Israël unanime ?

Si on lit le Weekly Standard, certes, on ne peut concevoir qu’une chose : Israël, luttant pour sa survie et pour la civilisation occidentale conjointement et souplement, est unanime derrière la glorieuse Tsahal. Les MSM occidentaux nous en fournissent des tonnes là-dessus : analyses, interviews des gens qu’il faut dans les rues et ainsi de suite. Bien entendu, la réalité est beaucoup, beaucoup plus nuancée.

Il y a eu des manifestations anti-guerre en Israël mais elles ne sont pour l’instant pas significatives. Le site WSWS.org nous donne des indications là-dessus, aujourd’hui. Plus intéressants et plus significatifs, des commentateurs de la presse iraélienne sur cet aspect de la crise.

Voici quelques paragraphes de WSWS.org sur le sujet.

« These sentiments undoubtedly reflect wider anxieties about being dragged into a wider war, as well as deep-seated distrust in the coalition government cobbled together by Olmert’s Kadima Party and Peretz’s Labour Party after national elections in March. For now, the pro-war atmosphere dominating the media and the political establishment has largely drowned these voices out, but the underlying social and class tensions wracking the Zionist state are building up just below the surface.

» Writing on the Arabic Media Internet Network, Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom commented on the stifling of anti-war sentiment. “The public is not enthusiastic about the war. It is resigned to it, in stoic fatalism, because it is being told that there is no alternative. And indeed, who can be against it? Who does not want to liberate the ‘kidnapped soldiers’?... In the media, the generals reign supreme, and not only those in uniform. There is almost no former general who is not being invited by the media to comment, explain and justify, all speaking in one voice.”

» Despite this concerted campaign, a number of commentators have drawn attention to the cracks appearing in the official justifications for the military onslaught. On the same web site, Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli-born musician and writer living in Jordan, noted:

»  “Although both Palestinian militants and Hezbollah were originally targeting legitimate military targets, Israeli retaliation was clearly aiming against civilian targets, civil infrastructures and mass killing directed against an innocent population. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that this is not really the way to win a war or confront that particular sort of combat known as guerrilla warfare.”

» Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy wrote on July 17: “Regrettably, the Israel Defence Forces once again looks like the neighbourhood bully. A soldier was abducted in Gaza? All of Gaza will pay. Eight soldiers are killed and two abducted to Lebanon? All of Lebanon will pay. One and only one language is spoken by Israel, the language of force.... “In Gaza, a soldier is abducted from the army of a state that frequently abducts civilians from their homes and locks them up for years with or without a trial — but only we’re allowed to do that. And only we’re allowed to bomb civilian population centres.”

» In a column posted on July 16, Shmuel Rosner, chief US correspondent for Haaretz, pointed out that in October 2000, just months after Israel ended its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, three Israeli soldiers were abducted from the border area. Ehud Barak, Labour prime minister at the time, decided to let it pass—an approach repeated several times by his Likud successor, Ariel Sharon—in order to avoid opening a “second front” in addition to the one in the Palestinian territories.

» Rosner attributed the change in policy to the levels of frustration that had built up among Israelis with the country’s political and military leadership. “You can hear them on every street corner, in every cafe, and in almost every living room: people of the right and the left, young and old, from north and south — frustrated, toughened, disillusioned....

»  “In this atmosphere, no military officer and no civilian decision-maker can even think about restraint. Reaching at least one of the two goals they set for this current operation in Lebanon—bringing the soldiers back home and ‘changing to rules of the game,’ meaning no more Hezbollah militias on the Israeli border—will decide not only the future of the northern front but also the political future of Israel’s leaders.” »

Mis en ligne le 18 juillet 2006 à 09H28