The battle for legitimacy

One of Israel's sternest critics, Professor Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, said this week that Israel was losing the battle for legitimacy. What did he mean? The answer came from the angry crowds demonstrating in cities across the world. For them, Israel's cruel assault on the helpless population of Gaza means that the Jewish state has lost its honour, its good name (or what small part of it is still intact), its threadbare claim to live by 'civilised Western values'.

Some demonstrators carried banners comparing Israel's cruel actions to Nazi barbarism against the Jews. The massacre in Gaza is just one too many to stomach, one too many after the long list of atrocities, from Deir Yassin onwards, that Israel has perpetrated against the Palestinians, the Lebanese and other Arabs since it emerged brutally at the heart of the region six decades ago. Yet, most Israelis cheered on their soldiers in their gruesome task. Brainwashed by cynical leaders and by a compliant media, they seemed to believe that their country is waging a 'just war' in Gaza. The rest of the world knows better. And so do a handful of far-sighted Israelis, who - to their great credit - represent the troubled conscience of their violently aggressive country.

Uri Avnery, Israel's oldest and most relentlessly consistent peace campaigner, wrote this week: "What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster... This will have severe consequences for our long-term future... In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel."

Another wise Israeli is Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations at Oxford University. Israel, he believes, has become a rogue state.

An American rabbi, Michael Lerner, is the editor of the progressive interfaith magazine Tikkun. "It breaks my heart," he lamented, "to see Israel's stupidity... As a religious Jew, it confirms to me how easy it is to pervert the loving message of Judaism into a message of hatred and domination."

Perhaps the most severe criticism of Israel by an Israeli has come from Professor Ilan Pappé, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, his devastating account, published in 2006, of how Israel terrorised, killed and chased out the native population of Palestine in 1947-48. His verdict on the Gaza war is damning: "Zionism is an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now massive massacres. What is needed now is not just a condemnation of the present massacre but also delegitimisation of the ideology."

What all these dissident Israeli voices are saying is that Israel has lost the battle for legitimacy. By reducing Gaza to ruins, it has not only permanently damaged its 'image' but it has also severely undermined its political and moral standing, so essential for its long-term survival.

So why is Israel doing it? Two explanations might be advanced. One is that there is something profoundly irrational in Israel's search for absolute security for its own people, whatever the cost to others - an attitude which can perhaps be explained as a delayed response to the terrible suffering endured by the Jews in Europe in the last century.

This past trauma may explain why Israel seems unable to tolerate any resistance to itself, however feeble. Hamas's largely futile rockets seem to induce in it into an insane homicidal rage. How dare a rag-tag Arab militia challenge the might of the Jewish state which has insisted on America guaranteeing its 'military edge' over all its opponents? But irrational may not be an adequate description of Israel's behaviour. Its actions seem to reveal a profound psychological disturbance, suggesting that the US has perhaps been unwise to put lethal weapons in the hands of professional killers, of uncertain sanity.

Sinister goal

Another explanation of Israeli behaviour is quite different, and points to a wider and more sinister Israeli goal than simply satisfying an exaggerated and paranoid need for security. Since 1948 - indeed since Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917 - Israeli leaders of every political colouring have been determined to frustrate any move towards Palestinian statehood. They want the whole territory for themselves. How else to explain that Israel refuses to define its borders and keeps relentlessly pushing outwards? The war in Gaza looks like a desperate attempt to sink, once and for all, any possibility of a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What alternative do Israel's leaders have in mind? Clearly, they would like to hand Gaza over to Egypt, thereby ridding themselves of responsibility for this mass of suffering humanity, while dealing a massive blow to the Palestinians' aspiration for statehood. Egypt has been most reluctant to open the Rafah crossing - even at the risk of facing the anger and contempt of Arab opinion - precisely because it suspects that this is Israel's ultimate intention.

Ariel Sharon, Israel's former prime minister, withdrew Jewish colonies from Gaza in 2005 in order to consolidate Israel's hold over the West Bank. That policy is still very much alive. The West Bank colonists have by now become so numerous and so powerful as to be virtually immovable. They have no interest in peace. They want land and still more land.

Can Obama's America reverse this dangerous trend? Hillary Clinton, the US secretary-of-state-designate, has said that the vision of Israelis and Palestinians co-existing in peace and security must not be abandoned. We have heard this talk before. But she was rash enough to add that the US would not speak to Hamas. This would seem to be her first big mistake. How does she hope to make peace between the two combatants when she refuses to speak to one of them?

Only a concerted effort by the US, the European Union, Russia and the UN - acting together and with real muscle - can bring Israel to its senses and give peace a chance.

Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs.