How degraded is the semi-official discourse of les clercs that sanctimonious poltroonery is treated - still - as important intellectual intervention & moral weightiness? 

Because the much-garlanded Lion of Conscience comes down - & the regret at being forced to do so is palpable - on the side of thinking that the mass murder of peace activists trying to deliver wheelchairs was bad, bona fides are established. This is not some warmonger, heavens no. This is a Man of Peace. 

The discourse is wearisomely familiar. This is the last thing Israel wanted. This all went very badly. Israel is ‘stained’.  Israel has been very stupid. D’Oh! MoreInSorrowThanInAnger.

Such exculpations are not enough, though: within half a paragraph is the explanation that the dead ’lure[d] Israel into a trap’.  Sneaky, sneaky dead peace activists! They knew, you see, how Israel, choiceless, ‘is destined & compelled’ to react & they, with motives ‘often malicious’, tugged its strings.

They were - shall we not mince words? - asking for it.  

One might consider this repulsive & filthy victim-blaming, but that Grossman has been at pains to explain that he strives to encourage The Two Sides™ ’not to demonise each other’. & that this leads to his loneliness.  What about his pain? 

Were we not in the company of such a beacon we might think the rest of the article contained more outrageous bullshit. Is the best adjective for the ‘closure’ of Gaza ‘condescending’, rather than, say, murderous? Was that blockade perpetrated ‘to obtain the release of one imprisoned soldier’, rather than to punish an entire people? Is Gilad Shalit really ‘precious & beloved’, rather than a useful shorthand & disposable nothing to the forces that have always - always - had an eye to the ‘beneficial disaster’ if helpful to the project of politicide? 

Most of all, if we didn’t know better, we might consider the nostalgia for a lost, Kinder, Better Israel a joke in questionable taste. The longing for a Golden Age before such infra dig pugnacities as today’s, of less vulgar slaughter, for ‘the qualities that once typified Israel & its leadership - freshness, originality, creativity’.

Ah, do we but recall? That time, before awful arrivistes like Netanyahu ruined everything with their lack of simpering & handwringing, when Israel had all the virtues of a start-up advertising agency, or a second-string Whole Foods imitator. 

1953: fresh!

1982: original!

1996: creative!

In such blubbing for halcyon days is the anguished second half of what Perry Anderson characterises as Israeli Labour’s traditional culture - ‘the mixture of machismo & schmaltz’. Now Likud is flexing its guns, calling dibs on all the machismo, what’s left for Grossman but the schmaltz? Whither ‘shooting & crying’ when there’s a lot of shooting going on & not much crying - indeed, mostly laughing? 

Then Lions of Conscience must cry harder.