 200 chil­dren. In order to stop this mad­ness we need two kinds of pres­sure: Israeli cit­i­zens must pres­sure the gov­ern­ment from below, while the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty must pres­sure Israel from above.

As an Israeli cit­i­zen, I still believe in the impor­tance of democ­ra­cy and in the impor­tance of the Israeli peo­ple mak­ing a deci­sion. But at this point in his­to­ry, we need help from con­cerned cit­i­zens in the glob­al are­na. We need Amer­i­can cit­i­zens to pres­sure the incom­ing admin­is­tra­tion to raise its voice against the use of vio­lence. Pres­i­dent Oba­ma has a major role to play but it is unclear that he will do it with­out pres­sure from with­in the Unit­ed States.

Oba­ma, it is impor­tant to keep in mind, has a cru­cial advan­tage over his pre­de­ces­sors. Sev­er­al years of polit­i­cal nego­ti­a­tions – from the 1991 Madrid con­fer­ence, through Oslo, Camp David, Taba and Annapo­lis – along­side the pub­li­ca­tion of dif­fer­ent ini­tia­tives – from the Gene­va Ini­tia­tive and the Sau­di plan to the Nus­sai­ba and Ayalon plan – have clar­i­fied what it would take to reach a peace set­tle­ment between the war­ring sides.

The two-state solu­tion entails three cen­tral components:

1. Israel’s full with­draw­al to the 1967 bor­der with pos­si­ble one-for-one land swaps so that ulti­mate­ly the total amount of land that was occu­pied will be returned.

2. Jerusalem’s divi­sion accord­ing to the 1967 bor­ders with cer­tain land swaps to guar­an­tee that each side has con­trol over its own reli­gious sites and large neigh­bor­hoods. Both these claus­es entail the dis­man­tle­ment of Israeli set­tle­ments and the return of the Jew­ish set­tlers to Israel.

3. The acknowl­edg­ment of the right of return of all Pales­tini­ans but with the fol­low­ing stip­u­la­tion: While all Pales­tini­ans will be able to return to the fledg­ling Pales­tin­ian state, only a lim­it­ed num­ber agreed upon by the two sides will be allowed to return to Israel; those who can­not exer­cise this right or, alter­na­tive­ly, choose not to, will receive full compensation.

While the con­di­tions that need to be sat­is­fied in order to reach a peace agree­ment are well known and even though most polit­i­cal lead­ers under­stand that the only way to pro­vide real secu­ri­ty for the two peo­ples is by sign­ing a com­pre­hen­sive agree­ment, years of nego­ti­a­tions have pro­duced only lim­it­ed results.

The cru­el irony is that the major­i­ty of Israelis and Pales­tini­ans in the region sup­port the two-state solu­tion but, nonethe­less, the two par­ties can­not reach an agree­ment because siz­able minori­ties in both camps reject this solu­tion. These minori­ties have man­aged to hijack the respec­tive polit­i­cal are­nas and have suc­ceed­ed in cre­at­ing a dead­lock that can only be over­come if the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, and par­tic­u­lar­ly the Unit­ed States, assumes a more inter­ven­tion­ist role.

With deter­mi­na­tion and polit­i­cal bold­ness, Oba­ma can neu­tral­ize the rejec­tion­ist minori­ties and resolve this bloody con­flict once and for all. I believe that he can achieve this objec­tive if his admin­is­tra­tion adopts the fol­low­ing strategy:

• First, the White House needs to draft a pro­pos­al using the above­men­tioned guidelines.

• Sec­ond, the draft pro­pos­al should be sub­mit­ted to the two sides so that each one can sug­gest minor alterations.

• Third, the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion will have to ham­mer out a final pro­pos­al (that is, the Oba­ma Plan).

Final­ly, this pro­pos­al should be pub­li­cized and brought to a ref­er­en­dum in both Israel and the Occu­pied Ter­ri­to­ries, with the Unit­ed States and inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty apply­ing pres­sure by declar­ing that the two par­ties will be reward­ed if they sup­port the ini­tia­tive and penal­ized if they do not. Thus, the major­i­ty of the peo­ple on each side, and not the local lead­er­ship or a rejec­tion­ist minor­i­ty, will decide whether or not to accept the peace plan.

Obama’s polit­i­cal vision has engen­dered hope, not only in the Unit­ed States, but as his appear­ance in Berlin and the post-elec­tion jubi­la­tions sug­gest, in the var­i­ous pop­u­la­tions of the world. My expec­ta­tion is that he will make good on his promise for change and intro­duce a coura­geous ini­tia­tive that will bring peace to Israelis and Pales­tini­ans. He has both an oppor­tu­ni­ty and a respon­si­bil­i­ty to do so.