AUT: Israel in Crisis: Why Now?

[Scott Hamilton <s_h_hamilton@xxxxxxxxx>]

Maybe I'm being misled by the media, but it seems to
me that the tide of the war in Palestine has changed
in the space of a few days. After a handful of
sophisticated and successful Palestinian attacks the
Nazionist state is running scared: Sharon is under
pressure, deserters' and peace activists' protests are
spreading to the mainstream, and the 'kill em all'
right is getting ever more shrill.

The thing that strikes me is the fact that the losses
caused by the Palestinians are, in a strictly military
sense, peanuts. The attack that really threw Israel
into panic mode - the attack on a checkpoint a couple
of days ago - was a hit and run affair that killed
only six soldiers. It's not like there is any chance
of Israel is in danger of suffering a strictly
military defeat, so some other factor is presumably
behind the sea change.

Are we seeing the hidden hand of the great victory of
the Vietnam war showing itself here? Before Vietnam,
horrendously costly wars like World War 2 and Korea
evoked little protests in America; after Vietnam,
imperialist adventures are constrained by a terror of
prolonged and/or high-cost war. As Black Hawk Down
inadvertently shows, one decent scrap frightened
America out of Somalia; a couple of weeks of steady
rsistance in Afghanistan was enough to cause a
creeping crisis before the timely Northern Alliance
breakthrough.

I think that Toni Negri has argued that there has been
a radical change in the willingness of 'the
proletariat to die in war' over recent decades. Has he
got a point? Would Israel be in crisis if the recent
attacks been mounted thirty years ago, during (say)
Nasser's War of Attrition? Just wondering...

Cheers
Scott



=====
"Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Everything you'll ever need on one web page
from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
http://uk.my.yahoo.com


     --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---