Why is it that you have to go to the Israeli press to find good sense about the Israel-Palestine conflict? Gideon Levy provides a little balance to Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before the U.N. General Assembly yesterday, in which, as Levy points out in a column in Ha'aretz, the Israeli prime minister cheapened the memory of the Holocaust twice:Once, when he brandished proof of the very existence of the Holocaust, as if it needed any, and again when he compared Hamas to the Nazis.
Levy goes on:
And it is doubtful that any historian of stature would buy the comparison the prime minister made between Hamas and the Nazis, or between the London Blitz and the Qassam rockets on Sderot. In the Blitz, 400 German bombers and 600 fighter planes killed 43,000 people and destroyed more than one million homes. Hamas' Qassams, perhaps the most primitive weapon in the world, have killed 18 people in eight years. Yes, they sowed great terror - but a Blitz?
But my favorite line from this column:
Talk of security and victims may still have buyers among the WIZO women of America, but that's it. For a regional power that has almost every weapon in the world in its arsenal and is fighting primitive terror organizations, it is a bit difficult to be taken seriously when talking about security, especially when said security is only for Israelis.
Which reminds me, Israeli leaders and the Obama administration are still banging on about how biased and unbalanced Richard Goldstone's report on Israeli and Hamas war crimes in Gaza was, even though it called out both sides for its violations of international law--despite the fact that the death toll on the Palestinian side was 100 times that on the Israeli side. It's time for war crimes prosecutions, and let the chips fall where they may.
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