{"id":16015,"date":"2012-02-25T14:45:58","date_gmt":"2012-02-25T10:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=16015"},"modified":"2012-02-25T16:32:54","modified_gmt":"2012-02-25T12:32:54","slug":"sleepwalking-into-war-few-israeli-voices-oppose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/editors-choice\/sleepwalking-into-war-few-israeli-voices-oppose\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Sleepwalking Into War’: Few Israeli Voices Oppose"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Below are two pieces from Israel describing the siege mentality inside Israeli society and how those feelings of isolation have fed the determination to attack Iran. Unlike the articles I have repeatedly slammed here that suggest the inevitability of an Israeli attack and that are reliant on unnamed Israeli officials (by\u00a0Jeffrey Goldberg<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Ronen Bergman<\/a>), these pieces convey the irrationality of Israeli society, the paranoia and dissociation.<\/p>\n

Especially the second excerpt below, Larry Derfner’s reporting at Salon, which describes the reluctance of the sane to speak out against this mad idea, because the society is so militarized. As Derfner shows, generals hold the greatest authority in Israeli society, but generals in the end obey chain of command.<\/p>\n

Joel Greenberg\u00a0in Washington Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like people are saying, \u2018A typhoon is coming,\u2019?\u201d Avi Funes, a 57-year-old accountant, said over lunch at the Azrieli Center, a towering glass-and-steel mall and office complex next to the military headquarters and the Defense Ministry \u2014 a potential target area for retaliatory missile strikes.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople aren\u2019t taking to the streets to protest against an attack,\u201d Funes added. \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of complacency. What can the ordinary citizen do? It\u2019s not up to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

The wisdom of a strike on Iran has been debated here for months, with current and former security officials as well as political figures arguing about whether such a move would achieve its aims or, instead, provoke costly retaliation and possibly a broader conflict without stopping Iran\u2019s nuclear effort. On Tuesday, Iran warned of preemptive action against its foes if it felt its national interests were threatened…<\/p>\n

But among visitors to the designer shops and cafes at the Azrieli complex this week, there seemed to be only faint trepidation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s business as usual, although there are concerns,\u201d said Zehava Shem-Tov, a 50-year-old secretary on a lunch break. \u201cThere is a sense that something unpleasant awaits us, but it\u2019s kind of repressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amos Tzion, 53, who sets up farming projects abroad, said that \u201cthere\u2019s concern, but also the need\u201d to take action. \u201cWe live in an area that\u2019s always been threatening, we\u2019ve grown accustomed to that, and there\u2019s an existential fear that Iran will have the bomb, and something has to be done about it,\u201d he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Larry\u00a0Derfner in Salon<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Only one person has made a real effort to reverse the country\u2019s course, and lately he\u2019s given up, too. At the start of last year, upon finishing his legendary tenure as Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, then the country\u2019s unchallenged supreme warrior, did the unprecedented. He began speaking out openly against an attack on Iran, calling it \u201cthe stupidest idea I\u2019ve ever heard,\u201d and warning that afterward, \u201cthe regional challenge that Israel would face would be impossible.\u201d He was going public, he explained, because \u201cthere is no one to stop Bibi and Barak\u201d from undertaking such a \u201cdangerous adventure\u201d now that he and the other military and intelligence chiefs, who had the clout to rein in the political leadership, were retiring.<\/p>\n

Last week, after months of silence, Dagan resurfaced to announce he\u2019s heading a new NGO to change Israel\u2019s parliamentary system \u2013 an old chestnut of the good government movement that seems conspicuously irrelevant now. For nearly a year, Dagan raised a flag, and when he saw hardly anyone behind him, he lowered it. A few high-level ex-warriors, including two former army chiefs of staff, warned against the consequences of attacking Iran. But these were isolated remarks that got very little attention; in the public\u2019s mind, the antiwar movement began and ended with one man.<\/p>\n

I asked a retired army general who agrees with Dagan\u2019s views why he and the many others like him didn\u2019t get together and sign a letter in a major newspaper, or hold a press conference, or do something that might start a public debate over this fairly fateful matter; after all, Israelis listen to generals. He replied that he and his fellows didn\u2019t have the information that those around the cabinet table had, they didn\u2019t know if the government really intended to order an attack, and they didn\u2019t want to take the chance that this was all \u201cpsychological warfare,\u201d which they would be undercutting if they spoke out.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to understand,\u201d he said, \u201cIsrael is a small community, everybody knows everybody else\u2019s opinion, so you have to be responsible. That\u2019s the way I was educated.\u201d<\/p>\n

No opposition \u2013 that\u2019s what Netanyahu and Barak want, and at home, that\u2019s what they\u2019re getting.<\/p>\n

As for opposition from the Obama administration, it has been awfully muted. The Republican presidential candidates (with the exception of Ron Paul) have \u00a0been gung-ho, which has much to do with the administration\u2019s wariness toward Israel in this election year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PHILIP WEISS, MONDOWEISS: When the former Mossad chief stands alone in opposition to war the position looks inevitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":16016,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,171,483,482],"tags":[1583,8798,18306,18311,3555,2550,9894,11710,3276,122,2317,3046,10677,1996,2624],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}