Liberal Zionism After Gaza by Jonathan Freedland | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war. Days after I’d filed my essay for The New York Review
on Ari Shavit and his fellow liberal Zionists, the perennial tension
between Israel and the Palestinians had flared into violent
confrontation and, eventually, a war in Gaza—the third such military
clash in five years. For liberal Zionists these are times when the dual
nature of their position is tested, some would say to destruction. What
the Israel Defense Forces called Operation Protective Edge—a large-scale
mobilization that by the time a twelve-hour “humanitarian truce” was
agreed on July 26 had reached its nineteenth day—was no different.
Even during the grim chain of events that led to this episode,
liberal Zionists found themselves facing both ways, switching direction
day-by-day, even hour-by-hour. Of course, they, like everyone else,
condemned the brutal June kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers on the
West Bank, an act immediately blamed on the Hamas leadership (falsely
so, it later turned out:
the kidnapping was, in fact, the work of a local “lone cell,” acting
without authorization). But some felt queasy during the subsequent
two-week Israeli operation to root out Hamas militants there, referred
to as “mowing the lawn,” not least because several Palestinian civilians
were killed in the process. Still, it was hard to criticize too loudly,
because that effort was conducted under the cover of a search for the
three missing teens and, by then, the three were the object of a
campaign that encompassed the global Jewish diaspora: #BringBackOurBoys.
Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Corbis
Destroyed houses in the Shejaia neighborhood of Gaza City, July 26, 2014
