Israel's 'paranoia'

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
07 March '10

The British Sunday paper The Observer devoted one of its recent editorials to an ostensibly well-meaning lecture about what really, truly was in Israel's best interest. The title counseled that "Israel can accelerate peace by exercising restraint," and the sub-header elaborated: "The diplomatic challenge is to help Israel grasp how its failure even to engage with international opinion risks an isolation which will make the country much less secure."

The piece was open for comments by readers for just 12 hours, but attracted more than 300 responses in this time, and if the thrust of these comments reflected "international opinion", they provided a good example of the futility of any Israeli efforts to "engage" with this kind of utterly misinformed and deeply hostile audience.

The analysis offered in the editorial suggested that:

Israeli policy is driven by two fears. The first, quite justified, is that the country is mostly surrounded by hostile states, some of which host terrorist attacks against its civilians. The second, unjustified, is that criticism from any quarter includes an implicit question of the legitimacy of the Jewish state. That paranoia leads to constant reliance on isolationist militarism which, as well as creating terrible injustice for the Palestinians, has consistently failed to provide the security that Israelis crave."

The assessment that efforts to provide Israelis the security they "crave" have " consistently failed" is most peculiar given that the relevant Israeli authorities reported at the end of last year that in 2009, there was "a marked decrease in the volume of terrorist attacks compared to previous years."

Any editorial writers who would like to dispense free advice on how best to achieve the "security that Israelis crave" could also benefit from contemplating the graphic that accompanies the quoted report, because it vividly illustrates that Israeli efforts to achieve peace in Camp David and Taba from summer 2000 to January 2001 were followed by the violence of the so-called "Al Aqsa intifada."

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