Never again?

The Seattle Intelligencer carries a comment by guest columnist, Sandy Tolan,arguing, among other things, that Israel's current onslaught against Gaza reflects, in part, some fear of another holocaust.

Israelis, too, are a traumatized people, and their nation's current actions are driven in part by a hard determination, born of the Holocaust, to "never again go like sheep to the slaughter." But if "never again" drives the politics of reprisal, few seem to notice that the reprisals themselves are obscenely out of scale to the provocation: For every crude Qassam rocket falling harmlessly, far from its target, dozens, sometimes hundreds of shells rain down on the Palestinians. For one missing soldier, a million and a half Gazans are made to suffer. In Israel, today, it is "never again" gone mad.

The problem with this reasoning is that it doesn't explain how an educated ruling Israeli establishment could imagine itself as "sheep to the slaughter" in the face of an impoverished people, indeed a people that they, the Israelis, have impoverished. The article concludes:

The irony is that, contrary to making themselves more safe, the Israelis, just like the Americans in Iraq, are only sowing the seeds of more hatred and rage.

Another problematic assumption. The Israeli government knows what it is doing; roughly anyway. The hatred and rage that they provoke in Palestinian society isn't some by-product of Israel's yearning for security. It looks like deliberate policy. This mobilisation against Gaza must have been planned for weeks ahead of its pretext. Israel must want Palestinians to retaliate so that Israel too can up the ante. Security? No, this is ethnic cleansing by making life nigh on impossible for the Palestinians.