Bradley Burston in Ha’aretz:
In going to war in Gaza in late 2008, Israeli military and political leaders hoped to teach Hamas a lesson. They succeeded. Hamas learned that the best way to fight Israel is to let Israel do what it has begun to do naturally: bluster, blunder, stonewall, and fume.
The whole essay is well worth reading. It’s about the ways in which Israel’s enemies have learned to use its own toxic politics to aid in the project of its destruction.
And yes, the only country in the Middle East where a journalist could publish an article such as this and not wind up in a dungeon is worth defending. The problem is that it needs defending not just from Hamas but from Bibi’s Clown Show.
It may be meaningless, but Reporters Without Borders ranks Israel 93rd for press freedom, below United Arab Emirates (86th), Kuwait (60th) and just above Qatar (94th). I imagine they lost points for things other than throwing government critics in dungeons, though.
I forgot Lebanon (61st).
Also, I notice that 93rd is the ranking for Israel itself. The ranking for the occupied territories is 150th, largely because of journalists killed or wounded in Gaza during the Israeli offensive.
[...] policies are counter-productive to American’s interests, and whether the need now is, as both Mark Kleiman and Nicholas Kristof have suggested, saving Israel from itself. It’s not looking [...]