Israeli humor

If there were any further need, here is a good indication of how comfortable Israeli society is with its self-image as the eternal victim and—not incidentally—how this official state martyrdom turns its citizens into moral pygmies capable of pissing on the graves of its victims.

We would have to reach back into the horrors of a recent war or perhaps the torture regimes of Latin America of three decades ago to find a comparable spectacle: a powerful elite eagerly shoving each other out of the way to celebrate its own cruelty and stomp on the miserable.

This vile mockery of the Turkish-led flotilla and the civilians killed by Israeli commandos could be produced by chortling adolescent pricks anywhere. But a state that would join in the laughter is not only morally bankrupt but irreparably blinded by its own arrogance.

It is now Israel—not the Palestinians—who ‘never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’, and although the consequences of each incremental act of defiance of basic decency may not be immediately visible, the effect is cumulative. From the outside it seems odd that a tiny state with a few million inhabitants would speak and behave as if it will never require the sympathy of the world’s peoples because it has accumulated many warplanes and missiles and powerful friends.