Israel's Gaza Assault: 'Crying and Shooting'

LONDON, Jan. 9, 2009 — -- The United Nations has finally voted for a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. Both Israel and Hamas have ignored the resolution and Gaza is still burning.

This follows a spate of speeches against Israel earlier in the week from nations as politically disparate as Venezuela, Iceland and Spain. "The Nuremberg Tribunal will be waiting for you in the future in order to judge you as war criminals," said Venezuela's Ambassador, Julio Escalona, on Jan. 7, addressing the Israelis.

But Great Britain, in lockstep with its ally the United States, has refused to criticize Israel's massive military assault on the Gaza Strip, instead condemning the militant Islamic organization Hamas for its primitive rocket attacks on southern Israel, and consistently referring to the Israeli attack as an "action" or "operation.

The British press, however, has cast a much colder eye on "Operation Cast Lead," as the Israelis call their attack on Gaza. A number of journalists and commentators are not pulling any punches. Some examples:

Professor Avi Shlaim, writing in The Guardian on Jan. 7, says that Israel "has become a rogue state, with an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders." A former officer in the Israeli army, Shlaim goes on to define his terms.

"A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practices terrorism – the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all these three criteria," he says.

Shlaim is now professor of International Relations at Britain's prestigious Oxford University. He says he served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960's and has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders.

What he can't stand, he says, is what he calls the "Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line," and Israel's "policy of victimhood."

"The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness," he says. "In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of 'bokhim ve-yorim,' – crying and shooting."

Shlaim says that while Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression (from Hamas rockets), the imbalance of power between the two sides leaves little doubt as to who the real victim is.