I really wonder what it says about the Guardian or\u00a0its readers that it publishes an article like this one by Yuli Novak, a former Israeli air force officer. The discourse, even on the left, is still so degraded on\u00a0the issue of Israel-Palestine that this seems to pass for progressive thought.<\/p>\n
I am also appalled that I almost find myself pleased that this former soldier, an insider, is telling us that Israel is acting immorally in its current attack on Gaza. But in doing so she bolsters a patently\u00a0ridiculous mythology that, for most of its history, Israel\u00a0had\u00a0a moral army \u2013 the most moral in the world, no less \u2013 and that only a decade ago the army agonised over every Palestinian death.<\/p>\n
As someone who lived and reported through those years, at the start of the second intifada, I can say with certainty that that\u00a0is utter nonsense. This was a time when the Israeli chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, the current defence minister, spoke of “searing” defeat into the Palestinian consciousness.<\/p>\n
Let’s not forget that the Israeli army, far from once being driven by moral ideals, began life with\u00a0an act of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in 1948. It has been maintaining and expanding the cleansed zone ever since.<\/p>\n
What’s so dangerous about these “shooting and crying” articles \u2013 I remember an equally silly one a few years back in the Observer by Will Hutton about the “once noble ideal” of the kibbutzim, the racially pure communities Israel built over the ruins of Palestine \u2013 is that they lay claim to a golden era, one that, of course, never existed, when Israel’s mission was truly wholesome.<\/p>\n
Writers like Novak want Israel to return to an\u00a0imaginary recent past, ignoring the fact that the present is simply a logical extension of everything that went before. The seeds of the\u00a0current rampage in Gaza were laid in the decades of\u00a0Israel’s\u00a0dispossession of the native population, culminating in\u00a0the Nakba of 1948. Most of the population of Gaza are refugees from that period – their grievances and rights unaddressed all these many years later.<\/p>\n
It is some consolation that people like Novak are waking up to the ugliness of Israel’s national mission: to subdue and displace the native Palestinian people. This\u00a0is evidence\u00a0of the self-destructive course Israel is set on. But Novak’s\u00a0moral high ground is\u00a0undermined entirely if she wants to\u00a0claim\u00a0it was all much prettier a few years ago.<\/p>\n