Israel consents to UN probe of flotilla deaths

5 Comments / 5 Comments

1. It is the so-called Israeli leadership that is responsible for shoving Israel down the toilet.

   Leadership? Not just the leadership. Almost every human occupation is an embodiment of goodness. Goodness is an absence of evil. Absent of evil, people lead normal lives, and normal is good or goodness is normal.

   Evolution ingrained this postulate in human mentality: goodness is non-actionable. If you want to be good, go on with your normal life. The Torah defines goodness succinctly: “Do not follow the majority to evil.” Such an attitude, perfect 99 percent of the time, is devastating during crises. Very few Arabs or Ukrainians participated in pogroms; the silent majority of good people watched and did nothing. Evil people act while good people refrain from action, unless someone incites them to counter the evil with more evil and annihilate the original evil.

   In most cases, no such leader arises in time, and evil prospers on the communal level.

2. It is the so-called Israeli leadership that is responsible for shoving Israel down the toilet.

3. Calling it a mistake is simply the wrong term. It is willful cowardice, and trying desperately to suck up to the big powers.

   P. Eidelberg-However, since few people want to believe that Israeli prime ministers are simply stupid, I thought it might be comforting to classify their obtuseness as “extraterrestrial stupidity.”

   Not that I ignore such human frailties as cowardice (yielding to foreign pressure) and self-aggrandizement as possible explanations of elite behavior in Israel. But with the passage of seventeen years since Oslo and 10,000 Jewish casualties, and after much research and reflection, I have arrived at the conclusion that the policy of yielding Jewish land to Arab terrorists should be attributed not to mere stupidity, but rather to self-induced stupidity resulting from loss of will.

   Some evidence of this phenomenon appears in a speech Mr. Netanyahu gave in 2000 at the thirteenth-anniversary celebration of the Zionist journal Nativ.

   Asked whether he saw any end to the Israel-Arab conflict, Netanyahu expressed the belief that the spread of Internet among the Arabs would promote their pacification!

   Is it any wonder that Israel is going down the toilet. It is the Israeli leadership that is providing that shove.

4. While I too think it is a mistake for many reasons (where are the UN probes of all the other controversial international actions resulting in 100x the number of deaths), I find it interesting that Netanyahu’s inner cabinet approved it. That includes the likes of Benny Begin. We don’t have all the information.

5. I agree with both Ted and Bill. More generally, Netanyahu is increasingly proving to be a major disappointment. Israel: What happened to the spirit of 1948?