guaging, assuaging, and co-opting political will..,

Gilad Atzmon | Seemingly, in Israeli politics Arab blood is translated into votes. It would obviously be very reasonable to charge Livni, Barak and the current armed forces chief of staff, Gabriel Ashkenazi, with first-degree murder, crimes against humanity and obvious breaches of the Geneva Conventions. But it would be far more meaningful to take into account that Israel is a "democracy". Livni, Barak and Ashkenazi are giving the Israeli people that which they want: it is called Arab blood and it must come in vast quantities. This repetitive murderous practice, conducted by Israeli politicians, reflects on the Israeli people as a whole rather than just a few politicians and generals. We are dealing here with a barbarian society that is politically driven by bloodthirstiness and lethal inclinations. There should be no mistake: there is no room for these people among civilized nations.

Why the Israeli people are so remote from any notion of humanism is a big question. The generous and naïve humanists among us may argue that the Shoah, or Holocaust, left a big scar in the Israeli soul. This may explain why Israelis are obsessively cultivating that very memory with the support of their Diaspora brothers and sisters. The Israelis say "never again" and what they mean is that Auschwitz should never reoccur. This somehow allows them to punish the Palestinian for the crimes committed by the Nazis.

However, the realists among us do not buy this argument anymore. They are now beginning to acknowledge that it is more than possible that the Israelis are so incredibly brutal just because this is how they are. It goes far beyond rationality or pseudo-analytical assumptions. They say: "this is what the Israelis are and there is not much we can do about it anymore". The realists among us have come to admit that killing is how the Israelis interpret the meaning of being Jewish. Gravely, many of us are coming to admit that there is no alternative humanist secular Jewish value system to replace the murderous Hebraic one. The Jewish state is there to prove that Jewish national autonomy is an inhuman concept.

I grew up in post-1967 Israel. I was raised in the wake of the Israeli mythical victory. We were trained to worship the "Israeli who shoots from the hip", the platoon commando who shoots his Uzi automatic rifle in the direction of the Arabs and manages to win against four armies in just six days.

It may have taken me two decades too long to understand that the Israeli who "shoots from the hip" was actually the master of indiscriminate killing. Barak was one of those 1967 heroes, he was a master indiscriminate killer. Apparently, the Israeli cabinet has just approved his plan for the biggest raid on Gaza since 1967. Livni is more or less my age and, as we know from the news, she has internalized the message. She is now accumulating the necessary credentials as an indiscriminate murderer. Both Barak and Livni are taking Israel and Palestine into an election campaign of slaughter. Arab and Palestinian blood is the fuel of Israeli politics.

I may just suggest to Livni and Barak that it may not help them in the polls. Netanyahu is a genuine, authentic hawk. He doesn't have to pretend to be a murderer, and as much as I despise him, he has yet to take Israel into a war. He probably understands better than them what the power of deterrence is all about.

Admittedly, I was wrong all day long about the outcome of the last Usonian presidential election. But one wonders about the collective state of Israel's electorate with the naked appeal to irrational urges unfolding now in Gaza in the runup to their electoral selection of the next candidate for national operations management executive?