Just one small thing more

Suppose the government of Israel decided to send a thousand trucks to the Gaza Strip, all loaded with high quality caviar, and that it would be served to the Gazans on plates of solid gold.

And suppose that after making such a magnificent gesture, Prime Minister Netahyahu would have asked the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip: "And now, what more do you want?"

They might have answered: "Just one thing more, Mr. Netanyahu. That from now on it would not be you who decides how many trucks enter our territory, and what is loaded on them. "

Silence is not golden

For a long time Noam and Aviva Shalit kept quiet and maintained a low public profile with regard to their son Gilead, held captive in the Gaza Strip. The government solemnly promised them that the subject was being taken care off and that everything will be fine. A month has passed, and another month, and another. The fourth anniversary of Gilead's capture comes near, and there is an increasing feeling nothing is being done.

Now, the parents decided to break their silence and set out on a long foot journey across Israel. Now they decided to confront head-on the Prime Minister and his ministers, and appeal directly to public opinion. Now they say openly what was, in fact, well known already long ago: that in order to get the Israeli captive free, many Palestinian captives will have to be released, including some of those defined in Israel as having "blood on their hands".

Would it work this time, after four years of captivity? Will we soon witness Gilead Shalit reunified with his family? (and at least some of the Palestinian prisoners reunified with theirs?).

Binyamin Netanyahu once defined the main principle of his policy: "Those who give will get, those do not give will mot get". In practice, this can often be rendered as " "Those who shout will get, those who keep silent will not."

The way to heaven - paved with fiascos

Only after the state of Israel provoked against itself an unprecedented wave of protests throughout the world - and nine people were killed at sea - did the government of Israel come to the conclusion that it might not be an absolute necessity to prevent Gazan Palestinians from consuming pasta and coriander.

How many more fiascos until the government comes to accept that the inhabitants of Gaza – like those of Ashdod, and of Haifa, and of thousands of sea-side cities on the shore of all the world's seas - have the right to build a sea-port and invite to it ships from anywhere in the world?

The naval forces of the State of Israel already prepare for the next headache: a boatload of Lebanese women seeking to sail to the Gaza shores...

Madness at full gallop

In recent days, the name of Emmanuel came up prominently in news bulletins and banner headlines.

Not because Emmanuel is a settlement established in the midst of an occupied territory. Not because it is strictly forbidden for Palestinians from the nearby villages to live there - even to Palestinians on whose land and that of their families this settlement was established. These fact were hardly mentioned by any of the reporters. After all, there's nothing special or new about all this, and it is no different from the situation in dozens of other settlements throughout the Occupied Territories.

Emanuel made headlines because of a racial discrimination between Israelis and Israelis, between Jews and Jews, because a group of dominant settlers is systematically discriminating against their fellow settlers. Because in the middle of a school a high separation wall was established to separate Ashkenazi girls from Sephardi girls. Because the young Sephardi girls were repeatedly humiliated and told to their faces that they were "second class" and that they were "worth much less than Ashkenazis."

In violation of the Supreme Court ruling on the matter, the whole group of Ashkenazi parents embarked on tricks and evasions as not to let their daughters go to class together with their "second-class sisters" - until sent to jail for contempt of court.

"We'll go to jail with our head held high" declared Martin Luther King when struggling for the civil rights of Blacks in the US South. But in 2010 Israel it is the racists who are going to jail their head held high, boundlessly proud of their racism and declaring it the most sacred of religious principles. Tens of thousands of enthusiastic supporters followed the racists up to the prison gates, proclaiming them to be heroes and martyrs.

And what is left to a sane person to say? Perhaps no more than that we are in even deeper trouble than we knew.

Speaking about madness:
Dov Yirmiya's The end of Sicarii Zionism is a must read.

Investigation. Really?

Noise. A lot of noise, all over the world. A noisy, turbulent world is vehemently protesting and demanding an investigation of Israel's behavior, the acts of the Israel's naval commandos who went on board to shoot and kill, and of the officers who commanded them and of the government which sent them and of the siege of Gaza because of which everything happened.

Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak sat down with their friends and associates and gave it a lot of thought. They discussed and consulted and conducted a lot of calls across the Atlantic and finally resolved: There will be an investigation! Yes, there definitely will be one. There will be a respectable retired judge. There will be two distinguished professors. There will also be distinguished observers from abroad. An especially distinguished observer will be the leader of the Protestant Unionists from Northern Ireland, who just two weeks ago join the "Friends of Israel Association" initiated by Netanyahu's associate Dore Gold.

There will certainly be a Commission, a neat and dignified one. And an Investigation? There will be an Investigation too, just a small little bit of investigation. No, there will be no investigation of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense and their doings. God forbid, an investigation might have even found something which would have hurt them politically.

Nor will the Commission deal with any soldiers or officers. Members of the Commission will not get to see or hear anyone in uniform. The Army will conduct any such investigation in its own way, thank you, and provide the Commission whatever material it would consider appropriate.

And the activists who were on the boats? Them, the Commission will certainly not see. After all, the State of Israel had already decided, even ahead of any investigation, that they are dangerous terrorists. If any of them dare to approach Israel's boundaries, they will not get to the Commission's halls, but to a detention cell where they will stay for quite a long time.

But still, an investigation there will be. There certainly will be. Commission members will thoroughly investigate the little crumbs which the government left them, and will eventually submit their carefully reasoned and respectable conclusions.

And what is this upstart UN Secretary General doing here, rudely unsatisfied with our respectable Commission of Inquiry and goes on pushing for an International Commission. What is this supposed to mean?

Quiet, gentlemen! Quiet! Do not disturb, there is an investigation going on. Please stand patiently in line!

The ungrateful

In November 1949, Israeli soldiers conducted extensive searches in several Arab villages - at the time under military government. The villagers complained of brutal treatment by the soldiers, and these complaints were voiced on the Knesset floor by KM Tawfik Toubi.

Many of Toubi's Jewish colleagues disliked hearing such things in the Knesset, and gave a public vent to their irritation. Some said "He should be grateful for being allowed to be a Knesset Member at all".

On November 18, 1949, poet Nathan Alterman published in the labor daily "Davar" a poem which made quite a stir, "The rebuke to Tawfik Toubi".

"Well, who is Tawfik Toubi? A Member of the Knesset.

A Communist, an Arab. In the parliament

He is by full right, not by anybody's favour...

Perhaps the time had come to remember this, my friends.

He owes us no debt for the greatness of our hearts.

His presence in the House is by the law

By basic principle

It is elementary.

No! Parliament should not raise its hand

Again and again try to divorce him.

62 years later

Knesset Member Hanin Zoabi is outspokenly opposed to the siege which the State of Israel imposes a on a million and half residents of the Gaza Strip - in which she undoubtedly expresses the wishes of her voters. To express this position, KM Zoabi joined the flotilla which set out to break the siege and bring humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza. This flotilla was attacked by the State of Israel's naval commandos, who killed nine Turkish passengers in circumstances which are soon likely to be the subject of an international investigation.

MK Zoabi herself was at a lower deck while these traumatic events took place. Later on she – at the request of the commando officers who took over the boat – convinced wounded passengers to leave cabins where they barricaded themselves and be taken to medical treatment in Israel.

For the crime of having participated in this flotilla, KM Hanin Zoabi has come under an offensive more severe than any of the dozens of earlier attacks on Arab Knesset Members during Israel's six decades of existence. She suffered a physical assault on the Knesset floor itself, and the Interior Minister made an impassioned plea to the Attorney General to find a legal way of depriving her of Israeli citizenship.

The Knesset House Committee constituted itself a special Summary Court, and convened to try KM Zoabi and deprive her of parliamentary privileges. With KM Yariv Levin doubling as Chief Judge and Chief Prosecutor, the pre-determined verdict was approved. The overwhelming majority included also the representatives of the Kadima Party from the "opposition".

Where is Nathan Alterman of the year 2010?

How to win friends (Israeli style)

David Ben Gurion turns in his grave: he invested such great efforts in forming an alliance with Turkey, the non Arab among the Muslim countries, and therefore - so he thought - a natural ally to the Jewish state. It worked out well for more than fifty years. Not only was Turkey a strategic ally, for many Israelis it also was the first foreign country where they spent their holidays.

How did it all go wrong? It is hard to remember that less than two years ago Turkey's Erdogan was working hard to broker peace between Israel and Syria, and that his mediation was gratefully accepted by both of them. But just when a breakthrough seemed imminent, in December 2008, PM Olmert paid a cordial visit to Erdogan in Ankara, neglecting to tell his host about his intention to launch a devastating offensive against Gaza on the very same week.

Erdogan took it as a personal insult. The Turkish people were shocked by the daily footage of the Israeli bombings and the bleeding and burned Gazans. The cycle of Turkish accusations, angrily rebuffed in Israel, was launched, and under Netanyahu escalated out of anyone's control. A far from sophisticated  thriller series on Turkish TV, depicting Israeli occupation soldiers as even uglier than they really behaved, enjoyed high ratings.

A wiser Israeli government would not have paid official attention and would have accepted such things as unavoidable in the aftermath of its having so forcibly "reinforced our deterrence". But, top diplomat Ayalon thought it was better to put en scene a calculated "humiliate the ambassador" play.

Later on, a wiser Israeli government would have felt very careful and cautious when dealing with a Gaza aid flotilla in which a Turkish organization, under the patronage of its country's government, was a major actor. A bit more diplomatic government might have understood what was at stake, and might have decided to allow the flotilla through to Gaza, for example with the condition that the Turkish authorities check the boats' cargo and guarantee there were no weapons aboard.

But the Netanyahu government is endowed with even less wisdom, or diplomacy than its predecessors. And an alliance which started to unravel over Turks outraged by the killing of Palestinians got its coup de grace with them even more outraged by the killing of fellow Turks…

And now, Ireland. Never a strategic ally, but a country which always had reasonably good relations with Israel. (Not many countries in the world had a president of Irish origin, as Israel's Chaim Herzog was.) Today another Gaza-bound boat, the "Rachel Corrie" has reached the Mediterranean, having sailed all the way from Ireland, carrying Irish citizens on board and with her mission of breaking the siege of Gaza enjoying an overwhelming support in the Irish parliament and general public.

The government of Israel seems determined – as of this moment – to deploy its renowned naval commandos once again.

Who is next?