Yitzhak Laor on the difference between us and them

This is Yitzhak Laor in the London Review of Books wondering, among other things how the regional super power in the Middle East manages to present itself to itself and to others as the plucky little David of Jewish folklore.

As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, which ended with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight soldiers died there), became public, the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a premier whose ‘leadership’ is being launched and legitimised with rivers of fire and destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon with which large numbers of people identify. Israelis identify with the IDF, and even after the deaths of many Lebanese children in Qana, they think that stopping the war without scoring a definitive victory would amount to defeat. This logic reveals our national psychosis, and it derives from our over-identification with Israeli military thinking.

In all the excitement of the past month I missed this vital statistic contained in a throwaway (bracketed) line in Laor's article:

(In July it [the Israeli army] killed 176 Palestinians, most of them from the same area in Gaza, in a ‘policing’ operation that included the destruction of houses and infrastructure.)

Israel is engaged in slaughter on two fronts. I knew this, I just somehow forgot to count the Palestinians.