Uri Misgav is an Israeli journalist, publicist, lecturer, teacher and director, formerly with Haaretz, the closest thing Israel has to a mainstream opposition newspaper.
Haaretz gave him oped ed space to denounce Prime Minister Netanyahu's current war.
I wish to write my opinion about the war. No filters. It's important to do this because, heaven forbid, a missile will hit our rented apartment in Jaffa or the shelter in the assisted living facility next door where we run to during the incessant sirens. I'm using the free platform provided me by Haaretz, which has been under frontal assault by the government in recent years. It is also my right to make my civic voice heard in a democratic country (still, ostensibly).
I think that this is a psychotic war. One that Israel and the United States entered led by two psychopaths. Vainglorious, narcissistic, disconnected. They're up to their necks in political and legal trouble. They head the two most fundamentalist and anti-democratic governments in the history of their countries. And they have the chutzpah to preach democracy elsewhere.
It gets worse.
At the moment, it's a deluxe war, based on bombing from an open air corridor high above, with almost no enemy antiaircraft or jets. Or bombing by American cruise missiles, which sometimes hit desalination plants or a girls school. The cannon fodder are Israelis and people in the Gulf states.
Also the Iranian people, whom U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are encouraging to replace the ayatollahs' regime even as they are being savagely bombed and hit by black rain after oil depots were attacked.
And one million Lebanese who were again ordered to evacuate their homes, or were simply unfortunate enough to live in Beirut. Everything is supposed to give rise to "changing the face of the Middle East for generations."
... I have a name for this war: the roaring psychos.
Mishav, for all his desperation at finding himself huddling in shelters as a consequence of the vicious stupidity of a government he despises, writes obliviously, ignoring the two million Israeli Arab citizens and the additional two and a half million residents of the occupied Palestinian West Bank. These people largely do not enjoy the same high class bomb shelters.
In the Israeli/Palestinian +972 Magazine the journalist Meron Rappaport puts the psychopaths' war in a perspective that is both closer to home and wider at the same moment.
Questioner: ... Where do you see the Palestinians in Israel, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and the Palestinian refugees fitting in Israel’s or Netanyahu’s plan for the region and for Iran?
Rappaport: In two words: not here. I think the genocide and the partial ethnic cleansing in Gaza set a model that this is possible. Or at least I think Netanyahu and his allies think it’s possible, even if we, Israel, failed to do the total ethnic cleansing.
There are still two million Palestinians in Gaza. Yes, they live in tents and in broken houses, but they are there. But I think it opened up the appetite to do this, that this is possible, that the world will not oppose, that there will be no internal opposition to that.
Of course we see that in the West Bank, it’s still the semi-official policy in the West Bank. It’s not the official policy — the ethnic cleansing. In Italian there is ufficiale and there is ufficioso. Ufficiale is official and ufficioso is half-official. There is this policy in the West Bank of half-official policy of ethnic cleansing. Still, you have to see the big picture, it does not still succeed fully or even partially. You know, for the communities hit in the Jordan Valley or Masafer Yatta, it’s terrible for every community, but there are still two and a half million Palestinians in the West Bank.
But I think this is the idea. The idea is put on the table. It was more or less agreed upon by the army, which was previously a little bit opposed to this kind of move. So I think that there is a semi-official policy of ethnic cleansing and really wiping out any opponent like Israel did in Gaza. We see it in Lebanon now really leveling out.
The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said yesterday that Israel should have no alternative but to go into South Lebanon and bring down a few villages, level down a few villages. This really went into the bloodstream of Israeli society, not only Netanyahu and his allies, the army, the institutions.
Of course, it will be hard to do the same thing in Iran, 2,000 miles away and with 80 million people but what we are seeing, the bombing, the pressing now in Tehran, other cities are leveling down. The idea is the same.
This is, I think, really here Israel’s biggest contradiction maybe or problem. Because if this is the thinking — that taking down the Iranian regime — if someone really believes, and of course we put a lot of question marks on this, but let’s say that people do believe that taking down the Iranian regime will make it possible for Israel to live in peace in the Middle East without giving Palestinians their rights.
If someone really believes in this I think quite soon he will realize this is not the case. I think Israel will learn quite quickly that it did not solve anything, that the Palestinians are here. ...
The vocation of a genuine objector within Israeli society is lonely. +972 Magazine and Standing Together attempt the near impossible: a joint Israeli/Palestinian peace movement from within.
Much as the two psychopaths wish, Palestinians cannot be just erased from the reality of the lands of their ancestors.
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