It's time to think about those who sit in offices and issue orders to continue the blockade—even at the price of killing; those who alternate between stoking and extinguishing the flames as needed; who prepare the lists of products that cannot be brought into Gaza—pencils, medicines, spices; those who ordered the attack on the Peace Flotilla; those who use pools of blood as a smoke screen.
The more the social crisis deepens, the more bloodshed, provocation, and escalation become the easiest and most accessible means by which corrupt elites attempt to dominate us; by fanning the smoke they temporarily unite the majority of the nation; by creating incitement against a common foe, they divert the public’s attention away from the ongoing theft of its rights and assets.
There’s nothing like political provocation to distract the public from the corruption of government leaders. There’s nothing like a security crisis to temporarily remove from the public agenda any serious discussion of the scandalous privatizations that have been carried out under Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Barak (each in his turn) and their cronies, who have given away to a handful of families control of enormous wealth at the expense of us all. There's nothing like exchanges of gunfire with Hamas and the nurturing of jingoism to keep public scrutiny far from the ever-increasing number of cases in which families, who have lived for decades in publicly administered properties, are evicted from their homes in order to clear the way for dubious real estate transactions.
The art of exchanging threats with Hamas or insults with protesters in Turkey are a true and tested means (but temporary, always temporary) of having many segments of the Oriental Jewish public forget that it was—and still continues to be—the victim of a distorted allocation of national resources. But both Jewish and Arab jingoism are even more tried and true means of preventing the coming together of dispossessed Jews and Arabs, populations oppressed by the very same interests.
There's nothing like talking about public shelters, security rooms, and civil defense exercises to hide the fact that, due to budget cuts, more than half the children defined as "children at risk" in Israel, those who daily face risk in their broken or dysfunctional families, cannot be accepted into after-school clubs designed to ensure their safety and welfare for several hours in the afternoon. After all, what’s social security when compared to "real security?"
Naturally, Hamas dances to the very same tune, creating periodical, even seasonal escalations which only serve its own narrow interest of retaining political power—and thereby contributes its part to the survival of the corrupt Israeli elite. The same can be said of other players in our region.
And yet most of us, the majority of people living in this country, not only do we silently bear the shocking results of each round of violence, but we tolerate the continued erosion of our social rights, our economic rights, our rights to negotiate and fight for what we had, or what should really be ours, while they, the wealthy few, those linked to power, continue to take more and more out of the hands of our two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian.