On Monday Israel revealed the true dimensions of the peace it professes to long for – bullets and the bible! And not even the Jewish bible, but the evangelical Christian one, replete with the second coming, Armageddon, salvation and Trump.
Even as self-satisfied American and Israeli dignitaries patted themselves on the back in the cause of peace at the opening of the new American embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers were mowing down teenage Palestinians at the fence that divides the impoverished, desperate enclave of Gaza from Israel. At least sixty were killed and two thousand wounded, almost all from sniper fire.
And if that wasn’t enough cognitive dissonance, thousands of Jewish revelers of about the same age as both the soldiers and the dead protesters in Gaza thronged the central square in Tel Aviv to celebrate the triumph of Israeli Neta Barzilai at the recent Eurovision song contests.
Barzilai is a weight- and appearance-challenged woman who sings about the right of people to be different, though the rights of different people in Gaza didn’t seem to perturb her and those who celebrated her much. They partied through the night.
Beyond the grotesque counterpoint between the scenes in Gaza, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv – all of which are little more than an hour’s drive from each other – a number of important conclusions emerge from Monday’s events.
The first is that Israel has no plan, no strategy for the Palestinians other than the use of overwhelming force. It professes peace, but it has done nothing in the past twenty-plus years to even hint at a sincere intention to initiate change. When it comes to peace, or any sort of resolution, Israel doesn’t have a clue. A country that prides itself on its brainpower, Israel is intellectually and morally bankrupt.