Ari Shavit asks what happened to Israel, and answers:

Generally it is not right to conduct an in-depth investigation of a wartime failure during a war. However, at the end of the most embarrassing year of Israeli defense since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Israeli government is not drawing conclusions. It is not reorganizing the system, there is no evidence of a real learning curve and it is not radiating a new ethos. On the contrary: It is adding another layer of folly onto a previous one. Its slowness to react is dangerous. Its caution is a recipe for disaster. Its attempt to prevent bloodshed is costing a great deal of bloodshed. So that now of all times, just when the forces are moving toward south Lebanon, there is no escaping the question of where we went wrong. It is so that Israel will be able to achieve a last-minute victory and so that the troops will be able to achieve their goals and so the soldiers will be able to return home safely, that we must ask already now: What happened to us? What the hell happened to us?

A simple thing happened: We were drugged by political correctness. The political correctness that has come to dominate Israeli discourse and Israeli awareness in the past generation was totally divorced from the Israeli situation. It did not have the tools to deal with the reality of an existential conflict. It did not have the tools to deal with a reality of an inter-religious and inter-cultural conflict. That is why it focused entirely on the Palestinian issue. It made the baseless assumption that the occupation is the source of evil. It assumed that it is the occupation that is preventing peace and causing unrest and perpetuating the instability.

I think that the Israeli left finally gets it. Sadly, there's no sign that their compatriots in Europe, the US and Canada do. Whether or not Olmert survives this debacle will help tell the tale. Fortunately, the Lebanese cabinet is in disarray, and the attempted hudna is breaking down, so Israel may yet get a chance to continue to remove the Iranian infection that is killing Lebanon, and preventing peace.

Rand

That is an amazing article and a warning to us here in the U.S.

Good job on finding and posting it.

Dennis

This sparked a thought, and it's a big idea, and I'm sure not a new one (like the Romans and Greeks and possibly Sumerians probably thought the same thing.) But it seems to me that part of the shift in Israeli attitudes comes from the shift between a largely agrarian (if not necessarily rural) economy and it's current high-tech urban economy. Land ownership, especially when that land provides your sustenance directly or indirectly provides a much greater incentive to defend your homeland and a much more visceral reaction to those who would threaten it.

Eric J - Then there's also the fact that farmers have a lot more experience identifying bullshit - and shit from other sources - than their citified cousins.